Vedran

🦁📈

@CryptoDadsNFT
@angryboars
@LazyLionsNFT

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

I hope I'm wrong.

But tonight feels like some sort of invisible line has been crossed that we didn't even know was there. The last time I felt like this was 9/11 when it was clear, without knowing the how and the what, that the world was about to change forever.

Like the rules of the game had been permanently altered and there was simply no going to back to the innocent, peaceful past.

I didn't feel like this when an attempt was made on President Trump's life. If I had to rationalise why I didn't, I guess it's because several US Presidents have been shot at and even assassinated. Somehow it was within the realms of the possible, no matter how awful.

But to murder a young father simply for doing debates and mobilising young people to vote for a party that represents half of America? This is something else.

Charlie's death is a tragedy for his wife, his children and his family. I don't pray often. I am praying for them tonight.

But I fear his murder will be a tragedy for all of us in ways we will only understand as time unfolds.

I hope I'm wrong.

[Igor Babuschkin @ibab]

Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023. I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.

Building AI that advances humanity has been my lifelong dream. My parents left the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR in search of a better life for their kids. Life wasn’t always easy as immigrants. Despite the hardships, my parents believed that human values were priceless: values like courage, compassion, curiosity for understanding the world. As a child, I admired scientists like Richard Feynman and Max Planck, who relentlessly pushed the frontiers of physics in order to understand the universe. As a particle physics PhD student at CERN I was excited to contribute to that mission. But the search for new physics was getting harder and harder, requiring bigger and bigger colliders, while new discoveries kept getting fewer. So I began to wonder if superintelligence, not larger colliders, could be the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Could AI develop a consistent theory of quantum gravity? Could AI prove the Riemann hypothesis? In early 2023 I became convinced that we were getting close to a recipe for superintelligence. I saw the writing on the wall: very soon AI could reason beyond the level of humans. How could we ensure that this technology is used for good? Elon had warned of the dangers of powerful AI for years. Elon and I realized that we had a shared vision of AI used to benefit humanity, thus we recruited more like minded engineers and set off to build xAI.

The early days of xAI were not easy. Naysayers told us that we arrived too late to the game, so starting a top AI company from scratch would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Starting a company from zero required lots of hands-on work. In the beginning I built many of the foundational tools used at the company to launch and manage training jobs. I later oversaw much of the engineering at the company, including Infrastructure, Product and Applied AI projects. xAI’s people are deeply dedicated. Through blood sweat and tears, our team’s blistering velocity built the Memphis supercluster, and shipped frontier models faster than any company in history. I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency.

xAI executes at ludicrous speed. Industry veterans told us that building the Memphis supercluster in 120 days would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Our goal was to get our training setup running at scale on the Memphis cluster ASAP. Towards the end of our 120 day deadline, we were riddled with mysterious issues with communicating over RDMA between the machines. Elon decided to fly to the datacenter, and we followed. Our infra team landed in Memphis in the middle of the night and got straight to work. After pouring through tens of thousands of lines of lspci output we finally identified a wrong BIOS setting, the root of the problem. Elon was there with us until late into the night. When the training run finally worked, Elon posted our triumph at “4:20am” causing us to laugh out loud. I will never forget the rush of adrenaline that night, and the emotional bonds that we were all in this together. We went to bed feeling like we were living through the most exhilarating time of our lives.

I have enormous love for the whole family at xAI. Our team is truly special - you’re the most dedicated people I’ve ever worked with. Catching up to the frontier this quickly hasn’t been easy. It was made possible by everyone’s diehard grit and team spirit. Thank you to every single person who joined me on this adventure. I want to honor your contributions, your time, your sacrifices, which are never easy. I will always remember working together far into the nights and burning the midnight oil. I will never forget the sacrifices and contributions you’ve made. As I drive away today, I feel like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college. My heart is brimming with tears of joy, rooting for the company as it grows and matures.

As I'm heading towards my next chapter, I’m inspired by how my parents immigrated to seek a better world for their children. Recently I had dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute. He showed me a photo of his young sons, and asked me “how can we build AI safely to ensure that our children can flourish?” I was deeply moved by his question. Earlier in my career, I was a technical lead for DeepMind's Alphastar StarCraft agent, and I got to see how powerful reinforcement learning is when scaled up. As frontier models become more agentic over longer horizons and a wider range of tasks, they will take on more and more powerful capabilities, which will make it critical to study and advance AI safety. I want to continue on my mission to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity. I’m announcing the launch of Babuschkin Ventures, which supports AI safety research and backs startups in AI and agentic systems that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe. Please reach out at [email protected] if you want to chat. The singularity is near, but humanity’s future is bright!

[Vedran @VedranZoric]

@ImpactfulPerson @romanhelmetguy I remember watching this cca 30 years ago. As a kid I was shocked back then.

[Vedran @VedranZoric]

@shoewizard59 If I understand, we have a 6 men rotation. Next 6 games, 6 different starting pitchers?

[Vedran @VedranZoric]

Bidding Problem https://t.co/eeWUlz130V

[Vedran @VedranZoric]

@SGrant9393 @christopherrufo @FistedFoucault Not

[non aesthetic things @PicturesFoIder]

She was definitely fired after this

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Prominent academic brings forward (a) studies and charts showing one thing is causing a second, bad thing, and (b) corresponding urgent policy reforms.

The 5 big questions to ask:

1. Your field is crippled by a vicious replication crisis; 50%+ and maybe even 70% of your field's studies don't give the same results when run by someone else. Why believe any of your analyses?

2. Why should we believe "wet streets cause rain" vs "rain causes wet streets"? A big part of the scientific replication crisis is mispresentation of cause vs effect. Why should we believe the flow of causation is as you say?

3. Few important things in the world are monocausal, most outcomes are overdetermined by several or many causes. Why should we believe that this is the single or main cause that is generating the effect, and not one or dozens of other causes, or no causes at all?

4. Many prominent scientists just like you have come forward over the last 100 years with similar arguments; we look back on many of those as irrational moral panics, people freaking out over comic books and dime novels and bicycles and jazz music. Is this just another in a long series of academic- and activist-driven moral panics?

5. Thomas Sowell says, "There are no solutions, only tradeoffs." What are the tradeoffs of your proposed policy reforms? What are the downsides to be suffered by people you've never met and feel no responsibility to? Are you personally exposed to those downsides, or are you totally off the hook?

[HOW THINGS WORK @HowThingsWork_]

Reversing skills 🤌🏼

[Alexandros Marinos 🏴‍☠️ @alexandrosM]

I would like to use the occasion of this clip to remind everyone that the TOGETHER trial has still not released the raw data as it promised to do in its journal submission.

All the big name accounts complaining about fraudulent ivm studies have said NOTHING about this scandal.

I even offered Scott Alexander $25k of my own money if he would help get it released and he didn't move a finger.

Following the ivm rabbit hole has been the fastest way to find out that practically nobody from the medical establishment cares about the actual facts on the ground. Just posturing and repeating the hive mind talking points.

Thank God for whistleblowers, I have gotten access to the interim analyses from this trial, and when I publish them, the fraudulent nature of its conduct will be clear to anyone who cares to know about it.

Receipts in replies.

[Joel Shepherd Author @ShepJoel]

Literally 30 years ago, when I was just a kid taking an interest, I predicted this, not because I'm so smart, but because lots of others at the time were predicting something similar and I thought they made sense.

Manufacturing is the kind of thing that a big autocratic nation can be good at, you mobilise huge amounts of labour, attract Western capital, and grow very rapidly by making things cheaply at huge volumes.

But the biggest part of that cheapness is labour cost, and that never stays low once the economy develops. And so China would need to move to value added manufacturing (which they're doing but not at the required scale) and services.

The thing with services and high tech is that they require the free flow of information to grow rapidly. The CCP hates free flowing information, so companies can never be certain of the data they're working with.

I didn't believe then that an autocratic nation could run a modern technology and services economy to compete with the West, and I still don't now.

THIS is where the old idea came from that the modernisation of China would one day lead to democracy. It's not that it would inevitably happen, it's that one day, China would be forced to choose between continued high growth at the cost of autocratic control, or autocratic control at the cost of high growth.

They chose the later, so now here we are.

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

Writing in 2003, I was not in principle against a pax americana in succession to the pax britannica of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I took (and still hold) the now heretical position that most history is the history of empires; that no empire is without its injustices and cruelties; but that the English-speaking empires were, in net terms, preferable for the world to the plausible alternatives, then and now. https://t.co/m1tTqrmi30 1/10

[Crazy Clips @crazyclipsonly]

Is this the right way to teach your child how to swim?

[Vedran @VedranZoric]

@TinaMcDermott5 @JYSexton USA and Russia are not (legally) in war. Would you like them to be?

[Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya]

How to be anti-vax, a primer:
1) Exaggerate covid vaccine efficacy against disease transmission
2) Cause people to lose jobs and ostracize them via covid vax mandates & discrimination
3) Gaslight people with vax injuries
1/4

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

What you and your ilk fail to appreciate is how tediously familiar I find your tactics. I had a violent ex-husband who used to tell me life would be great if only I’d comply, but you’re making the same mistake he did. Women like me can’t be bullied out of resistance.

[Jeremy Howard @jeremyphoward]

Now that ChatGPT has rolled out custom instructions to most users, try out this instruction -- it makes GPT 4 far more accurate for me: (Concat the rest of this 🧵 together and put in your custom instruction section)

[Vedran @VedranZoric]

@Logan_Howardx @dbacksreact @tombombadil31 I hope he gets traded (anywhere), and then we can revisit.

[Vedran @VedranZoric]

@dbacksreact @tombombadil31 Lawlar Lin together, maybe