Beff (e/acc)

founder @ e/acc // thermo king @extropic // Kardashev scaling is all you need

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Here's the full segment

Talked about the importance of moonshots and went in-depth on the Midjourney launch

Enjoy!

[MTS @MTSlive]

Why is the Midjourney team uniquely qualified to build medical hardware?

@BeffJezos, founder of @extropic:

"David's a trained physicist. He worked at NASA. He was a founder of Leap Motion, which is completely slept on as one of the first major projects he worked on."

"What I really like about that team is that a lot of the same team from Leap Motion followed David into Midjourney and now into this hardware exploration."

"They were training neural nets before there was TensorFlow, before there was GPUs. They did it on CPUs, and they had some of the first neural network technology deployed in a consumer product."

"So people are like, 'Why would a gen AI company pivot into medical devices?' It's really folks that came from the hardware world finding this unique blend between neural nets and hardware to achieve things people didn't think were possible."

"If it's physically possible, I very much have faith that that team can pull it off."

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

The government taking 50% equity of any AI company that crosses $200M in revenue is the fastest way to ensure no one founds a startup here

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

It's time to securitize the individual AI researchers so you can actually bet on your friends

[atlas @creatine_cycle]

so my mum is visiting SF and found out how much money AI researchers made today.
she then asked me: "why aren't you doing that then?"
good fucking question mum

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

@Evan_ss6 😆

[Christian Keil @pronounced_kyle]

I'm calling it: this is the start of a new era in tech.

First tangible example of massive consumer surplus from AI profits — more are coming!

Three from Midjourney, but beyond that, @DavidSHolz just showed us how to make the techno-optimistic future real. And just in time!

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

@DavidSHolz I stg you got me into Max Cooper and it became my most listened to artist

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

@Grimezsz @alder_riley The top lab in terms of vibes

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Hosting a party is an exercise in cultivating soft power

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

@stevejang David is cooking. Just you wait to see what comes next.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

@alpaysh All my homies hate Decels

[Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo]

The AI safety community constructed a memeplex in which “taking AGI seriously” was a prerequisite for being a serious and good person. When inside this memeplex (as many at Anthropic, some at OpenAI, and a few at DeepMind are) your vision narrows until the world feels extremely constrained. The whole future seems to flow through the “one ring” of controlling recursive self-improvement. And so even when you worry about AI itself seizing that one ring, you can’t generate better strategies than trying to control it yourself (directly via an AGI company, or indirectly via AGI governance).

I’m not saying this is a pure hyperstition. There’s a core truth underlying this perspective: AI will become extremely intelligent and capable, much more than it is today. But the current world is much more spacious and human-empowering than the future which Eliezer originally envisioned (a “brain in a box in a basement” taking over the world by surprise). And it would be even more spacious if this memeplex weren’t active. For example, Satya and Mark and Sundar only started taking AGI seriously because OpenAI forced them to—and even now they don’t really believe in superintelligence—and even if they did they couldn’t get most of their employees on board. Imagine how chill a “race” between Microsoft and Meta and Google would have been, compared with what we have today: Dario and Sam deep in the “one ring” memeplex while also personally loathing each other.

So the one ring memeplex has an escalating life-cycle. It infects people by letting them harness the narrative that they’re good people for taking AGI seriously, and that making other people take AGI seriously is a boon for the world (despite how terribly that’s gone so far). Then it shuts off their imagination—any sparks of creativity or plans that don’t steer towards the one ring are quickly shut down. Instead they make ChatGPT or the METR graph or other recruiting tools for the memeplex. And yes, they’ll acknowledge that previous versions of the memeplex were too extreme, and led to overly constricted action. But we don’t have time to worry about that, they’ll say, because AGI is coming by 2027/2028, and that’s the end of history. Somehow, though, almost everyone with that view has only a vibes-based definition of AGI. They don’t believe in Dyson spheres by 2028, or self-replicating nanotech by 2028, or brain emulations by 2028. They mostly can’t make concrete predictions, except that it’ll be enough AI that it puts all their plans on a deadline. (Shout-out to @DKokotajlo and @paulfchristiano though, who do make concrete predictions about things going crazy soon.)

It seems very hard to break out of this memeplex without just giving up. David Holz is maybe the world champion of that—the only person who was in a position to race for AGI and consciously turned away. Various agent foundations researchers have carved out space to think real thoughts, not the kind of panicky stabbing in the dark that usually passes for safety research. A few others (e.g. Salamon, Hoffman, Vassar, Andre, Sahil, Davidad) are pursuing more unusual paths. And of the people who burned out, I expect some will reorient to doing creative thinking.

For others, the main takeaway: yes, the future of AI will be wild. But so far it’s increased peak human agency, and openness to this trend continuing over the next decade will allow you to start creating something worth creating.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Make Venture Capital back moonshots again

[Jake @JustJake]

It’s a good time, today, to ask yourself:

Why aren’t there more of these?

Midjourney is doing something insanely trailblazing. Only possible when you have full autonomy over your destiny

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Can attest.

[TBPN @tbpn]

"The biggest and best people in the world are also the most hated."

@jakepaul says the bigger you get, the more criticism you attract, and that leads to even more attention.

"I don't think anyone who does big things in this world doesn't have haters... The haters will actually talk about you more and say bad things. But at the end of the day, people don't remember what was said. They just remember your name and your face."

"They're adding to the algorithm. It's really just math. If you just have 10,000 fans talking about you, and then add 10,000 haters, that's 20,000 people adding to clicks and views."

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Excellent move by OpenAI.

Makes me very optimistic about their future policy proposals.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: OpenAI is hiring former Trump AI policy adviser Dean Ball to help shape frontier AI policy & governance.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Technology is becoming techno-optimistic again

[jaiya @jaiyagill]

finally, we're making technology optimistic again

midjourney became profitable and, likely thanks in part to having 0 VC funding (iykyk), decided to spend years working on medical imaging that could actually improve people's lives

now let's see more of this pls

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Grok of War

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Pentagon AI chief announces SpaceX's Grok helped U.S. forces deploy over 2,000 munitions against Iran in 96 hours.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

☢️/acc

[Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors @isaiah_p_taylor]

Moments ago, Valar Atomics took Ward 250 critical for the first time. This fulfills President Trump’s EO 14301, which called for 3 advanced reactors to go critical by July 4th.

This is our second criticality as a company, and an important step toward our goal of power by July 4.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

@isaiah_p_taylor Broooo
LFG

[MTS @MTSlive]

Why is the Midjourney team uniquely qualified to build medical hardware?

@BeffJezos, founder of @extropic:

"David's a trained physicist. He worked at NASA. He was a founder of Leap Motion, which is completely slept on as one of the first major projects he worked on."

"What I really like about that team is that a lot of the same team from Leap Motion followed David into Midjourney and now into this hardware exploration."

"They were training neural nets before there was TensorFlow, before there was GPUs. They did it on CPUs, and they had some of the first neural network technology deployed in a consumer product."

"So people are like, 'Why would a gen AI company pivot into medical devices?' It's really folks that came from the hardware world finding this unique blend between neural nets and hardware to achieve things people didn't think were possible."

"If it's physically possible, I very much have faith that that team can pull it off."

[Extropic @extropic]

Thermodynamic computing isn't just for AI.

It will be an unprecedented tool for simulating the biological world.

New paper: TSUs can run mRNA codon optimization at ~1M× lower energy than GPUs. Estimates grounded in real hardware.

Paper + THRML code :
https://t.co/Zdr4EYD98A