Kording Lab 🦖

Konrad kording, @Penn Prof, deep learning, brains, #causality, rigor, Transdisciplinary optimist, Dad, Loves outdoors, 🦖

[Kording Lab 🦖 @KordingLab]

I am writing a super accessible explainer of AI (for non-CS folks). Anyone wanna test drive?

[Maxwell Meyer @mualphaxi]

“Don't think for a second that because you are an alarmist that you are doing a social good.”

This sentence is just devastating for so many intellectuals who need everybody to presume that they’re “the good people”

Thank goodness we have Jensen!

[Kording Lab 🦖 @KordingLab]

@Maze_s_Center Mark's criticism of carbon capture.

[Kording Lab 🦖 @KordingLab]

Super excited about this. Hardware is where the future is at!

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

The reactor team at @terraformindies has demonstrated successful production of high purity methanol at scale at our Muroc desert test site.

Let's review our progress in 2026. In January, we closed on our Muroc test site. By March, construction was underway. By May, we had 1.8 MW of solar installed. In July, we produced CO2 on site (https://t.co/H73NC4sZjT), and in August, hydrogen (https://t.co/en7BiUW9QU).

Terraform Industries has built an incredible team to revolutionize not just one or two key technical pieces, but the entire stack required to convert sunlight and air into fuel. Like plants, only 100 times higher productivity per acre and requiring no irrigation, fertilizer, or pesticide.

Two years ago, Terraform produced pipeline-grade natural gas for the first time. Since then, we've scaled up our methane reactor, increasing production by 250x and reducing contaminants by 10x, which allows us to increasing revenue per unit of product by 100x because it's now at chemically pure grade.

But it was always clear to me that natural gas was only one piece of the puzzle. It is possible to convert natural gas into other hydrocarbon products like gasoline or jet fuel, but given our precursors are CO2 and hydrogen, we can do one better by directly synthesizing methanol as well.

Methanol is far easier to convert into longer chain hydrocarbon products, either via the MeOH->DME->ethylene pathway, MTG, or via variations on Fischer-Tropsch.

Methanol also has significantly higher revenue per molecule than pipeline natural gas, which forms an essential part of our cost-reduction-through-profitable-scale-up strategy, explained in more detail in our post: https://t.co/ZnXRkYgWZq
TL;DR: If our learning rate is above 11%, our margins will strictly increase as we scale up into a market worth about $10t/year. Not including induced demand.

Amir joined the team earlier this year and speed ran the methanol reactor development program, successfully demonstrating recirculation and heat recycling before integrating these new technologies in a production scale reactor, built from the ground up at Terraform's facility in Burbank.

As soon as the hydrogen team was done, we shipped our latest reactor up to the desert, plugged it in, and began activating the catalyst. An extended test campaign through the heat of summer followed, punctuated by bunnies nibbling on hoses!

The hard work paid off, with Terraform's production of significant batches of high purity methanol, now packaged and ready to ship. A huge congratulation to the entire team, including Amir, Enric, Dominic, Hugo, and @lucie_nurdin.

With the completion of this test, Terraform has now demonstrated TRL 9 operation of all of its subcomponents, each developed from scratch, in house, to deliver the highest possible value to the end customer.

Terraform will never rest until we have broken the geological and geographical monopoly on oil, unlocking unconditional energy abundance for all of humanity. Join us!

[Kording Lab 🦖 @KordingLab]

@Maze_s_Center Apparently the logic is faulty?

[Kording Lab 🦖 @KordingLab]

@Maze_s_Center As the price of electrical will plummet efficiency is a tad less crucial.

[Community For Rigor (C4R) @comm4rigor]

See you next week in Philadelphia! 🎉

In just a few days, researchers and educators from around the world will come together for three days focused entirely on scientific rigor.

We're excited for the talks, workshops, conversations, and games that happen when we bring our community together in the same room.

Which part of C4R26 are you most excited about?

See you at C4R26!
📅 September 28
📍 Philadelphia

#C4R26

[Kording Lab 🦖 @KordingLab]

@CJHandmer @terraformindies You are one of the key reasons I tell my doomer friends that engineering will solve climate change.

[Ada Fang @AdaFang_]

Biology does not need models that just describe the world. It needs models that predict what happens when we intervene.

In @CellCellPress Focus on AI in Biology, we lay out how to build biomedical world models, from the data they need to how they should be trained and evaluated.

[Penn Bioengineering @pennbioeng]

We’re hiring.

The Department of Bioengineering is seeking faculty at the Assistant, Associate and Full Professor levels across bioengineering as part of a multi-year hiring initiative.

Applications due Nov. 23, 2026.

Learn more + apply: https://t.co/Sh7CRFSaSA

@PennEngineers

[Mustafa Suleyman @mustafasuleyman]

https://t.co/8XJVIXDpQz

[Ioana Marinescu @mioana]

When should you use #AI vs. not? 
1You shouldn’t use AI instead of efforting when efforting is the very goal of the activity (intrinsic value): like don’t watch a video of weight lifting instead of doing it yourself
2Don’t use AI instead of developing your general skills, or specific skills useful in your job/degree
3Do use AI when you could do it without AI but AI is faster
4Do use AI when the skill it replaces is not important to you, which can be hard to assess without developing your own skill (see point 2)

[Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault]

Are virtual flies playing Beat Saber? SM64? Doom? No.

The new fly connectome is an incredible achievement! Less is going on in the sim videos than it seems. I'm stoked to see people engage with neuroscience though. My breakdown: https://t.co/W7NCosFMCT

[David Bellamy @DavidRBellamy]

I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.

And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.

[Christopher Manning @chrmanning]

I propose Stanford NLP as an independent third-party evaluator under @DarioAmodei’s 3 step plan. For important parts of the work, universities would be better than any other organization (see below 🧵👇), and, of university groups, @stanfordnlp would be the best one to choose. 😊

[Deb Raji @rajiinio]

I applaud this but any mature audit ecosystem has *auditor conduct standards*. Was surprised to learn a METR investigator for the HF/OpenAI incident is married to an OpenAI board member, many access contracts are highly constrained etc. PCAOB in accounting exists for good reason!

[Kyunghyun Cho @kchonyc]

it's not "out-of-control" at all. openai had all the control in the world (i.e. they could always literally turn off all their machines across all data centers.) they decided not to based on carefully calculated trade offs between finance-economy-reputation-customers-etc. just like any other co'a e.g. anthropic

[Ioana Marinescu @mioana]

I've just posted a new preliminary paper: “Calibrating AI automation and its labor market impacts.”

I calibrate a model in which AI-driven labor automation is endogenous and tied to the accumulation of AI capital, using data-center and hyperscaler investment to discipline its growth.

Preliminary and incomplete. Much more to come.

Paper: https://t.co/3mtZNsTxHf

[Aran Nayebi @aran_nayebi]

This is incorrect. Rather, it's an MLP trained policy that can do these things, not the fly connectome itself (let alone the fly brain, which is the connectome + dynamics!).

When you replace "fly" w/ "MLP" you realize how not impressive this is...