Rob Leclerc

founded $300m aum deeptech vc (top 100 by @TIME); neural nets since 99; phil, cs, evobio, 2x pubs nature journals w/800+ cited, ucalgary ba/bsc/msc, yale phd

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

Just posted an article, a General Theory of Neural Networks -- an idea that I've been thinking about since my PhD.

https://t.co/UZXXe4xOkj

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

@bryan_johnson @Polymarket try paraxanthine coffee

[Andrew Côté @Andercot]

If you're an investor that wants to fund high impact creative work dm me

I'll reward you with infinite deal flow into early stage deep tech startups

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

@o0shad0oo @firesidealpha it’s not a question of whether it’s possible. it certainly is. it’s how the TCO compares to a terrestrial data center

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

how many hedge funds are doing this? there’s alpha everywhere on x for those with the eyes to see

[Nebulizer @SMASIMHO]

$NBIS Update:

I just called Mr. Kessler's phone and his wife Bonnie picked up. She says he's still at the townhall.

I think she thought I was anti-datacenter so she told me, "I don't know what to tell you honey, it's the way of the future."

Sounds like a done deal to me... She said I could call back in a bit to confirm. I'll wait an hour or so but again... reading between the lines.

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

@WR4NYGov @bl0rq @firesidealpha https://t.co/o016R193Pl

this obviously flips if the cost of on-planet energy increases significantly, or policies simply limit our ability to build.

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

data centers in space take all the costs associated with building data centers and adds all the overhead costs required for space, all for the sake of a small operational savings in the levelized cost of energy.

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

@chamath @anni_sen @Anantdvd great antidote to the sweater meme

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

we attribute consciousness to humans because we experience it first hand and extrapolate that to other humans

but ask an ai if it’s conscious, or if another model is conscious, and the answer is no or no one knows

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

astra better not do this to me (a typical session)

-The final independent review found two blockers
...
-I recommend a v8 replan
-The final activation review found an unsafe restart race
-The blockers are the live database mismatch
-I have now found four additional material risks beyond the reviewer’s list
-The plan review found that a standalone checker could still be bypassed
-The clean next move is a fresh, bounded activation-gate campaign that removes that dependency
-The final review found a genuine data-loss window
-The remaining issue is narrow
...

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

@bl0rq @firesidealpha i’ve seen them, they’ve been all over x, so you must have too. do i need to go track them down and read through each one to send you? i have better things to do with my time. now if you want to send me a defensible set of calculations you like, i’d be happy to look at it.

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

@bl0rq @firesidealpha burden of proof lies with you

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

@dwarkesh_sp i see what you smuggled into your second paragraph

“has created another mind” is more anthropomophizing. it may be a useful heuristic to think this way, but this shouldn’t be our null hypothesis. we should be ruling out simpler explanations before we jump to this.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Residents of Effingham County, GA are going to see their property taxes go down by about ~$200/year per $100,000 of taxable home value.

Why?

Because OpenAI is coming to town and their data center is paying enough property tax that the town can afford to lower everyone's bills!

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

@sbkaufman you want to stay open so that you’re open to evidence, but it’s not the null hypothesis. the burden of proof lies with those proposing that ai is conscious, and the bigger the claim the bigger the burden

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

i’m sorry, but if you want to claim the moral high ground and declare you’re the only ones who can be trusted with agi, maybe you shouldn’t constantly trick your customers

[AshutoshShrivastava @ai_for_success]

This is how Dario and Anthropic is making money.

Misanthropic for a reason.

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

instead of innovation, the eu focuses on creating regulation to drive employment of the administrative class

[European Commission @EU_Commission]

We have designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine and Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms under the Digital Services Act.

They now have four months to comply with additional DSA obligations.

More: https://t.co/gIR8vTolmB

#DSA

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

it was $150k-$1m of compute for a relatively minor outcome. a broader and larger scale and sustained attack would need to 100x this. who exactly is footing that bill? and who is not going to notice as the scale increases?

this is an interesting, but largely benign case we should not extrapolate from.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Columbia County, GA is in the final stages of agreeing to let Google come in, build a data center, and pay $40m in property tax

The cool part? They currently collect $25m total

The deal is being set up to let them get rid of property taxes for residents since the DC is enough!

[Rob Leclerc @robleclerc]

these attacks aren’t free. the estimated token cost for the hugging face attack is $150k-$1m. only an ai lab with infinite tokens to burn & poor accounting would miss this.

now imagine the cost for a broader & more sustained attack. it’d need to run into the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. who is not going to notice this? and the larger the surface area the greater likelihood of detection.

outside intentional targeted attacks by bad actors, these will be limited and isolated events.

[Nate Soares ⏹️ @So8res]

The scariest case isn't that the next swarm will shut down a hospital. A scarier case is that the next swarm might be smart enough to evade detection. This might be the last warning we get.