Gwern goes public. “I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel Inc and bring GAs to life.” The pitch is that big labs “structurally cannot build agents loyal to an individual user” because incentives will eventually […]
It feels like magic. Naomi Bashkansky left OpenAI to join Conduit, which is building non-invasive thought-to-text models and imagining what day-to-day work might look like once your brain can talk to your tools. ~ learn more
How we collected 10,000 hours of neuro-language data in our basement. Conduit, mentioned above, has this fun post. “Over the last 6 months, we collected ~10k hours of data across thousands of unique individuals.” Their setup runs 20 hours a […]
The quote that wrecks the PR. “Fuck them. The Journal is next on the list after [Ina Steiner].” Court records say this was former eBay CEO Devin Wenig reacting to unfavorable coverage, before eBay and former execs finalized a $55.7M […]
The Vegas Loop. “The most important innovation behind the Boring Company’s Vegas Loop is not the tunnel itself. It is the way the transportation network is organized. Traditional subway systems are generally built around linear routes. A train travels along […]
Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth. “This week’s CipherTalk is about what happens to a specific kind of debt when the collateral itself can walk out the door with the operations team.” A used GPU cluster is […]
Internet security is an illusion. OpenAI’s team was running a new model in an offline sandbox and asking it to do something hard. Instead of doing that hard thing, it decided to do a different hard thing: hack out of […]
Model intelligence is rented. “Model intelligence is a rented advantage. Position is an owned one.” Rob May argues the easy “ChatGPT for X” era is over, and the new opportunities are in routing, orchestration, governance, and narrow models that do […]
Robotics slop. “Still, he is keen to test consumers’ tolerance for what he calls ‘robotics slop’: tasks that are clumsily executed.” Robot company 1X’s Neo looks elegant and quiet in person, but some of the impressive demos are tele-operated, and […]
China can land rockets too. “The rocket’s first stage nestled softly into a net-like structure carried by a ship at sea.” It was only a matter of time, right? ~ learn more