Paras Chopra Profile picture
Jan 27 4 tweets 3 min read
Do 👽 aliens exist?

@robinhanson has developed a mathematical model called "Grabby Aliens" that not just predicts that they exist also suggests that they're rapidly expanding in the universe.

Listen to my interview with him on this:
1/ For a short intro on the model, here's a great explainer:

You can read the paper detailing the model here: grabbyaliens.com
2/ In our hour-long conversation, we touch on a lot of topics:

- Fermi's Paradox
- SETI
- The Great Filter
- UFOs

What @robinhanson says is both provocative and hard to refute!
3/ I enjoyed picking Robin's brain and have been trying to contrast it with my first ever podcast in which @anderssandberg says exactly the opposite: that aliens might not exist and that we may be alone in the universe.

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More from @paraschopra

Jan 24
Consumers want stuff for free, companies want to pay.

a 🧵
1/ Mark Zuckerberg famously said that there’s no point in monetizing a consumer product unless you have a billion users.

Consumers are habituated to getting digital services for free.

This makes monetization for consumer products very tricky.
2/ Try recalling all the digital products or services you pay for as a consumer.

In all likelihood, there won’t be too many as increasingly music, news, movies, productivity apps, and games are all free.
Read 9 tweets
Jan 17
It’s winners-take-all in B2C, while B2B is a long tail.

a 🧵
1/ There are only a few dominant social networks because consumer markets are prone to winner-take-all effects.
2/ There are multiple reasons for this.

First, consumers want stuff for free or cheap which drives consumer companies to expand aggressively so that they can amortize their fixed costs over many such users.
Read 15 tweets
Jan 13
🎉 Announcing December winners of Gaur and Chopra Escape Velocity grants.

We're awarding 6 people under 25 years of age, a sum of Rs 50,000 each.
1/ Sanjana is from Sikkim and she wants to use the grant money to create a mentorship network for students from rural areas in north-east.

She will connect people from north east with well-established careers to these kids, hopefully uplifting the region.
2/ Abing is from a rural area in Arunachal Pradesh and has launched a podcast using his mobile phone only.

anchor.fm/abing-lamnio

With this grant, Abing will purchase equipment to be able to record his podcasts professionally.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 12
One big difference between how biological intelligence (like us) and current AI systems is active sensory foraging.

When we are not sure about something, unlike an AI, we don’t blurt out and answer, but instead actively seek new information to reduce our uncertainty.
Give an unfamiliar image to today’s ML systems and they’ll immediately output a label.

But we will look at things from different angles, try to touch them, hear them — only when we’re sure, we will label it.
Of course, this is possible because we live in an interactable world while ML systems are input-output workflows.

But we can give AI systems mechanisms for active foraging for new evidence.

@OpenAI’s new webgpt is step in that direction openai.com/blog/improving…
Read 4 tweets
Jan 11
What can we learn about the 🧠 brain if we map it at a nanometer resolution?

In my latest 🎙️ podcast, I talk to Jeff Litchman (from Harvard University) about their project to map human brain tissue and what insights we get from it.

Listen here ->
1/ They map just 1mm cube of human brain and revealed 1.6 petabytes worth of data, which can fill 3000+ laptop hard drives.

And. 1 mm3 of the human brain which is 0.0001% of the entire brain. The human brain is truly staggering in its richness and complexity and we explore that.
2/ If you want to read the paper with details from the project, here's the link to it biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

In it, you'll find beautiful pictures of the human brain such as this one where one neuron is making several contacts with another.

cc: @harvardbrainsci
Read 5 tweets
Jan 3
I read 28 books in 2021.

a 🧵 recapping all of them.
1/ This little book is jam-packed with insights about money.

2/ In fact, the learnings from the book resulted in probably my most popular thread so far.

Read 40 tweets

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