Durk Kingma

@AnthropicAI. Prev. @Google Brain/DeepMind, founding team @OpenAI. Computer scientist; inventor of the VAE, Adam optimizer, and other methods. ML PhD.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

Personal news: I'm joining @AnthropicAI! 😄 Anthropic's approach to AI development resonates significantly with my own beliefs; looking forward to contributing to Anthropic's mission of developing powerful AI systems responsibly. Can't wait to work with their talented team, including a number of great ex-colleagues from OpenAI and Google, and tackle the challenges ahead!

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@IanOsband @AnthropicAI Can confirm it's real

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@TimSalimans Excited to have you on board Tim! 🚀

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

Obviously I strongly support Anthropic's position here.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

A statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

https://t.co/Gg7Zb09IMR

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@rcbregman Preach!

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@DBahdanau Most humans prefer desk jobs (when given the choice) like yours, and robots like Neo will become cheaper and more and more general purpose over time.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

1X seems to have the right approach to developing safe humanoid home robots. Developing full autonomy will require lots of in-distribution demonstration data, so this launch, mostly tele-operated, makes a lot of sense. I expect such robots to be ubiquitous in 5-10 years.

[1X @1x_tech]

NEO The Home Robot
Order Today

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

In the Netherlands, and I imagine other places, there's a severe labor shortage that's realistically not going away, while humanoids will become general purpose. We need more housing but construction is extremely expensive due to labor cost, for example, and we need more hands for elderly care.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@DBahdanau This could be asked about almost any form of automation. Do you think we should avoid washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners? I see your point though. The real question is how we'll choose to use the robots.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

I really liked this interview, where Geoff manages to explain the essential bits for a general audience.

[Geoffrey Hinton @geoffreyhinton]

I did a podcast with Jon Stewart who has always been a hero of mine. It was a lot of fun. He really wanted to understand how AI works.
https://t.co/frLBndsW7g

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@ArYoMo I don't agree on both your view of European regulations, and Anthropic, but this website is just the absolute worst discussion platform so I'll leave it here.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

Think, people. Like many other technologies, AI technology has applications that are a net negative, unless well regulated. Don't support the anti-regulation lobby and don't support the people and the companies behind it.

[New York Times Opinion @nytopinion]

Mark Zuckerberg has a vision for how A.I. could be used in Meta's universe.

But the actor and filmmaker Joseph Gordon-Levitt is here to point out a flaw in the technology: an apparent lack of guardrails around how the company's chatbot interacts with underage users. https://t.co/ALnOOwpyaN

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@ArYoMo It's not even on the other end, it's just a false dichotomy.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@ArYoMo Regularity capture is the other end but absolutely not what I'm arguing for.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

Its kind of personal since
(1) I'm a dad and am concerned for the kids,
(2) I have ex-colleagues who have created a $100M+ blanket anti-regulation superPAC, and
(3) Some of my work is general-purpose and now also used for this kind of bad stuff.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

🔥

[Claude @claudeai]

Keep thinking.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@wellingmax @cusp_ai @NEA @Temasek @nvidia @SamsungVentures Congrats on this milestone, exciting! 🎉

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@realKingRoland9 @NandoDF I agree that that's what will happen eventually, but this is too expensive right now, and probably the coming few years.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

It's already the case that people's free will gets hijacked by screens for hours a day, with lots of negative consequences. AI video can make this worse, since it's directly optimizable.

AI video has positive uses, but most of it will be fast food for the mind.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Very impressed with Veo 3 and all the things people are finding on r/aivideo etc. Makes a big difference qualitatively when you add audio.

There are a few macro aspects to video generation that may not be fully appreciated:

1. Video is the highest bandwidth input to brain. Not just for entertainment but also for work/learning - think diagrams, charts, animations, etc.
2. Video is the most easy/fun. The average person doesn't like reading/writing, it's very effortful. Anyone can (and wants to) engage with video.
3. The barrier to creating videos is -> 0.
4. For the first time, video is directly optimizable.

I have to emphasize/explain the gravity of (4) a bit more. Until now, video has been all about indexing, ranking and serving a finite set of candidates that are (expensively) created by humans. If you are TikTok and you want to keep the attention of a person, the name of the game is to get creators to make videos, and then figure out which video to serve to which person. Collectively, the system of "human creators learning what people like and then ranking algorithms learning how to best show a video to a person" is a very, very poor optimizer. Ok, people are already addicted to TikTok so clearly it's pretty decent, but it's imo nowhere near what is possible in principle.

The videos coming from Veo 3 and friends are the output of a neural network. This is a differentiable process. So you can now take arbitrary objectives, and crush them with gradient descent. I expect that this optimizer will turn out to be significantly, significantly more powerful than what we've seen so far. Even just the iterative, discrete process of optimizing prompts alone via both humans or AIs (and leaving parameters unchanged) may be a strong enough optimizer. So now we can take e.g. engagement (or pupil dilations or etc.) and optimize generated videos directly against that. Or we take ad click conversion and directly optimize against that.

Why index a finite set of videos when you can generate them infinitely and optimize them directly.

I think video has the potential to be an incredible surface for AI -> human communication, future AI GUIs etc. Think about how much easier it is to grok something from a really great diagram or an animation instead of a wall of text. And an incredible medium for human creativity. But this native, high bandwidth medium is also becoming directly optimizable. Imo, TikTok is nothing compared to what is possible. And I'm not so sure that we will like what "optimal" looks like.

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@Big_Uppy Think about: cars, guns, drugs. These are also "tools" but due to their dual use nature, we don't simply let it come down to the user on how to use it; the solution is a balance between freedom and regulation. Why would AI be different?

[Durk Kingma @dpkingma]

@danijarh @sirbayes Agree that custom per-user videos are too expensive now, but (1) it will become cheap eventually and (2) per-user-group ads are feasible already and can still be very targeted.