Ian Sefferman

👨‍💻 applied ai engineer ✨ making healthcare cheaper @goodbill ✋ detroiter 🎣 fly fisherman 🐶 english setter lover

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

Has anyone hooked this up to twilio yet?

[jack @jack]

We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.

https://t.co/r0qFLdvd6c

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

@wooster The absolute most fun.

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

We should not be primarily focused on humanoids

[Octi Zhang @octi_zhang]

(1/6) From @GoogleDeepmind’s AlphaGo to AlphaZero, we saw machines find moves that reached beyond what we’d imagined for them. No one taught them those strategies. They emerged from reinforcement learning: playing, failing, and trying again under a single binary task reward for success or failure. Inspired by them, we couldn’t help but wonder: what might a robot discover if we gave it that same freedom to learn?

That question led us to AlphaNIST. Starting tabula rasa, with that same binary reward plus only a simple control cost, a single policy solves all 20 @NIST assembly tasks at a 98.2% success rate in simulation. More surprising still, AlphaNIST can complete 10 different tasks in a row, receiving that reward only once, after all 10 are done.

Just as AlphaGo’s strategies surprised its creators, AlphaNIST discovered dexterous strategies we couldn’t have come up with ourselves.

Paper: https://t.co/HZBYgG7SWK
Website: https://t.co/VyUKiYFI2y

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

Had to do it.

[Wes Bos @wesbos]

I have discovered $50 amazon photo frames to be the PERFECT home display screen

They can be rooted, updated to run a modern browser, have WiFi and can be powered from USB

1280×800 resolution with a nice touch screen

I detailed how to hack these yourself in my latest video

https://t.co/QhIiKjlf9N

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

the early 2000s amazon mafia is honestly insane. i got to work for/with/near so many impressive people:

@bscholl: supersonic jets
@jeffholden: whatever this crazy thing is
@rdicker: cpo, zoom
@daveselinger: physical security
cto, lime
... plus so many others ...

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Atomic Machines has invented the first deeply new manufacturing technology since… 3D printing?!? They can make important micro-scale electro/mechanical devices that are otherwise impossible. The first product is a breakthrough power relay that will be important to data center scaling and electrification generally. (You might think switches are a solved problem—but they very much are not… until now.)

Proud to be an investor and board member, and proud to have known @jeffholden for more than a quarter century. Jeff and team Atomic Machines are wicked smart and grind as hard as anyone I’ve ever met.

We will almost certainly use PrimeSwitch on Overture, where it will enable digital power control with significant weight savings.

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

It still hasn’t sunk in how the last 30 years of software development were about how to keep developers from context switching.

And the next 20 seem like they will be about how to successfully context switch as much as possible.

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

3 years.

Never again is now.

[🇺🇸 Jake Hilton 🇮🇱 @TheDemSlayer]

OCTOBER 7, 2023: SHE KNEW SHE WAS GOING TO DIE.

Libi Cohen-Meguri, a 22-year-old infantry officer, went to the Nova music festival.

She was shot while fleeing the party. At 8:11 a.m., she called her parents and said:

“I’ve been shot in the stomach, I’ve been shot in the arm, I’m losing blood. I’m going to die.”

Calmly, quietly, she understood; these were the last minutes of her life.

She asked her parents to call Tomer, her twin brother, and Maya, her little sister, and said:

“I’m going to die. I just want you to listen to me.

I love you, Yariv. You’re the best father I could have asked for.

Mom, stop screaming. Just listen to me. You are the best mother we could have ever had. Don’t forget to be a good mother to Tomer and Maya after I die.

Tomer, how lucky we were to live this life together. I love you.

My Maya, never forget—you are the treasure of my life.”

When she finished speaking, her parents told her to get out of the car, lie down on the road, and pretend to be dead.

With her last bit of strength, she got out of the car and laid down on the road.

“Mom, they’re coming to shoot me again,” Libi said after lying down.

While her mother listened on the phone, shouts in Arabic could be heard, and then a barrage of gunfire.

It didn’t stop.

It kept going, until the call was disconnected.

And that’s how Libi died—with demonic beasts from the pit of hell standing over her and emptying a full magazine into her body.

Libi died with LOVE on her lips: love for life, love for her family, and love for her people.

Her memory will forever be a blessing.

NEVER FORGET.
NEVER FORGIVE.

NEVER AGAIN IS NOW.

Israel is hunting down every single Palestinian and Hamas terrorist who participated in the October 7th Massacre—to kill them all.

They’re living on “borrowed time,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Sooner or later, every one of these monsters will be found and eliminated.

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

So I know Cognition doesn’t care about Little Ole’ Me, and this is just my story, so take it with a grain of salt, but here’s why I don’t think all these crazy scaling revenue numbers by coding agents are going to stick:

We’ve been happy Devin users for a while. Really like the product, and like the company. Still do! This isn’t shade at Cognition, and I’m not upset with them, just a sample of why I worry about the competitive landscape for these cos.

Anyway, our usage grew to >$100k run rate or so. I think one or two of our users even received an email congratulating them for being Top 200 users of Devin.

As usage grew, we added more capabilities and needed a BAA (layman’s terms: an agreement that says they are HIPAA compliant). This required an Enterprise contract (why a piece of paper requires extra money is a topic for another discussion, but it’s very normal…) so we started talking to their sales team.

Basically, we were going to ~1.5x our spend in order to get the BAA. Honestly, that was fine with us. We like Devin!

Our only request was to pay quarterly (already a big concession from our existing monthly payments, given our relatively small size). They declined, unless we committed to EVEN MORE usage.

Before responding, I decided to see how difficult it would be to set up Hermes to do the equivalent work as Devin, and to see what the costs were. I’d host it in our infrastructure and only use providers we already have a BAA with.

Two days.

That’s it. It’s functionally 100% equivalent. Maybe slightly better in some ways, slightly worse in others. We spend a little bit of time futzing with it, but we did that with Devin, too.

The cost is roughly 25% of Devin.

So, two days for $100k or so per year savings. All because they didn’t want us to pay quarterly.

At some point, other companies are going to catch onto this, too. So congrats on this milestone, but keep finding more ways to provide value and keep customers happy. It’s hard to compete.

[Cognition @cognition]

Cognition has crossed $1B in annualized revenue run rate.

This milestone belongs to our customers. Here's how a few of them are building with Devin.

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

This could go down in history as one of the dumbest decisions for America— and humanity.

[Sam Altman @sama]

I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.

Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

Colleges are turning into healthcare. Expect it to get uglier before it gets better.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Net college prices have been falling, but price discrimination is getting more extreme, so sticker prices keep climbing.

For low-income families, tuition at these colleges are cheaper than ever…personalized pricing we accept with almost no pushback.

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

@Misopogon Given Vandy’s recent emphasis on a great place for Jewish kids to attend, this is positive!

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

I am in an entire row of empty treadmills by myself.

A guy just came and took the treadmill next to me.

Do we not abide by urinal rules on treadmills anymore?!

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

GrokBot is really well done. Has a lot of the polish I have been wanting out of my personal agent.

But (a) I just don't trust it enough, and (b) just won't be locked into a model.

Hermes wins, still.

@Teknium, pls take some notes from Bot on the UI for desktop/mobile.

[jack friks @jackfriks]

ok nvm AGI isn’t here yet guys…

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

Paper Route #219 — 47 moves
🚲 +2 over par
📰📰📰📰📰📰📰📰📰📰
https://t.co/5oK4j0OxZG

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

Fable one-shotted a new game based on just three or four sentences.

Let me know what you think!

https://t.co/L2wr6ZHP8r

[Ian Sefferman @iseff]

Then a guy reads 1,300 years of Discord arguments and ships the Mac production docs.

Then another guy ports those docs to Windows.

[𝗖𝗮𝘁 שושנה 🎀🧃 @CatShoshanna]

Me explaining the Talmud to Zoomers:

“Well, it’s basically a Discord log from 1,800 years ago. Then another Discord log from about 1,500 years ago arguing over every message in the first one. Then a guy about 1,000 years ago writes the most legendary blog post explaining both. Oh, and there are also Slack logs from 1,800 years ago… and that’s how we figure out how to light the Hanukkah candles.”