Matt Turck

VC at @FirstMarkCap. Host: MAD Podcast; Organizer: Data Driven NYC, Author: MAD Landscape.

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

Why AI Can Now Make Discoveries - my conversation with @danintheory, Lead of the Foundations of Reinforcement Learning team at @OpenAI

00:00 Intro: AI's wild week in mathematics

01:21 What OpenAI's Foundations of RL team does

03:08 Dan's journey: from black holes and quantum gravity to frontier AI

07:04 Are AI systems becoming useful for real science

08:21 The AI math moment: Erdős, OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic

08:52 Why the OpenAI result was an act of exploration

10:25 OpenAI vs. DeepMind: informal reasoning vs. formal proof

12:13 RL 101: learning by doing, not just watching

15:10 Why reinforcement learning works

15:58 How RL breaks: sparse feedback and long-horizon tasks

17:03 RLHF: how human feedback shaped early language models

18:48 Move 37, self-play, and the search for novel strategies

22:16 Explore vs. exploit in scientific discovery

24:49 Why RL may now be "the cake," not the cherry on top

25:46 Why RL started working with large language models

27:29 Is RL "sucking supervision through a straw"?

28:47 Why language may be the grounding layer for intelligence

31:46 A contrarian take on the Bitter Lesson

32:41 What test-time compute actually is

34:50 How RL gives models the ability to think

35:40 Verifiable rewards, math, coding, and the messy real world

38:00 What physics can teach us about AI

42:08 Is there a thermodynamics of AI?

43:08 From Erdős problems to Einstein-level AI

45:16 Is AI already doing original science?

45:51 How far are we from AI automating AI research

47:41 Why Dan is excited about the future of science

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@jbotsch

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

Ok bad stories about VCs are spreading on X right now, but VCs have horror stories about founders too

Like, that one time when a founder decided to take another term sheet with a higher valuation despite our obvious ability to add value, thought leadership and vendor discounts

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@albn @RomainLavault @Jameswise @gpcastle12 @2lr @brendaniribe ❤️

[prinz @deredleritt3r]

Dan Roberts (OpenAI):

"I can make a very long-distance prediction for the next 6 months.

I think we'll see more math and science breakthroughs, and obviously we'll turn this on AI itself, and the models will get a lot more powerful, and that'll be fun. You could do science of AI and have it feel like doing physics."

[Neil Zeghidour @neilzegh]

Our first commercial TTS model was optimized for WER and SSIM because that’s what research had taught us over years to be the standard metrics. The first customer feedbacks we had unveiled the huge blind spots of these metrics, in particular on naturalness, rhythm, emphasis, question intonation, etc. Now our internal eval has dozens of criteria monitored on each model.

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@PouliotDave 😱😂

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@utekkare yes and the startup logo is now prominently displayed on our website - proud owners of 0.00027% of the company

[Neil Mehta @ostensiblyneil]

https://t.co/os0UB8sVZ0

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@denys_khomyn Blue Ray?

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@jtc_ai

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@ScottPatterson0 and podcast!

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@rauchg @soleio @v0 @nextjs So cool!

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Vercel is partnering with and integrating Shopify.

Starting with @v0, you can now prompt a Next.js + Shopify store in seconds.

The old tradeoff was “easy monolith” or “costly headless”. No more. Easy @nextjs Shopify storefronts with no scale or sophistication ceiling.

[Ivan Burazin @ivanburazin]

Didn’t think I would be on the Nasdaq tower 😅

Thanks @FirstMarkCap

[Gradium @GradiumAI]

Reasoning LLMs typically take 2-3 seconds to start emitting tokens. In a voice agent, that's 2-3 seconds of silence after the user finishes speaking.

The @MiniMax_AI team just shipped a community contribution to Gradbot with two models running in parallel. MiniMax-M2-her produces a short acknowledgement that starts streaming to TTS immediately, while MiniMax-M2.7 runs in the background reasoning and tool calls.

Thanks to @davidtaoweiji for this contribution. Checkout our readme for more details.
https://t.co/gxSTdrCiAm

[SurrealDB @SurrealDB]

KongBrain gives OpenClaw a memory upgrade. Built by @eyeJUK3, it uses SurrealDB to store conversations, skills and causal chains, so your AI agent remembers, adapts and compounds knowledge. Check out the GitHub repo to learn more. 👉 https://t.co/TNFWz92goX

[Dan Roberts @danintheory]

TL; DW I say things (on reinforcement learning, the process of scientific discovery, and how physicists approach work on AI).

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@danintheory @polynoamial Thanks so much Dan! Really fun convo

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

@yagilb so cool 👏👏

[LM Studio @lmstudio]

Meet LM Studio's mobile app.

Your local models, now in your pocket.