Bill Leaver

Building in Physical AI. Prev PM @synthesiaio & @v7labs, scout @hummingbirdvc, founder in residence @join_ef. Interested in progress studies / organising genius

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

Works in Progress Issue 24 is arriving with our subscribers now. In it, you can read about:

- What ultra-Orthodox Jews can teach us about boosting fertility.
- How we can start claiming land from the sea again.
- Why the Glorious Revolution shows us how to abolish today's "Stakeholder State".
- How Alberta became the only place in the world without rats.
- Why and how we can vaccinate the world's wild animals against disease.
- How Vancouver's Squamish people might solve the city's housing crisis.

@pietergaricano, @Aria_Babu and I sat down to discuss all this and MORE from the new issue. Listen now.

Spotify: https://t.co/9ei9TebV6e

Apple: https://t.co/mW4cCpna0j

YouTube: https://t.co/v3MlhJFGvs

[Jim Fan @DrJimFan]

Today, we enable AutoResearch in the physical world for the first time! Introducing ENPIRE: we give 8 Codex agents a fleet of robots, an allocation of GPUs, and generous token budget. We set them free with a simple goal: solve the task as quickly as possible, keep the robots busy but stay safe, don't waste precious compute. Make no mistake.

Then humans step aside and our watch begins. The robot fleet starts to come alive: they learn to look for visual clues, reset the scene, practice novel skills, tinker with control stack, read papers online, debate, reflect, get stuck, and try again directly on the hardware. All we did is to give Codex an API to the world of atoms, and the rest is emergence.

ENPIRE is able to solve high-precision tasks like tying zip-ties, organizing fine pins, and installing GPUs all by itself. We also discovered a new type of "physical scaling": 8 robots exploring in parallel improves significantly faster than fewer ones.

A part of our NVIDIA GEAR lab now self-improves tirelessly over night. We just read the reports in the morning.

/goal: we all take a holiday and Jensen wouldn't even notice ;)

We will be open-sourcing everything, so you can host your self-running robot lab at home too! Deep dive in the thread:

[Bill Leaver @BillLeaver_]

@aeronlaffere @Dominic2306 Dream collab

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

The Anthropic rugpull is a bit of a mini-Sputnik moment for European leaders. They have had a few of these recently, discovering the hard way just how far behind the continent has fallen in the past 20 years or so.

Its not going to get better.

There will be another shock from the space side as well. This year, China will likely crack first stage reuse, get into the business of serious megaconstellations. At the same time, Starship - which to European leaders is nothing more than an explosion every couple of months - will get to orbit and start ramping up cadence. Everyone who understands the sector knows whats coming, but politicians here will be convinced its all smoke and mirrors until they wake up one day seeing both the US and China with a decades long lead over them in another critical sector.

[Nathan Benaich @nathanbenaich]

how it started…

[Bill Leaver @BillLeaver_]

@LeRobotHF @rabault_nicolas Awesome

[Bill Leaver @BillLeaver_]

@SamuelBeek Awesome this was my main feature request

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

"[Britain] dominated the world despite being small because of institutions, ideas and character—and the luck of being an island so we could develop very differently to Europe. Institutions, ideas and character repeatedly dominate scale." Dominic Cummings https://t.co/nbtjhyeMHC

[Dom Hallas @Dom_Hallas]

People like to talk about doing what they believe to be the right thing for their country. Ian gave up his home run investment of a lifetime to do it. Heroic. 🫡

[Séb Krier @sebkrier]

Fukuyama was so prescient. In a society with strong rights and material comfort, but light on demanding shared purposes and some degree of sacrifice, thymotic energies go searching. Some quiet into bourgeois hedonism; other will seek “metaphorical wars” and eventually real ones.

[Bill Leaver @BillLeaver_]

@adamshuaib Related to this, great founders have an under developed sense of cringe. This is something that constrains great founder production in the UK compared with the US

[Bill Leaver @BillLeaver_]

@obrien @SebJohnsonUK @mikebutcher Well done for correction

[Bill Leaver @BillLeaver_]

@RianCFFWhitton Excellent as always

[James Wright @JPBWFarm]

According to Natural England's modelling, the fish disco will save just 0.083 salmon and 0.028 sea trout per year. That works out to over £280,000 per fish saved.

For £700 million, we could wipe out Somerset’s £41 million council deficit for a decade, fix every single pothole in the county, build a rail link to Minehead, and make every bus in Somerset free for years.

Or we could just make the electricity that Hinkley produces cheaper, and we'd all benefit.

Being a poor country is a choice.

[Bill Leaver @BillLeaver_]

@chris_j_paxton Great post

[Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh @S_OhEigeartaigh]

Hardly a month goes by without me thinking about how prescient this essay (and the talks Ian gave) were back in 2017/18. If you haven't read it, do now. If you have, read it again. Mundane now, but almost shocking then.
https://t.co/4X9uyu7nMT

An under-appreciated part of the UK getting its AI safety infrastructure & international engagement right was benefiting from people like Ian (and Matt Clifford, Jade Leung, Nitarshan Rajkumar, Henry De Zoete) giving up their time to make things happen that would not have happened otherwise. (And all had very good, much better-paying, alternative uses for their time). Grateful.

[Bill Leaver @BillLeaver_]

@colossusmag Excellent piece

[James Marriott @j_amesmarriott]

Wittgenstein's (incredibly typical) response to a university friend taking him for a cheerful afternoon out to watch a boat race:

[Ian Hogarth @soundboy]

For those who enjoy "UK stand up tall!" type content

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

In my teens and 20's I would spend way too much time playing Starcraft and Civilization. Harvesting resources, building things, and expanding was super addictive to my brain - to an almost unhealthy degree.

Later I realized that entrepreneurship and business is the ultimate game. It scratches the same itch for me (resources, building, expanding), but you're actually contributing to humanity at the end of the day, which can be much more fulfilling.

Business is also much more positive sum than video games. In Starcraft, the other player has to lose for you to win. In business, there is competition, but in a growing market there can be multiple winners. And gains compound long term (it's a infinite game) instead of starting over each time.

Now days I prefer to watch pros play video games to unwind, instead of playing video games myself. But a quick game can still be fun here and there to unwind. By contrast, the game of business is played over many decades.