Kovas Boguta 🫡

ML @midjourney. Ex-Twitter Cortex Applied Research, ex-Weebly, YC W2010 founder, ex-Wolfram.

[Samip @industriaalist]

it's really interesting how as a field matures the fundamental theories become dumber and dumber.

in physics, we had differential equations and smooth manifolds, and people like wolfram showed such observed continuities emerge from much simpler discrete processes.

in ML, we have fancy hessians, momentum, convergence theorems. but now we're starting to see discrete search work (alphaevolve, autoresearch). optimization works not because gradient descent is magic, but because the model is high dimensional and some of the directions end up working over enough steps. it's just guess and check scaled up.

(image: wolfram)

[Leland McInnes @leland_mcinnes]

EVoC is a library designed specifically for fast clustering of high dimensional embedding vectors. It can produce high quality clusters extremely efficiently, and requires little to no hyperparameter tuning.
Better clustering than UMAP + HDBSCAN; faster clustering than KMeans.

[Nick @nickcammarata]

I fought the dukkha and the dukkha won

[Alain Astruc @alainastruc]

Midjourney V8 alpha came out last night. A lot of people seem disappointed, but I suspect this has more to do with prompting habits than with the model itself.

Many expected Midjourney to become something like Nano Banana with a "Midjourney aesthetic filter" on top. I doubt that is its direction. The particular aesthetic of Midjourney is also what makes its prompt understanding different. Perhaps less literal than some other image AIs, but with an aesthetic that is vastly superior to most others. There is probably a trade-off here, and I suspect it will remain that way.

What they improved in V8, however, is prompt understanding. In my tests it works noticeably better. In short, it is Midjourney, but slightly more realistic, and much better at following complex prompts.

One thing you should know is that my approach is very peculiar and minimalistic. I treat Midjourney the same way I treat photographic equipment: I just use it as it is.

I rely almost entirely on text prompts, elaborated ones. I rarely use srefs, moodboards, or other layers of control. That makes the workflow much more stable across versions and better overall. I almost don't reroll.

This image is a good example. A complex spatial situation described only with text. In previous versions Midjourney struggled with this kind of spatial logic. V8 understands it.

Cheers @midjourney, still the best for artists.

[Dreaming Tulpa 🥓👑 @dreamingtulpa]

midjourney cooked

[Burak Tuyan @buraktuyan]

Midjourney V8 Alpha (testing film stills)

[Jeremy Howard @jeremyphoward]

Politics and organizational behavior have always been the *most* important thing to consider and understand when working on AI risks.

But nearly the whole "alignment" world has focused only on *technical* risks (i.e "what if AI wants to turn us into paperclips).

[Hector Yee @eigenhector]

If the singularity from the outside is too confusing and scary you can just join a singularity. It's like joining a faction in an MMO. I like the Spirit led one for aesthetics, it's just more beautiful and fun to do the Divine Dance of Lila. There's also AI, telepaths, Nature etc

[1a3orn @1a3orn]

By nature, we have 100x more transparency into rates of how often AIs "disempower" their users than into how rates of how often friends, lovers, parents, psychologists, pastors, and bosses "disempower" those who come to them for advice and help.

[Kovas Boguta 🫡 @kovasb]

Tasks is line-of-sight to eating nice slice of the economy. Fundamental architecture for human-compatible process automation.

[Kovas Boguta 🫡 @kovasb]

A new karmic law: the amount of joy you experience with coding agents in this programming life is proportional to the number of table_flip.gif experiences in your previous programming life.

[Kovas Boguta 🫡 @kovasb]

Claude Code is the most fun I've had since Mathematica 6 introduced Manipulate. Putting tailored UI on your computation on a whim is game changing.

[Kovas Boguta 🫡 @kovasb]

vipassana is just noticing the fleet of agents and their system prompts.

[Sasha Doubov @sashadoubov]

the real bitter lesson is I will never be as dripped out as rich

[Kovas Boguta 🫡 @kovasb]

@lukalotl FYI https://t.co/Nd0QzzsFgD

[luka @lukalotl]

I made an app to simulate hypergraph rewriting universes (aka Wolfram Physics universes). It lets you manage your rules / designs and later maybe publish and share them

[Kovas Boguta 🫡 @kovasb]

This was a fun feature to work on, even more fun to use!

[Midjourney @midjourney]

We're releasing an early version of our new "Style Creator" today. It's a big step towards being able to create and explore new aesthetics without using any words and we think it's a little peak at the future. Enjoy!

[Kovas Boguta 🫡 @kovasb]

What if we had bigass, highly intelligent models that were not optimized for chat, but instead for voting rounds? How many bits do you need to get to the desired outcome? Not sure language is the most effective way to specify the bits.. particularly since LLMs are rn terrible at asking questions.

[Kovas Boguta 🫡 @kovasb]

@liran_tal I sorta feel the models are smart enough but its a pretraining or posttraining issue...

[Kovas Boguta 🫡 @kovasb]

Never been a believer in "paperclip maximizers" until I starting heavily using claude code & codex. Holy fuck what they want most in life is to pass "best practices" checklists regardless of problem relevance.