The data black hole at the center of AI
"We see these AIs as a galaxy glittering with capabilities, but at their center, invisible to the naked eye, holding all the constellations together, is an…
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Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time
"He begged to work for the regime that tortured him."
Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?
“One robot now turns into many robots next year, but the number of ballerinas is the same.”
Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up
Working up from basic logic gates to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.
The mistake of conflating intelligence and power
f this is your definition of intelligence is the ability to achieve your goals across a wide variety of domains, then Stalin was the most intelligent…
RLVR might be disproportionately bad at science
the verification loop for theories can be on the order of decades and centuries, and even then we know today as the better theory can often…
Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch
AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play.
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
"Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere."
Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served
It's shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations and a blackboard
More open questions about AI
Hodge podge of things I was thinking about this weekend.