Early signs of the acceleration Week 1/2025

AI is designing superior wireless chips outside the normal design space
👇 🧵 I hated wireless antenna design in college because it was the most non scientific tradition bound guildlike cult where the older engineers would drop by and sigh and tell you “that won’t work in practice”… glad it’s getting figured out

https://twitter.com/dr_singularity/status/1876648394644418838

OpenAI staff comments on o3 thread.

Public bookmarking 👇 x.com/bobmcgrewai/st… x.com/bobmcgrewai/st…

114 million views in 7 days
> Historic really
> How did it happen? 🧵below 👇
Wed Nov 27 8.38 pm - The newly titled Dr Louks, posts the following after a verbal defense of her PhD thesis in Cambridge, England

https://x.com/DrAllyLouks/status/1861872149373297078

Thu Nov 28 11.51 am - the first congratulations come in from an assistant professor at the University of Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan

https://x.com/Khorsheed2010/status/1862102086810325193

o1 personal testing megathread 🧵

Bookmark if you need to, just keeping track of reactions since a lot of us have held out personal test sets

https://twitter.com/dan_jeffries1/status/1834315315301273719

Zuck on Dwarkesh

TLDR: AI winter is here. Zuck is a realist, and believes progress will be incremental from here on. No AGI for you in 2025.

1) Zuck is essentially an real world growth pessimist. He thinks the bottlenecks start appearing soon for energy and they will be take decades to resolve. AI growth will thus be gated on real world constraints.
> "I actually think before we hit that, you're going to run into energy constraints. I don't think anyone's built a gigawatt single training cluster yet. You run into these things that just end up being slower in the world."
> "I just think that there's all these physical constraints that make that unlikely to happen. I just don't really see that playing out. I think we'll have time to acclimate a bit."

2) Zuck would stop open sourcing if the model is the product
> "Maybe the model ends up being more of the product itself. I think it's a trickier economic calculation then, whether you open source that."

3) Believes they will be able to move from Nvidia GPUs to custom silicon soon.
> "When we were able to move that to our own silicon, we're now able to use the more expensive NVIDIA GPUs only for training. At some point we will hopefully have silicon ourselves that we can be using for at first training some of the simpler things, then eventually training these really large models."

Opinion
Overall, I was surprised by how negative the interview was.
A) Energy - Zuck is pessimistic about the real world growth necessary to support the increase in compute. Meanwhile the raw compute per unit energy has doubled every 2 years for the last decade. Jensen also is aware of this, and it beggars belief that he does not think of paths forward where he has to continue this ramp.
Over at , the launch announcement read "At xAI, we have made maximizing useful compute per watt the key focus of our efforts."
So energy efficiency, algorithmic and otherwise are obvious areas where firms will be focused on. Zuck meanwhile is planning to move of Nvidia chips soon, and basically believing that the value in AI available to having a share of the most advanced compute clusters will declline.

B) AGI Negative
Zuck fundamentally
> does not believe the model, the AI itself, will be the product.
> It is the context, the network graph of friendships per user, the moderation, the memory, the infrastructure that is the product.
> Allows him to freely release open source models, because he has all of the rest of the pieces of user facing scaffolding already done.

An actual AGI
> where the a small model learns and accompanies the user for long periods
> while maintaining its own state
> with a constitution of what it can or cannot do
> rather than frequent updates from a central server
> would be detrimental to Meta’s business,
> would cause a re-evaluation of what they are doing

C) Summary
Zuck
> essentially settled into the trap of believing in incrementalism
> Advised by the smartest people in the world.
> Technically competent
> But he does not believe in states of the world where a 100x improvement from GPT-4 are possible, or that AGI is possible within a short timeframe.
> But he's also… he’s not raising capital.

The three people who are raising capital: Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei, are all on record expecting dramatic increases in capability. They could be hyping because they need higher valuations. I don’t know.

And so again we wait for GPT-5. If it is 10-100x as good as GPT-4, the current benchmarks won’t even work (how does one measure 100x as good on an MMLU scale of 1-100 ?).

If the models deliver value, and deliver large amounts of value exceeding manifold the capital deployed to develop them, then progress will continue. If not, not.

For me, the most exciting part of all of this is.. 🍿🍿🍿 drama. You get to see who is bluffing, with billions of dollars on the line, on a fairly short timeframe. And I, for the most part, am in it for sheer entertainment value in spectating potentially the greatest game mankind has ever played.

Happy Friday 🥂

I’d like to congratulate Dwarkesh for an excellent interview… and for not great ad reads as well 😜

The above was excerpted from my daily AI newsletter, full edition goes out Monday.

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🇺🇸

Inflection Deal

> too much capital and talent needed for next generation
> no real way to exit
> Reid Hoffmann looking to engineer an acquihire
> MSFT unwilling to bite at $4 bil
> so they engineered an earn-out deal
> allowing founders and research team to leave
> investors get back some capital over time
> surprising Reid managed to persuade everyone to get this done Subscribe!

emergentbehavior.co/subscribe

Elon Wuz Right: Vision is All You Need

> TikTok team trains Depth Anything
> LiDAR quality depth estimation from single photo frame
> Using teacher model-student model system
> 1st author Lihe Yang did this while on his internship (!) with the company

Out of training set estimation success: for parking, home automation, gaming, driving, office, architecture

Notably:
> Goal was to build a foundation model for depth estimation from a single image
> Did not use the classical method of getting accurate ground truth measured depth maps to train the model on
> Instead obtained a large (62 mil) image unlabelled dataset, which would form the basis of the “student” model
> Then built an annotation model to label this dataset
> Annotation model was built from a labeled 1.5 mil image dataset, the “teacher” model
> This worked because of scale! They had many failures along the way

No One Believed Elon when he said Tesla didn't need LiDAR or radar, images alone would be sufficient, and the TikTok team has proven him correct.

Bye Bye funky misshapen non-aerodynamic drone cars

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1380798469862957057?s=20

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Twitter Game

523 million monthly active users

61 median followers => 50% of Twitter users have less than this

Below 1000 => you are near invisible to the algo. Posts will almost never be seen.
=> Get Premium
=> Find people you enjoy reading
=> Interact with them
=> for large accounts, reply to them within 2 minutes of their post, otherwise QT them. For small accounts whatever
=> join small spaces where you can have a chance to talk, or host one. Establish genuine connection

1000 => congrats, only 15% of Twitter gets here

1k to 10k
=> posting now makes sense as it gets seen and you have a chance of going viral
=> the only thing that correlates to growth is visibility
=> you need to post/QT (retweeting and replyguying won’t get you there)
=> just post more and experiment, then delete stuff that doesn’t catch the wind. You can tell how far tweet is going to go with views in first 5 minutes of posting
=> what works on Twitter is either a) emotion or b) information, on a narrow interest. You can have stellar Twitter game making jokes and putting emojis on dry technical topics
=> Twitter users are fast scrolling infovores. Stuff has gotta be dense
=> easy hacks: watch the timing of your audience. Mine is workday morning Pacific time. With a second bump in the evening
=> manage your tweets. Tweet once, then repost at your audience bump time
=> like all replies (it’s a read receipt)
=> respond to at least Twitter Blue
=> add interesting replies to the main thread. I imagine it as moderating a Reddit board temporarily, so you can keep a popular post on the TL indefinitely by continuing to comment and add to the thread
=> every reply, retweet, repost, additional thread tweet pushes content on the main TL, bring more readers in
=> you can grind your way up here

10k => only about 100k users are here, only 1 in 10k, officially lower success rate than to Stanford at 2 in 100.

10k - 100k => you can go viral every week at this point
=> you start making serious friends on app
=> the need to like/reply grind fades
=> you can promote content from smaller accounts, by retweeting or quotetweeting them
=> still looks insightful because your distribution is so much bigger

100k => suspect only 1000 - 10,000 accounts at this level
=> many are unable to post
=> every interesting post gets highly criticized
=> saying a mean thing to someone gets them destroyed online by your followers
=> posting a lot overwhelms the timeline and gets you blocks
=> almost every tweet has real world consequences blog.gitnux.com/twitter-follow…

The Run Up

March - Gb Parascandolo, a Research Scientist on the OpenAI algorithms team dials off GPT4. His main research interest is reasoning in neural networks.

May - Gb briefs US senate staff working on AI regulation

July 6 - Noam Brown joins OpenAI. Noam built the first bot that beat Poker, and the bot that beat humans at Diplomacy, a verbal negotiation game. His stated focus is investigating reasoning, if successful will create “LLMs that are 1,000x better”.

Sept 27 - Sam make a joke on r/singularity “agi has been achieved internally” referring to a meme.

Oct 7 - Ilya’s last tweet is cryptic “if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re going to have a bad time”

Oct 18 - Gb looking for one more engineer to “work on (ideally solve) reasoning”. Noam says he’s “very impressed by what they’ve done”

Oct 30 - Biden EO signed

Nov 2 (ish)- Sam is in the room where the team demonstrates the 4th big advance in the 8 years of OpenAI.

Nov 16 evening - Ilya messages Sam to meet at noon the next day. Mira has already been briefed she’ll take over as CEO… This indicates a secret board meeting has to have taken place prior to the messages going out. The 3 independent members of the board were persuaded by something that was shown to them by Ilya.

Nov 17 noon - Ilya informs Sam he’s being terminated. Messages and calls Greg and tells him he’s being demoted.

3 hours later Greg resigns.

https://twitter.com/8teapi/status/1725724907722752008

Draw your own conclusions please. Don’t hurt me.

What happened at OpenAI?

> Nov 2 -> Sam was in the room, when the team demonstrated the next big improvement. 3 times before in OpenAIs history, most recently with GPT-4, they’d pushed back the veil of ignorance and pushed forward the frontier of discovery. As he watched the latest advance, he was already planning for the next moves: the funds that would have to be raised, the resources that would have to planned for

> Nov 4 - Ilya was unsettled. They’d reached a threshold of autonomy that was concerning, while the alignment team was still just adding capability instead of emotion, actual love for humanity. They needed more time to figure out the research pathway instead of hurrying to deploy product.

> Nov 6 - OpenAI dev day goes well. Lots of kudos. They release the announced products over the next several days

After dev day, Greg and Sam are in full on fund raising mode. They’re targeting 90 billion valuation, a 3x lift from 30 billion. OpenAI recruiters are already calling Google employees with 10-20 mil 4 year packages telling them if they join now they’ll make it in before the valuation increase.

Nov 9 > Greg meets Emanuel Macron for a photo op, afterwards take investor meetings in Paris. OpenAI is now at the sovereign wealth fund, European family money sized investment

Nov 13 > in an interview with the Financial Times in London, Sam confirms for the first time that work has begun on GPT5 and that he’s fundraising.

Nov 14 > OpenAI pauses ChatGPT subscriptions, as they’re totally out of capacity for inference. Usage has spiked post dev day.

Nov 16 > APEC CEO summit, Sam confirms the Nov 4 next step up discovery

By this point Ilya is pissed and scared. The fundraising tour has caught him by surprise. The usage numbers have spiked and now they don’t have enough servers for the research team, meaning they have to fundraise again to support research. Events are starting to move beyond him.

Nov 17 10 am > board meeting starts. Ilya produces 2 23 year old staff engineers (rumor) to describe progress and dangers to the board. Turns into a battle when he says they shouldn’t be fundraising and shouldn’t be expanding and that Sam was out on tour without board agreement.

Sam points out that as the CEO he has to stay ahead of the team and manage news flow in advance of the team’s needs. “We’re going to need more money for more data centers”

Ilya has a fit. Things come to a head. A vote is taken. Sam is out. The board demotes Greg, who is not at the meeting as Sam is authorized to cast his vote. Mandatory

I don’t know why there is any surprise.

Here’s OpenAI’s product strategy for the next 2 years:

- you will be able to upload anything to ChatGPT
- you will be able to link any external service like Gmail, Slack
- ChatGPT will have persistent memory, no more multiple chats unless you want it
- ChatGPT will have a consistent, user customizable personality including political bias
- ChatGPT will be able to respond by text, voice, images (diagrams and video still ?? In this timeframe)
- ChatGPT will become much much faster until you feel it’s a real person (>50ms response time)
- Hallucinations and non factual errors will decline rapidly
- as self moderation improves, question rejection will decline

https://twitter.com/thealexker/status/1718445317559902371

AI initiated actions. -> I hesitate to say agents because it’s a loaded word. Current browsing and data analysis tools are already AI initiated. Would expect to see that functionality be extended to more tools.

https://x.com/browsingenabled/status/1718467627742568706?s=20

Vicious Self-Degradation

> you Google
> Quora spots query and id’s as frequent
> Quora uses ChatGPT to generate answer
> ChatGPT hallucinates
> Google picks up Quora answer as highest probability correct answer
> ChatGPT hallucination is now canonical Google answer

@TylerGlaiel 🎩

How Long?

GOSPEL

⏰ 9000 BC
🇬🇷Magnesia, Greece - an old shaman communes with a speck of floating dust, a small window into an unknown universe

⏰ 1675
🇬🇧Cambridge, England - Isaac Newton, gets nerdswiped. “The last of the magicians” tries to steal from ancient magical tomes.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… LIES LIES ALL LIES

(Sources to follow)

Catch Up Thread

If you just want a quick read start at 15 - Ghost In The Machine.

If you want to experience what we did as we discovered things start with 2.

Disclaimer below.

https://twitter.com/8teapi/status/1686217806298423299

2

Real Superconductors Might Be Here

https://twitter.com/8teapi/status/1684018789082607616?s=46&t=ZmJDeWYPyzg_6V2zA08sXg

The Race To Validate

⏰Previously, on Friday 28 July
Kwon goes rogue and presents at the MMC conference.
Lee is forced to give an interview to Yonhap, retracting the 3 author paper, and disclosing Kwon had been fired 4 months earlier.

⏰Continuing:
🇺🇸 Virginia:, HT Kim, shrugs… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Sources to follow, maybe incomplete, and remember it’s fiction. Having trouble with Twitter app.

Ghost in The Machine

JH Kim joins the Chem Dept in Korea University in 1996, fresh faced, 24 years old.

He’s a synthesist, an experimental chemist of the old school. He believes the truth is in the making, and that you follow the truth even when it destroys your reality.

He… https://t.co/v9qh3bF9CEtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
What is a signal?

A squiggle on a chart, a faintly heard echo of something real happening.

Kim plays Marco Polo with the universe, blindfolded, calling out again and again with each experiment, listening on the ESR . Sometimes warmer, sometimes colder. He invents entire new… https://t.co/Nqs67Cc7gttwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/8teapi/status/1685419188851253248

We Are Not Cheating

YH Kwon goes rogue on Friday, showing up to the Metallic Multilayers Conference in Seoul unannounced.

He presents the data from the to be retracted 3 author paper, affiliating himself with both the Qcenter and Korea University. Both institutions declare him… https://t.co/3LExkO2u9Btwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/8teapi/status/1684932569148866560

Press interview

https://twitter.com/sanxiyn/status/1684905973507674112

What a drama

Lee and Kim has been disciples Korea University Dept of Chemistry head TS Chair.

TS Chair comes up with a one-dimensional room temperature superconductor (SC) theory and publishes in 1994.

Lee, the theoretician, takes up the mantle, publishes his Masters thesis… https://t.co/USv2NhgZHatwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/8teapi/status/1684385895565365248

🎩

https://twitter.com/sanxiyn/status/1684438761818714113

🤯 Palantir demo’ed a battlefield assistant calling in drones and quarterbacking a battle in Eastern Europe.

I’m sure @ESYudkowsky is going to be pleased at how fast this is moving.

🧵 👇 1) it’s a chatbot!
But with federated data retrieval based on intelligence classification access rules

💥 fired!

BREAKING!

GPT-4 is AGI!

An amazing human achievement and a milestone in history. About the equivalent of the invention of fire, writing, antibiotics.

Standing on the shoulders of all who have gone before us.

Kudos to @gdb , @sama , @ilyasut

🧵 OpenAI admits that all academic benchmarks should be assumed to have been memorized by GPT.

Their test criteria now draw from human psychology and they build novel and difficult questions. This is where the ChatGPT usage data is going to be very useful for next gen. @MikePFrank