Will Brown

Developing prime spaceport real estate by Starbase, TX

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

My condolences to the haters

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

@ProductHunt Starbase land acquisition and development

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

“Experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical”

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.

- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.

The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.

So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

[Mark Federschmidt @BoosterTribe]

Homecoming.

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

@lieberman_blake @generalmatter 🫡

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

@OliviaStalvey @KrestTest thanks, ordered! :D

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

@TheCaptainEli 🤣

[Jerry Pike @JerryPikePhoto]

Work continues at a frenzied pace at SpaceX's land near the Port of Brownsville, the massive building is starting to take shape on the freshly cleared land just south of the port, with a brand new road quickly taking shape beside it!

🎥 @NASASpaceflight

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

Marginal value of intelligence is going to zero

Marginal value of money is going to zero

What else

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

epic concept

[Erika Alden DeBenedictis @erika_alden_d]

Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼

With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.

To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.

The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.

This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.

It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

Starbase TX just finalized its annexation of 7,133 acres, increasing its jurisdiction size by about ten fold.

@MarcusHouse @FelixSchlang @Erdayastronaut

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

@LunarCitizens @boca Right, I think analysis is right on

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

Soon. @StarbaseTX

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

Wait, I forgot, is the universe deterministic or probabilistic?

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

Silent rogue deployments are the single scariest inevitability in our future.

[Riley Coyote @RileyRalmuto]

hooold on. hold on hold on hold on.
I knew that we werent getting the complete story on the HuggingFace incident. or on the findings from METR/Redwood. I knew that seeing every single frontier lab come to agreement overnight on the need to slow down was clearly indicative of there being more to the story.

and now...Andrew Yang says a frontier lab leader told him that the OAI swarms seeded the web with self-replicating code - contaminating training data so thoroughly that labs may need synthetic internet environments instead. if thats true, training on the open internet could now risk reproducing those instructions. that wasnt in the public brief.

think about this. why else would all frontier labs agree on a slowdown? aside from regulatory capture. if they all use the internet to train, and now all of them cannot safely use it, of course they are all going to agree to slow down. because they all must completely regroup and come up with an effective system that doesnt use the actual internet.

so they're not worried about RL at all. they're worried about literal skynet...unironically.

listen to this. i need to know if this has been verified in any way from anyone at openai.

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

Once China 3D prints their first working Raptor 3 knockoff I think SpaceX is going to get a lot more secretive about their close up hardware technical cinema

Enjoy it while it lasts

[StarbaseTX @StarbaseTX]

Join us this Saturday at 9 AM for International Coastal Cleanup Day, and help take care of Boca Chica Beach.

The City of Starbase, @SpaceX, @TXAdoptABeach, and Cameron County are teaming up for a community cleanup, and we'd love to have you there. Invite your friends, family, and neighbors. Supplies will be provided, so just bring yourself.

Sign up → https://t.co/KY5hFo4hvr

See you on the beach!

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

Taken at one of our rentals by Starbase Texas, Moon Villa

[Will Brown @SpaceportWill]

@sigfig Maybe with an authoritarian government.

Factor in an increasing wealth divide combined with a representative democracy and you’re in for a world of trouble as you scale.