Julio

We are already that which we are seeking

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field.

I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.

First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.

The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.

Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended.

I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.

Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.)

Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.

Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building.

[Original text (with links): https://t.co/jni2tWazAH ]

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Deep tech founder
Series Seed
Series A
Series B

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

This is Brazil

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

Que golaço

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

Yes.

[Anders K. Hvelplund @Falliblemusings]

I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time.

But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay.

That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions.

Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design.
After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples:

On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion."

On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings."

On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over."

On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us."

On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed."

On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two."

This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty?

And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it.

Now compare Deutsch:
"Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature."

"Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow."

"Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved."

"We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be."

Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence.

The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children?

Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct.

Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going.

Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff

[░ perfectloop ░ @PERFECTL00P]

𝙿𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚊 ▓🏃‍♂️🪟♦️🏃‍♂️🪟💣🏃‍♂️🪟🎨🏃‍♂️🪟

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

The rhythms of the weekly meeting, the quarterly planning cycle, and the annual review may stop making sense. New rhythms emerge. We lose some legibility. We gain scale and speed.

[Ivan Zhao @ivanhzhao]

https://t.co/fxHYR6S29D

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

@DougieDeLuca @ParizottoMath aqui pariznight

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

#NovaFotoDePerfil

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

wow

[Nic Cruz Patane @niccruzpatane]

Elon Musk came up with a pretty incredible idea during the Q3 Earnings Call, that no one is really talking about.

His words: “Actually, one of the things I thought, if we've got all these cars that maybe are bored, while they're sort of, if they are bored, we could actually have a giant distributed inference fleet and say, if they're not actively driving, let's just have a giant distributed inference fleet.
At some point, if you've got tens of millions of cars in the fleet, or maybe at some point 100 million cars in the fleet, and let's say they had at that point, I don't know, a kilowatt of inference capability, of high-performance inference capability, that's 100 gigawatts of inference distributed with power and cooling taken, with cooling and power conversion taken care of. That seems like a pretty significant asset.”

So basically, each car has ~1 kilowatt of high-performance AI inference capability, Tesla wouldn’t need to build giant data centers — the fleet is the data center.

Tesla could turn their entire fleet into a giant distributed inference network, spread across the world, powered by the batteries and AI in the car already.

Mind blown.

[jack @jack]

bitcoin is not crypto

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

Yes

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

Aulas

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Gamma crossed $50M ARR with 28 employees and more cash in the bank than we had raised ($23M)

In hindsight: We got here because we ignored common VC advice.

Examples of glaringly bad advice that you should ignore to save you $10M+ and years of time, like we did for Gamma:

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

When mistakes are cheap, you can move fast and fix what doesn't work. When mistakes are expensive, you overthink everything and still choose wrong.
This is why startups can run circles around big companies. It's not because they're smarter, but because being wrong isn't expensive

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

@zede_crypto @ParizottoMath kkkkkkkkkk

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

Sinal de topo

[TBPN @tbpn]

BREAKING: The SPAC King returns.

Chamath Palihapitiya files a new $250M SPAC: American Exceptionalism Acquisition A (AEXA).

[Chris Dixon @cdixon]

Clear rules for stablecoins and the road ahead

At the White House today, the first piece of U.S. crypto legislation will be signed into law: the GENIUS Act. It provides clear rules for stablecoins.

This is a historic moment — not just for crypto, but for the world at large. That’s because stablecoins give us something we’ve never really had before: open money infrastructure.

Stablecoins are a better form of money: faster, cheaper, and more global. They cut fees and eliminate intermediaries. They are auditable and programmable. They allow developers to build new kinds of apps that weren’t possible before: low-to-no cost remittances, programmatic micropayments, AI-native transactions, transparent and disintermediated global commerce, and more.

Stablecoins give the world access to the dollar, they spread financial freedom, and they ensure that the next generation of financial infrastructure is built on U.S. standards.

For too long, innovators in crypto have operated under legal uncertainty. That uncertainty has stifled progress, driven builders offshore, and created a fragmented internet. The GENIUS Act reverses this: it creates clarity for stablecoins and sets us on a path toward broader crypto market structure reforms.

This is how the internet moves forward: through clear rule-making. With the GENIUS Act, stablecoins have clear rules, paving the way for better payments, financial products, and an overhaul of the global financial system.

Next, we need the same for the rest of the crypto market. The Senate can do this by passing the CLARITY Act, which provides clear rules of the road for the broader crypto industry, opening a path for innovators while also protecting consumers from scams and bad actors.

We believe that the U.S. can lead the next era of the internet — the read-write-own era — by enabling open, user-owned protocols instead of the closed, corporate platforms that defined the last one. This legislation lays the foundation for that future. It's the beginning of a new chapter.

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

Simply put, we need more billionaires if we all want to live lives that are, for the most part, indistinguishable from the lives of billionaires.

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

99.9% of people need those richest people, with their yachts and PJs and extraordinary bank accounts, in order for us to enjoy the everyday wealth that we’ve become accustomed to. If Jeff Bezos couldn’t easily afford a $50 million wedding, I wouldn’t have free, next day shipping.

[Julio @JulioAndreoni]

If Nivida shareholders didn’t enjoy 790x returns, I wouldn’t be able to one day receive a safe and affordable AI robotic surgery. If Sergei Brin didn’t have a mega yacht, I’d have way less access to free information and knowledge.