In AI everything behaves according to a log-log scaling law, including the compensation

yasmin has been goat maxxing since forever

New blackboard lecture w @reinerpope How do chips actually work – starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do. 0:00:00 – Building a multiply-accumulate from logic gates 0:16:20 – Muxes and the cost of data movement 0:25:59 – How systolic arrays work 0:39:00 – Clock cycles and pipeline registers 0:51:40 – FPGAs vs ASICs 1:03:14 – Cache vs scratchpad 1:07:16 – Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores 1:11:49 – Brains vs chips 1:15:22 – A GPU is just a bunch of tiny TPUs Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube/Spotify/etc to watch. Enjoy!

AI has now solved a major open problem -- one of the best known Erdos problems called the unit distance problem, one of Erdos's favourite questions and one that many mathematicians had tried. openai.com/index/model-dispr…

Banger take

Stop living in a bubble. The key to happiness, the true meaning of life, is not impact or wealth or fame, but health, friendship, and care for others. Living authentically is not that expensive. In other words, money or success will not fill the hole in your heart.

I remind myself of this quite often.

Stochastic gradient descent

One of the biggest benefits of peptides is that it has distracted a decent fraction of grifters (ever-present in SF tech scene) away from AI. God bless 🙏

It's goblins all the way down

San Francisco— the birthplace of AGI

It was fun doing this panel with my friends @dwarkesh_sp @_sholtodouglas and Melvin Johnson, and thanks @labelbox for hosting. It's the first time for me facing the ever-spicy Dwarkesh questions in front of an audience. It's v important for frontier lab researchers to stay connected. Less adversity, more comradeship & cooler heads is necessary as the stakes for this technology gets higher.

JRR Tolkien used genz brainrot slang over 70 years ago, that's how ahead he was

Good cooking by a cracked team 🧑‍🍳

I do not share the cynicism of some with respect to OpenAI’s actions in the DoW/Ant dispute. It basically seems to me as though OpenAI was attempting to deescalate last week; whether they executed well is a separate question, but in their defense good execution in such chaos was nearly impossible. But from where I sit it seems OpenAI tried to reduce tensions and find a productive path forward, while allowing its employees considerable latitude to speak their minds. The easy thing would have been for management to stay quiet and let this happen; they did not do that, and they also stood firm in opposition to the supply-chain risk designation. In general, OpenAI is unjustly maligned. This is the thing that bothers me the most about Dario’s leaked memo; it spends so much time on OpenAI conspiracies and cynicism that I fear industry solidarity in the future will be harder than it needs to be. This is not the last time we will see state interference into frontier AI, and until we build formalized structures for such interference it will be important for the industry to hang tough together. I fear that will be less likely now.

I can’t help but think (and feel) that the world is generally very sad right now. Injured really. Yesterday I was in Utah with family. Three generations. We played sports, enjoyed good food, saw friends, and just messed around all day. One of the best days in recent memory for all of us. This is where I grew up. It took me back to my childhood. Allowing me to embody those psychological states and feel the comparative difference between then and now. The hollowing and sadness of the modern world seems to stem in part from our phones, social media, and the ferocious need to be seen and relevant in every moment. We have mistakenly idolized a specific kind of dysfunction: a manic, sleepless hyper-vigilance that needs to be omnipresent. Everyone I know who’s unplugged for a week, returns reporting life-changing levels of improved life satisfaction. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t return feeling spry and vibrant and clear-eyed about the corrosive nature of current social culture. The science supports them feeling that way. They were in a dopamine deficit from the hyper-stimulated state of the world so everything felt gray.  So why don’t we unplug more and more often? We’re all kind of trapped in a prisoner's dilemma. Most want to move to the mountains and be relieved of it all but are terrified that if they unplug, they’ll be invisible. Real life consequences of reduced power and status. So we stay plugged in and drink the poison. This hypervigilant state keeps us in chronic fight or flight (anxiety). Simultaneously, our addiction creates a dopamine deficit (the emptiness/grayness feeling) and a background hum of anxiety. Mammals are biologically hardwired to co-regulate: physical touch, eye contact, proximity and in-person vibes. Things which release oxytocin and activate the vagal nerve's parasympathetic system. Screens eliminate all of this goodness. There are small wins to be had here. More in-person time. A day off technology per week. A block of 4 hours. One hour before bedtime.  I hope that there’s a collective awakening that we’re all being mined for engagement. Then we get trapped. And then trap each other.