Mo Bavarian

Scaling up RL at OpenAI 🍓 Optimization and long context research before. Math PhD, MIT.

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

yasmin has been goat maxxing since forever

[Forbes @Forbes]

Most VCs wouldn’t touch Anthropic in 2023.

Yasmin Razavi did.

The Spark Capital partner led a $450M round when Anthropic had no public product, no revenue and a massive capital need. Now the AI giant’s rise has landed her on the Forbes Midas List for the first time. https://t.co/9rxuS91mb8 (Photo: Guerin Blask For Forbes) #ForbesMidas

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

New blackboard lecture w @reinerpope

How do chips actually work – starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.

0:00:00 – Building a multiply-accumulate from logic gates
0:16:20 – Muxes and the cost of data movement
0:25:59 – How systolic arrays work
0:39:00 – Clock cycles and pipeline registers
0:51:40 – FPGAs vs ASICs
1:03:14 – Cache vs scratchpad
1:07:16 – Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores
1:11:49 – Brains vs chips
1:15:22 – A GPU is just a bunch of tiny TPUs

Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube/Spotify/etc to watch. Enjoy!

[Timothy Gowers @wtgowers @wtgowers]

AI has now solved a major open problem -- one of the best known Erdos problems called the unit distance problem, one of Erdos's favourite questions and one that many mathematicians had tried.
https://t.co/SD1vVPkrHR

[Dylan Patel @dylan522p]

Banger take

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

Stop living in a bubble.

The key to happiness, the true meaning of life, is not impact or wealth or fame, but health, friendship, and care for others. Living authentically is not that expensive.

In other words, money or success will not fill the hole in your heart.

[Amadeo Pellicce @amapel]

https://t.co/sov1h4mOzD

[Bilal Zuberi @bznotes]

I remind myself of this quite often.

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

Stochastic gradient descent

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

@xanderai Tbc, I have no beef with peptides.

May they all triumph in RCAs and become smashing successes like GLP1’s.

But until the RCAs, the grifters are gonna grift

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

One of the biggest benefits of peptides is that it has distracted a decent fraction of grifters (ever-present in SF tech scene) away from AI.

God bless 🙏

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

It's goblins all the way down

[Sam Altman @sama]

artificial goblin intelligence

achieved

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

San Francisco— the birthplace of AGI

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

It was fun doing this panel with my friends @dwarkesh_sp @_sholtodouglas and Melvin Johnson, and thanks @labelbox for hosting. It's the first time for me facing the ever-spicy Dwarkesh questions in front of an audience.

It's v important for frontier lab researchers to stay connected. Less adversity, more comradeship & cooler heads is necessary as the stakes for this technology gets higher.

[Labelbox @labelbox]

This week, we had the pleasure of hosting 50+ researchers and builders from leading AI companies to meet, talk and socialize (MTS 😎) at Labelbox HQ.

Huge thanks to @dwarkesh_sp, Sholto Douglas (Anthropic), Mo Bavarian (OpenAI), and Melvin Johnson (DeepMind) for leading our fireside chat on scaling RL and the pursuit of AGI.

[Valentin Ignatev @valigo]

JRR Tolkien used genz brainrot slang over 70 years ago, that's how ahead he was

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

Good cooking by a cracked team 🧑‍🍳

[ComfyUI @ComfyUI]

Two massive updates for the ComfyUI ecosystem today:

1️⃣ App Mode: The power of the node graph, now behind an easy-to-use interface. Turn complex workflows into custom apps.
2️⃣ ComfyHub: A brand new home to discover, run, and share community workflows and apps instantly via URL. Try ComfyHub preview via https://t.co/kQxsxBs2bB

Create in App Mode. Share on ComfyHub.

Learn more here: https://t.co/s4oKA4Ab8f

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

I do not share the cynicism of some with respect to OpenAI’s actions in the DoW/Ant dispute. It basically seems to me as though OpenAI was attempting to deescalate last week; whether they executed well is a separate question, but in their defense good execution in such chaos was nearly impossible.

But from where I sit it seems OpenAI tried to reduce tensions and find a productive path forward, while allowing its employees considerable latitude to speak their minds. The easy thing would have been for management to stay quiet and let this happen; they did not do that, and they also stood firm in opposition to the supply-chain risk designation.

In general, OpenAI is unjustly maligned.

This is the thing that bothers me the most about Dario’s leaked memo; it spends so much time on OpenAI conspiracies and cynicism that I fear industry solidarity in the future will be harder than it needs to be. This is not the last time we will see state interference into frontier AI, and until we build formalized structures for such interference it will be important for the industry to hang tough together. I fear that will be less likely now.

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

As an American working in frontier for the last 5 years (at Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI), it pains me to see the current unnecessary drama between Admin & Anthropic.

I really hope the Admin realies its mistake and reverses course. USA needs Anthropic and vice versa! 🇺🇸

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

Anthropic SCR designation is unfair, unwise, and an extreme overreaction. Anthropic is filled with brilliant hard-working well-intentioned people who truly care about Western civilization & democratic nations success in frontier AI. They are real patriots.

Designating an organization which has contributed so much to pushing AI forward and with so much integrity does not serve the country or humanity well.

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

I don’t think there is an un-crossable gap between what Anthropic wants and DoW’s demands. With cooler heads it should be possible to cross the divide.

Even if divide is un-crossable, off-boarding from Anthropic models seems like the right solution for USG. The solution is not designating a great American company by the SCR label, which is reserved for the enemies of the US and comes with crippling business implications.

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

@AmandaAskell @elonmusk What is the opposite of xAI?! 🤔