Afroz Mohiuddin

@OpenAI, ex @Google. Interested in Science, Psychology, Investing. Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

@ycombinator @PerfectbitAI @vaphab @sjy82155065 Super cool! Congratulations folks!

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

This might be apocryphal, but it tells a deep truth — There’s a difference between those who know from knowledge and reasoning vs those who know from memorization and rote learning.

Coincidentally also the difference between reasoning models vs non reasoning ones, but I digress!

[Ronit Pereira @CAronitpereira]

Charlie Munger on ‘Planck’s knowledge’ vs ‘Chauffeur knowledge’.

“Max Planck’s chauffeur memorised his lecture after hearing it 20 times. During one talk, the chauffeur replaced places with Planck.”

“When asked a difficult question, the chauffeur replied: That’s such an elementary question, even my chauffeur can answer it.” 🤣

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

@sama plotted on cost instead and a linear x-axis (courtesy codex) ... @scaling01

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

@sama plotted on cost instead and a linear x-axis (courtesy codex) ... @scaling01

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

8 y/o discovered a simple math trick to multiply an even digit by 6 -- concat(half of the digit, digit)

So (2k)x6 becomes concat(k, 2k) [k=1,2,3,4]

This is correct because the answer is 12k, which is 10k + 2k -- which is concat(k, 2k)!!

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

@_arohan_ All the very very best!

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

@AndrewDai @nmasc_ Well reasoned, much respect!🫡

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

Many congratulations @nitishkulki and @alankarjain91 -- This is awesome and can't wait to see how this is used in the wild!!

[Nitish Kulkarni @nitishkulki]

Today, we are launching NextToken - a single place to build production-grade agents, apps and analytics.

Code-forward. Cloud Hosted. Zero setup. Extremely affordable.
@nexttoken_co

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” — F Scott Fitzgerald

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

I accidentally broke my brain reading about Nobel Prize winners last month.

There's this thing called "Janusian thinking" that basically explains why some people's minds work like magic while the rest of us think in straight lines. Named after Janus, the Roman god with two faces pointing opposite directions.

The psychologist who discovered it, Albert Rothenberg, was trying to figure out what made breakthrough thinkers different. He interviewed dozens of Nobel laureates, major artists, revolutionary scientists. What he found sounds impossible.

These people can hold two different ideas in their mind at the same time. They can explore both without switching back and forth or forcing a quick comparison. They can consider “yes” and “no” to the same question simultaneously and stay clear-headed.

Einstein too talked about this when he described his relativity breakthrough. He was imagining riding alongside a beam of light while also standing perfectly still. Both perspectives at once. Mozart said he could hear an entire symphony "all at once," every note, every contradiction, every resolution happening in a single moment of awareness.

Your average person's mind works like a courtroom. Evidence comes in, you weigh it, you reach a verdict. Case closed. But Janusian minds work more like... I don't know, like a quantum computer that can process multiple realities simultaneously until something new emerges from the overlap.

I've started noticing it in conversations. When someone can genuinely see both sides of something without needing to pick one, it drives people nuts. They want you to land somewhere definite. The ability to live in that tension space reads as wishy-washy or indecisive.

Most creative advice tells you to "think outside the box." But Janusian thinking is weirder than that. It's being inside and outside the box at the same time. It's thinking the box exists and doesn't exist simultaneously.

Which explains why truly creative people seem slightly unhinged. They think they're choosing between realities. But, they're inhabiting multiple realities at once, mining the contradictions for insights the rest of us never see.

Sadly, most of us have trained ourselves out of this ability. We've learned that holding contradictions feels unstable, so we rush toward resolution. We've been taught that changing your mind means you were wrong before, so we defend positions instead of exploring them.

But the people changing the world have kept that childlike ability to hold impossible thoughts without needing them to make sense immediately.

We just need to live in the questions everyone else is too scared to ask.

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

@JingyuanLiu123 @Jianlin_S @clu_cheng Congratulations on the move @JingyuanLiu123 !

You’ll do great and happy for you!

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

@agihippo Useful!

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

@agarwl_ @urvashi__s Many congratulations to both of you!

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

This one Munger quote is so counterintuitive, yet empirically so accurate.

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Charlie Munger: "Politicians are never so bad that you don't live to want them back."

"You laugh, you young people, but you're going to live to wish that Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump were immortal."

[Gregory Zuckerman @GZuckerman]

“At my age, you make new friends, or you don’t have any friends,” Charlie Munger during in his last, eventful years.

https://t.co/AK0yVvAzsi

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

Thanksgiving-week treat: an epic conversation on Frontier AI with @lukaszkaiser -co-author of “Attention Is All You Need” (Transformers) and leading research scientist at @OpenAI working on GPT-5.1-era reasoning models.

00:00 – Cold open and intro

01:29 – “AI slowdown” vs a wild week of new frontier models

08:03 – Low-hanging fruit, infra, RL training and better data

11:39 – What is a reasoning model, in plain language

17:02 – Chain-of-thought and training the thinking process with RL

21:39 – Łukasz’s path: from logic and France to Google and Kurzweil

24:20 – Inside the Transformer story and what “attention” really means

28:42 – From Google Brain to OpenAI: culture, scale and GPUs

32:49 – What’s next for pre-training, GPUs and distillation

37:29 – Can we still understand these models? Circuits, sparsity and black boxes

39:42 – GPT-4 → GPT-5 → GPT-5.1: what actually changed

42:40 – Post-training, safety and teaching GPT-5.1 different tones

46:16 – How long should GPT-5.1 think? Reasoning tokens and jagged abilities

47:43 – The five-year-old’s dot puzzle that still breaks frontier models

52:22 – Generalization, child-like learning and whether reasoning is enough

53:48 – Beyond Transformers: ARC, LeCun’s ideas and multimodal bottlenecks

56:10 – GPT-5.1 Codex Max, long-running agents and compaction

1:00:06 – Will foundation models eat most apps? The translation analogy and trust

1:02:34 – What still needs to be solved, and where AI might go next

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

Shortcut [noun]: The longest path between two points.

We love them around here!

😂

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

@prajdabre More about Warren Buffett disclosing his stake I’d guess!

[Joy Bhattacharjya @joybhattacharj]

In 1890, 23 years old without any formal degree, she was working as a governess in her father's friend's house in Warsaw to help support her sister who was struggling to get an education in Paris. She fell in love with the elder son of the family who refused her as she had no prospects. Heartbroken and weary she wrote to her sister Bronia that she was stupid, would remain stupid and nothing would ever come of her life.
Thirteen years later she won a Nobel Prize in Physics along with her husband Pierre, and won another one for Chemistry eight years later.
On Marie Curie's birthday, giving up shouldn't ever be an option.

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

Sometimes examples like these drive home the Sherlock Holmes quote —

“You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”

(3/3)

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

“Our inability to understand the exponential function is our biggest weakness” — Prof Albert Bartlett

https://t.co/gUUwYYXiQT

The example given is striking in its simplicity!

(1/3)

[Afroz Mohiuddin @afrozenator]

If a bacteria doubles every minute, and in 60 minute fills up the container — Exactly when does a bacterium first realize this fact?

Even a mere 5 seconds before, the container is only 3% full, ie 97% empty!

(2/3)