Ryan Brigden

[First Round @firstround]

Applied Intuition has a practice called the culture table. Co-founders @qasar and Peter Ludwig, plus a few other leads (specifically, not managers) meet regularly to make sure manager bloat isn’t creeping in as the headcount has scaled past 1,000.

Every six months, ICs score their managers by answering 50 questions about how they’re doing. The culture table will then discuss the results to see whether a team is both meshing well and operating effectively.

This system reveals the well-liked manager who doesn’t drive results, and the effective manager who makes everyone miserable.

One of @AppliedInt's early employees, @malharhar, took us inside HQ to share what makes the company culture so distinctly "Applied."

[Applied Intuition @AppliedInt]

Can VLA models for autonomous driving perform without depending on complex reasoning or massive datasets?

Our new approach, NoRD (No Reasoning Driving), proves you don’t need massive datasets or heavy reasoning for high performance.

➡️ 60% reduction in training data
➡️ 3x token efficiency
➡️ Competitive benchmark results

By eliminating the reasoning overhead, NoRD creates a recipe for high-performance autonomous driving that is not only cheaper to train but also faster to develop and deploy.

Read the research blog here: https://t.co/6Tz9Kl7Ps4

Want a deeper dive? Learn more here: https://t.co/WeNywr4BBV

[Malhar Patel @malharhar]

When I joined @AppliedInt, back in early 2019, it was just a handful of engineers working above a bar in Sunnyvale. The website didn’t really tell you what we were. We just wanted to build amazing products for the real world, from fighter jets to hundred ton trucks to autonomous vehicles.

But we’ve always been really paranoid about losing the special culture we built in the early days to the monotony of corporate scale. Somehow, even as we’ve grown into a thousand+ person company, a lot has stayed the same since (like being in the Manhattan of the Bay, Sunnyvale). And of course, we’re still building amazing products.

Continuing from my prior video, we captured the culture that pulled me in all those years ago and how we’ve protected it as we’ve grown in this @firstround Review. These are all questions I’ve been asked about in the last few years from founders of all company sizes so might as well put it in one place.

P.S. At the minimum, there’s some awesome photos inside so take a look :)

[Ryan Brigden @ryanbrigden]

Go bears

[Malhar Patel @malharhar]

I wanted my first public video to be learnings from the past 7.5 years here at @AppliedInt. Hopefully it’s useful to the next set of builders 🐻

[Ryan Brigden @ryanbrigden]

@yishan Even when dry, they certainly are not barren

[Gappy (Giuseppe Paleologo) @__paleologo]

I did not know that, for any random variable x,

| mean(x) - median(x) | <= stdev(x)

Direct proof:

[Scott Alexander @slatestarcodex]

I cannot wait until the White House changes hands and all of you ghouls switch back from "you're a traitor unless you bootlick so hard your tongue goes numb" to "the government asking any questions about my offshore fentanyl casino is vile tyranny and I will throw myself in the San Francisco Bay in protest", like werewolves at the last ray of the setting moon.

[Analytica Camillus @AnalyticaCamil1]

For those of you who don’t know him, T2 is a man one might consider as one of the moral compasses of SOCOM.

Before leading SOCOM as a 4-star, he worked his way up through the ranks in America’s pointiest units (if I don’t recall correctly, he’s one of a handful of officers who took an early rank reduction to become a sergeant in Delta Force — yeah, that one), before he eventually became one of 3 squadron commanders in Delta.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

It's exhausting to be lied to. I think some of the most accomplished liars even take advantage of this fact. Their lies then serve a double purpose: (a) whatever purpose each specific lie serves and (b) to exhaust their audience and thereby batter them into submission.

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

Two red flags here. A CEO of a major defense corporation is endorsing:
1. A conspiracy theory (in fact illegal immigrants have a very small partisan effect on apportionment)
2. The idea that our enemies are inside our borders, not outside them.

How long before Anduril's surveillance technologies are primarily used on Americans?

[Justin Amash @justinamash]

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
—George Orwell, 1984

[Jerusalem @JerusalemDemsas]

The nonchalance of the agents after one of their own has just shot a woman is a dangerous sign.

They do not feel accountable to the public, they are not afraid of repercussions for their actions.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The US is now doing the kind of things we used to make fun of banana republics for doing when I was a kid.

I know not all the people who supported this man are idiots. Is there a point where the non-idiots say "enough is enough?"

[Ryan Brigden @ryanbrigden]

sp1 is way more approachable than I expected

[Uma Roy @pumatheuma]

sp1 is way more approachable than I expected

[Uma Roy @pumatheuma]

Had an amazing conversation with @sinahab about SP1 and diving deep into its architecture on Into the Bytecode (a podcast I’ve long admired)!

Sina is a great interviewer and if you’re interested in getting into the weeds of how SP1 works, check it out.

[isabelle 🪐 @isabelleboemeke]

Can you feel the vibe shift yet?

All within the last month.

[DHH @dhh]

Maybe I'm supposed to get mad at this, but instead I just get sad. Mullenweg clearly sees it as a failure to create much more value in the world than what you capture, and maybe that's the root of our differences. I see that as a proud achievement. https://t.co/SBDgBE5X10

[Abhi Venigalla @ml_hardware]

We built a new model!

🧱 It's called DBRX 🧱

* mixture of experts
* 16 choose 4 experts
* 36B active, 132B total
* trained on 12T tokens
* built e2e in 2 months
* using 3072xH100
* served up to 150 tok/s on @Databricks
* open weights :)