Sean Kumar

Investor @ 1455 Ventures - Searching for the next Gutenberg moment for humanity. Cloud and Distributed Systems. Security. #Crypto OG (2011). INFJ. Dog Dad.

[Aleph @alephneuro]

We recently obtained the highest-resolution 3D images of the human brain ever taken from outside the skull. This is the first look.

Introducing Aleph, a research lab building brain interfaces for the telepathic future. (1/n)

[Midjourney @midjourney]

A technical dive inside our new "Midjourney Scanner"

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

How AI empowered Paul Conyngham to create a custom mRNA vaccine to cure his dog’s cancer when she had only months to live. The first personalized cancer vaccine designed for a dog:

[Chris @ChrissGPT]

Anthropic had 16 AI agents build a C compiler from scratch. 100k lines, compiles the Linux kernel, $20k, 2 weeks.

To put that in perspective GCC took thousands of engineers over 37 years to build. (Granted from 1987 - however) One researcher and 16 AI agents just built a compiler that passes 99% of GCC's own torture test suite, compiles FFmpeg, Redis, PostgreSQL, QEMU and runs Doom.

They say they "(mostly) walked away." But that "mostly" is doing heavy lifting.

No human wrote code but the researcher constantly redesigned tests, built CI pipelines when agents broke each other's work, and created workarounds when all 16 agents got stuck on the same bug.

The human role didn't disappear. It shifted from writing code to engineering the environment that lets AI write code.

I don’t know how you could make the point AI is hitting a wall.

[Jim Fan @DrJimFan]

If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths.

I won't be surprised if Sora is trained on lots of synthetic data using Unreal Engine 5. It has to be!

Let's breakdown the following video. Prompt: "Photorealistic closeup video of two pirate ships battling each other as they sail inside a cup of coffee."

- The simulator instantiates two exquisite 3D assets: pirate ships with different decorations. Sora has to solve text-to-3D implicitly in its latent space.
- The 3D objects are consistently animated as they sail and avoid each other's paths.
- Fluid dynamics of the coffee, even the foams that form around the ships. Fluid simulation is an entire sub-field of computer graphics, which traditionally requires very complex algorithms and equations.
- Photorealism, almost like rendering with raytracing.
- The simulator takes into account the small size of the cup compared to oceans, and applies tilt-shift photography to give a "minuscule" vibe.
- The semantics of the scene does not exist in the real world, but the engine still implements the correct physical rules that we expect.

Next up: add more modalities and conditioning, then we have a full data-driven UE that will replace all the hand-engineered graphics pipelines.

https://t.co/7BikSgE7iN

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model.

Sora can create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions.

https://t.co/YYpOAcrXQ3

Prompt: “Beautiful, snowy Tokyo city is bustling. The camera moves through the bustling city street, following several people enjoying the beautiful snowy weather and shopping at nearby stalls. Gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes.”

[Dimitris Papailiopoulos @DimitrisPapail]

Whoever tells you “we understand deep learning” just show them this. Fractals of the loss landscape as a function of hyperparameters even for small two layers nets. Incredible

[James Seyffart @JSeyff]

🚨BREAKING🚨

Bitcoin ETFs Likely Approved by the SEC

It certainly looks like the #Bitcoin ETF Approval order had hit the SEC website but the link is no longer working. That said, this document looks accurate to me.

https://t.co/NhJueWNPJ0

[Sam Altman @sama]

what i wish someone had told me:

https://t.co/1nEaYimzXG

[Balaji @balajis]

VCs know that doomers doom technological progress.

Here’s @vkhosla, first VC in OpenAI, taking apart the “religion of effective altruism.”

[Balaji @balajis]

Satya wins.
Reflexes of a startup CEO.
Resources of a trillion dollar company.
Pulls this together in 48 hours from a cold start.
Gets it signed and over the line before markets open.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

When a misbehaving child knows he's going to have to give in and do as he's told, the final stage of resistance is to do it really slowly.

[Paxos @Paxos]

We are prudent risk managers & hold more than 90% of stablecoin reserves in short-term US Treasury bills and overnight repo. This reserve management structure is designed to reduce exposure to the US banking system and limit our US dollar cash holdings at depository institutions.

[Paxos @Paxos]

Statement from Paxos: The protection and safety of customer assets is Paxos’ top priority, which is why we always take active measures to safeguard customers’ funds.

[Jon Wu @jonwu_]

I just read FTX's Chapter 11 First Day Affidavit.

In it, the appointed restructuring CEO John Jay Ray III, who oversaw Enron's bankruptcy proceedings, calls FTX's case the worst of his career.

Its contents are shocking.

Here are the highlights:

👇

[tweet davidson @andyreed]

my money don’t jiggle jiggle, it’s gone

[gbrammer @gbrammer]

#JWST is looking awesome

[Andrew Badr @andrewbadr]

This is the story of how @larvalabs, the creators Cryptopunks, hid a secret NFT prize almost a year ago—and how a couple friends and I recently solved the puzzle to claim it.

[John Collison @collision]

Stripe now supports crypto businesses: exchanges, on-ramps, wallets, and NFT marketplaces. Not just pay-ins but payouts, KYC and identity verification, fraud prevention, and lots more. https://t.co/3X173SkdPd

[Ashleigh Stewart @Ash_Stewart_]

This is Anastasiia Yalanskaya 🇺🇦

She was killed yesterday, just outside Kyiv, delivering supplies to a dog shelter that was without food for 3 days

The car she was in was targeted at close range

Yalanskaya stayed behind in Kyiv to volunteer as everyone fled around her