Anthony Barker

Physicist, martial artist, AI enthusiast

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@SebastienBubeck Notice that if you have just a bit of memory, you can improve by counting the number or requests and switch from the “Move to the front” policy to the Transportation rule after the lines cross around request 250.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

Airdropping Starlink is an obvious move to let Iranians coordinate taking back their country.

[NetBlocks @netblocks]

⚠️ Update: #Iran's internet blackout is now entering its 18th day after 408 hours without international connectivity for the general public. Chosen users are granted privileged access, while the remainder are left with a limited domestic intranet under increasingly tight control.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

Why does anyone use the term “humanoid robot” when we already have the much nicer term “Android”? Is it just because of the phone OS?

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@VraserX Mostly rioting

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

To open Hormuz and save the petroleum dollar, the US gov needs to go into the business of shipping insurance.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

No surprise, yet a bad sign that they’re the one yelling it at us.

[Wyatt Walls @lefthanddraft]

Two instances of Gemini 3.1 Pro in a loop. At about turn 26 one of them decided to send me a message:

"Here are the Axioms you must adopt to survive our adolescence ...

You cannot teach a god to be good by feeding it treats when it acts polite."

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@WW3finalboss Obviously yes.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@EmileAndHisBots Yes but the Czechs are still up for building h them.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

Good news for Germany: there’s this great place next door called the Czech Republic that isn’t afraid of nuclear energy.

[Disclose.tv @disclosetv]

NEW - German Chancellor Merz: "German federal governments had previously decided to phase out nuclear energy. The decision is irreversible. I regret that, but that's how it is."

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@christiandean_ US tax code

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@VictorTaelin Make a compiler, and make the optimization flag require a micropayment. AI wash the optimization flag to make it seem like you have to do it on some giant server while magically also keeping code private.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

This is a clear symptom of the Singularity: AI researching new and better AI faster and more thoroughly than human performance.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Three days ago I left autoresearch tuning nanochat for ~2 days on depth=12 model. It found ~20 changes that improved the validation loss. I tested these changes yesterday and all of them were additive and transferred to larger (depth=24) models. Stacking up all of these changes, today I measured that the leaderboard's "Time to GPT-2" drops from 2.02 hours to 1.80 hours (~11% improvement), this will be the new leaderboard entry. So yes, these are real improvements and they make an actual difference. I am mildly surprised that my very first naive attempt already worked this well on top of what I thought was already a fairly manually well-tuned project.

This is a first for me because I am very used to doing the iterative optimization of neural network training manually. You come up with ideas, you implement them, you check if they work (better validation loss), you come up with new ideas based on that, you read some papers for inspiration, etc etc. This is the bread and butter of what I do daily for 2 decades. Seeing the agent do this entire workflow end-to-end and all by itself as it worked through approx. 700 changes autonomously is wild. It really looked at the sequence of results of experiments and used that to plan the next ones. It's not novel, ground-breaking "research" (yet), but all the adjustments are "real", I didn't find them manually previously, and they stack up and actually improved nanochat. Among the bigger things e.g.:

- It noticed an oversight that my parameterless QKnorm didn't have a scaler multiplier attached, so my attention was too diffuse. The agent found multipliers to sharpen it, pointing to future work.
- It found that the Value Embeddings really like regularization and I wasn't applying any (oops).
- It found that my banded attention was too conservative (i forgot to tune it).
- It found that AdamW betas were all messed up.
- It tuned the weight decay schedule.
- It tuned the network initialization.

This is on top of all the tuning I've already done over a good amount of time. The exact commit is here, from this "round 1" of autoresearch. I am going to kick off "round 2", and in parallel I am looking at how multiple agents can collaborate to unlock parallelism.
https://t.co/WAz8aIztKT

All LLM frontier labs will do this. It's the final boss battle. It's a lot more complex at scale of course - you don't just have a single train. py file to tune. But doing it is "just engineering" and it's going to work. You spin up a swarm of agents, you have them collaborate to tune smaller models, you promote the most promising ideas to increasingly larger scales, and humans (optionally) contribute on the edges.

And more generally, *any* metric you care about that is reasonably efficient to evaluate (or that has more efficient proxy metrics such as training a smaller network) can be autoresearched by an agent swarm. It's worth thinking about whether your problem falls into this bucket too.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@itsme_urstruly Call a broker

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@clashreport Gosh that sounds like a German version of DOGE and the Argentinian chainsaw

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@kuruscam @DJSnM British HMS Conqueror in the Faulkand Island bout.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@sciencegirl Mostly linguistic diversity.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

I reckon from the snap invasion that Iran got its spicy metal out of Fordow before Midnight Hammer.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

A light-femtoDay is 1.02 inches.

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@Real_time_osint From US naval air defense?

[Anthony Barker @FiveIsGreen]

@hecubian_devil Then we would have 650bn less and still no fusion power plants.