Gemini Coding Data & Post Training at Google. Formerly: Founder/CEO MutableAI (acq by Google). DeepMind. Theoretical Particle Physics. Views my own.
Joined December 2021
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Omar Shams retweeted
Staggering the number of you guys that worship outlier lives of great accomplishment, but are completely disgusted by what true outlying behavior looks like
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Jun 12
Launching during their IPO! Absolutely incredible company. One of the few with a true technological moat. Single handedly revitalized the U.S. space industry.
Congrats to the SpaceX team and the early investors who took a chance on such a crazy idea.
Moon fabs next!
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Jun 5
During one pitch for my last co (AI for code) the partner said there’s no hope for any startup here because Github had “already won the space” 🫠
Another told me AI for code is “impossible” 😂
Being a smol time angel investor has given me a little more sympathy but not much
Jun 2
I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A.
12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30 minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going.
I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital.
You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious.
It's a dance.
And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious.
If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird.
No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there.
It is weird.
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Jun 5
It’s hard to pick winners. But man going into *venture* with the mindset that things are impossible due to technology or competition is the wrong frame. Just buy equities.
Venture is risk ON.
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May 3
i used to believe progress in robotics was bottlenecked by actuators etc now i realize i was mistaken and it's more limited by compute
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Apr 29
Atomic Semi moving to Austin is kind of a big deal.
Apr 27
I’m thankful for 4 years in California .
But, the Next Phase is in Texas.
We shift our hiring focus to build huge operations in Austin, Texas.
Join us ! The team is really great. @fab2
New 120,000 square feet HQ for R&D and production:
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Mar 29
It’s funny how every sport now has been reward hacked to the point of being unwatchable.
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Mar 23
.@ycombinator alumni demo day was amazing! Companies herding cattle with drones, moon hotels, tons of vertical AI agent companies, drone detection companies, several repeat YC founders, and so many more cool companies!
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Mar 2
A country of geniuses is a country with disagreements, status, and hierarchy. This is inherent to the creative process in the face of resource constraints.
In other words AI will have politics.
It cannot be engineered out without destroying creative output. These are things that are not inherent to humans.
It’s not an accident Ancient Athens had such a chaotic political life with vibrant characters & competing personalities.
Mar 2
While I love the idea of a country of geniuses or an intelligence explosion, I think it misses the point that at no time in history have we had this many smart people with access to education and the freedom to pursue their ideas.
Yet when you look at the output it sure doesn’t seem like output stacks linearly with intelligence deployed. It’s not clear that our physics or math research is very much better than it was 50 years ago. You may argue that there is less low hanging fruit but that is precisely a point in favor of what I’m arguing.
Some of what makes great advances possible is courage, primarily the courage to take a different perspective and also creativity. Creativity is difficult to measure and therefore to hill climb. But both courage and intelligence seem very weakly correlated with intelligence.
Creativity is necessary to think of something new to pursue. Courage because most new things fail and may have institutional friction and usually resistance in implementing them. Courage also allows you to pursue something that *seems* wrong for a long time.
Ancient Athens had competing characters with different perspectives and resulted in one of the most colorful characters (Socrates) being sentenced to death. It seems great leaps and advancements require a creative destruction and fierce level of disagreement and independence that we may find intolerable in digital intelligence as we find it barely tolerable in human societies.
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Mar 2
While I love the idea of a country of geniuses or an intelligence explosion, I think it misses the point that at no time in history have we had this many smart people with access to education and the freedom to pursue their ideas.
Yet when you look at the output it sure doesn’t seem like output stacks linearly with intelligence deployed. It’s not clear that our physics or math research is very much better than it was 50 years ago. You may argue that there is less low hanging fruit but that is precisely a point in favor of what I’m arguing.
Some of what makes great advances possible is courage, primarily the courage to take a different perspective and also creativity. Creativity is difficult to measure and therefore to hill climb. But both courage and intelligence seem very weakly correlated with intelligence.
Creativity is necessary to think of something new to pursue. Courage because most new things fail and may have institutional friction and usually resistance in implementing them. Courage also allows you to pursue something that *seems* wrong for a long time.
Ancient Athens had competing characters with different perspectives and resulted in one of the most colorful characters (Socrates) being sentenced to death. It seems great leaps and advancements require a creative destruction and fierce level of disagreement and independence that we may find intolerable in digital intelligence as we find it barely tolerable in human societies.
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Mar 2
Creativity
Courage
Org structure
Are largely independent of intelligence
Great intelligence will not automatically save you from a future where AI competes on the same ideas, with low risk tolerance, and poor organizational structure.
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Mar 2
*But both courage and creativity seem very weakly correlated with intelligence
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Feb 3
The Bay Area is absolutely incredible. I love being here.
I’m officially back. Friends let’s catch up. DMs open. Or text me if you have my #.
Also open to meeting new people especially former, current, or aspiring founders.
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