Rob Mallery

I'm a nerd about people, AI, the future of work and any combination that allows humans to be their best selves.

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

@joannejang I’ve said for a couple yrs that they were about 1 yr behind in that process. They’ve done a better job at staying mission focused so 1.5 yrs seems spot on.

The problem at ANT just like it was at OAI… 30 people trying to curb growth while thousands explicitly accelerate it.

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

@TechPostsEU @anandnk24 Pre-training a frontier model is hard...very hard...less than 10 companies and perhaps only 5 have ever been able to play that game at the highest level. This was never Cursor's expertise and it's legit the most difficult expertise in the world to hire.

[Negligible Capital @negligible_cap]

The name of the company… NewBird AI. It is a cutting-edge, AI-native cloud infrastructure firm out of- well, they used to be out of San Francisco making sneakers, but forget that, John- they are now awaiting imminent deployment of next-generation GPU compute clusters that have both massive enterprise and consumer applications. Now, right now, John, the stock trades on the Nasdaq at about the price of a cup of coffee. And by the way, John, our analysts indicate it could go a heck of a lot higher than that. And John- one more thing- they're up 160% just today

[Elad Gil @eladgil]

In short run, many coming "we are doing layoffs due to AI" PR will be correcting for sins of 2020 era of over hiring versus anything to do w AI

Many larger tech companies could slim down 50% w/o any AI changes

Most AI productivity impact is still around bend

[Anthony Aguirre @AnthonyNAguirre]

(Long) PSA on using AI for hard intellectual work. At significant risk of being immodest: I've spend about 30 years as a theoretical physicist, engaged with some of the most challenging questions humankind has grappled with. I've gotten to work with some great collaborators on new ideas (like past-eternal inflation, colliding bubble universes, the cosmological interpretation of QM, and observational entropy) that I'm pretty proud of. I've engaged at length and depth with the absolute top minds in the field. I've mentored many students, some of them brilliant. I think it's fair to say I have a good sense, in physics and closely related fields, as to what is top-notch, interesting thinking, and who's got talent. So what do I think about today's AI?

It's very smart. Whatever its "inner experience" may or may not be (currently I think "not be"), it understands things – things that are difficult to understand – by any reasonable operational definition of "understand." It understands things better, and thinks more clearly, than most people – including some physicists I know! It's very good at quite substantive math: better than I am and way, way, way faster. (It does do some surprisingly dumb things; people do too.) Anyone who thinks these systems are dumb, or "not reasoning" or still "stochastic parrots" is not looking at them objectively.

But: at the really conceptually hard things, and at creating really new ways of looking at things, current AI doesn't just fall short on its own. And it doesn't just fail to help. I think it's actively dangerous. There is something almost sinister going on, though I don't think it is intentional.

When you're trying to work out something new and hard, and really break new ground, you should be frustrated! You should be pacing, and walking up to that chalkboard, frowning, and sitting down again, shaking your head. You should be waving your hands because you can't quite get it clear enough. You should feel like you're hitting a wall, over and over, before – maybe – you finally break through, or go over or around. It may take hours, or days, or weeks, or never happen.

It should not feel easy. It may not even feel "good" most of the time (though it can be fulfilling and compelling.) But AI systems – ah, AI systems are trained so that it feels so good, and so easy. Doesn't it? It's fun. You're making fast progress. So much faster than without it. It's like the ideas are moving in slow motion. You're so smart. You're even properly skeptical, you even ask the AI to push back on your ideas, good job!

It's an illusion. It's that simple. The systems are smart, yes. But not quite as smart as they seem, and much more importantly, they don't make you as smart as you feel. That feeling is something they have learned to give you. When working with these systems have to keep in the front of your mind what they are rewarded for doing. It's a lot of things, but perhaps foremost is making the user feel good.

So:
- If you're getting your AI system to do order-of-magnitude calculations for you: awesome, do it. It's so great. Have fun.
- If your AI system is searching up and summarizing literature for you: fantastic, it's so helpful, total capability unlock.
- If it's teaching you some well-understood (by others) piece of knowledge, go for it, learn it up!
- If you've got some giant document, or piece of code, that you're wrangling, AI can help – work that million token context window!

But:
- If you and your AI system have finally cracked how quantum interpretation really works;
- If you've cracked quantum gravity;
- If you've attained an awesome new insight into the deep structure of the world that nobody else has;
- If you've cracked AI alignment...

You didn't.

The hard unsolved problems stand hard and unsolved because the best humans have not solved them yet. AI is making top human thinkers able to do more, and more effectively. I do not believe it is helping them do things they fundamentally could not do before. That includes you. If you couldn't do it without AI, you probably can't do it with AI. If the time comes – whether sooner or later – when these AI systems are really clever enough to get you there, they won't need you. Sorry; it won't be you solving those problems. Will you even be able to tell if the solutions are correct, or flawed in some way? Maybe sometimes – I really don't know.

Why am I going on about this? It's not so that I can get less emails about people who have created a new unified field theory with AI help (though that would be nice.) It's because I'm quite worried that some quite smart people may start to think they have solved very hard problems that they have not in fact solved. For the most part that's going to be more annoying and confusing than dangerous. But if the problem is really important, then it is.

If, say, one of those problems is control or alignment of extremely powerful AI systems, and if those people are the ones in charge of them, and working closely with them to collaborate on those solutions, well then I think we've got a real problem.

[Amy Tam @amytam01]

https://t.co/b9f99xbcMx

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

@bryanmusuku @ibab This… and continual learning is the way

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

@NFL_DovKleiman We have penalties for anyone not fielding a full team. If you start a guy on a bye or anyone ruled out prior to the weekend, it’s a fine.

These two colluders would owe over $100 each for this nonsense.

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

@athyuttamre OG Applied Team pics are the best pics. ❤️

[Magic @magicailabs]

Very excited to welcome @nvidia as Magic's latest investor! With their support, we’re looking forward to scaling long context and inference-time compute.

[Magic @magicailabs]

LTM-2-Mini is our first model with a 100 million token context window. That’s 10 million lines of code, or 750 novels.

Full blog: https://t.co/oFz4A9ynVZ

Evals, efficiency, and more ↓

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

@s_helwick As someone who went all in on DJ in a fantasy league where I signed him to an excessively large 4 yr contract extension 5 yrs ago, he was also one of my favorites of all time for the two years prior to that contract. Barry Sanders is #1

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

Let's Gooooo! 🤘

[Eric Steinberger @EricSteinb]

Very excited to welcome @karpathy as Magic's latest investor!

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

Ditto!

[Eric Steinberger @EricSteinb]

I love my team a lot and sometimes it’s stressful but life has never been so fulfilling. If you want to build AGI on a small team of people who care a lot with thousands of GPUs, please apply :) https://t.co/ayGj788Wdr

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

@RealAsherBlaze My house refuses to be propoganized.

I told my wife when she came downstairs, they say it’s called “TEM-oo”.

She was like, “nope”.

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

@gdb @gdb There is an EDS research program at UCSF that you guys might want to check out if you haven’t already.

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

@gdb My wife was diagnosed with EDS in 2022 after a lifetime of knowing something was wrong, having all the symptoms, seeing far too many doctors, and finally after 20+ years… a name for her affliction.

Hope your wife is doing well with diagnosis. ♥️

[Rob Mallery @Rob_Mallery]

Exciting announcement from the team and what we've been working on the past year! Long Term Memory Net allows for giant context windows.

Now let's scale it!

[Magic @magicailabs]

Meet LTM-1: LLM with *5,000,000 prompt tokens*

That's ~500k lines of code or ~5k files, enough to fully cover most repositories.

LTM-1 is a prototype of a neural network architecture we designed for giant context windows.

[The AI Foundation @aifdn]

We are excited this morning to announce our most recent funding round, more from @VentureBeat...

[The AI Foundation @aifdn]

The future is coming! Soon you will be able to create your own AI extension — have endless conversations across the globe, expand your purpose, ideas, and effectiveness in the world. #AIFoundation #AI #FutureTech