Kris Selberg

building ai that understands physics | cs @princeton

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

Post college graduation reflection on my life achievements

15 - 16 yrs old:
- Made first money online dropshipping Cristiano Ronaldo iPhone cases
- Made $1k+ selling fidget spinners from China to people in my school

17 - 18 yrs old
- Classic leadership in extracurriculars + sports to get into an Ivy League
- Team got 1st in national math competition
- Got into my dream school for math at Princeton

19 yrs old
- Started waking up at 5 AM 4-5 times / wk
- Realized I liked programming a lot more than math
- Read 52 books in 2020 (mostly self-help wantrepreneur books with some good biographies riddled in)
- Did research in deepfake detection

20 yrs old
- Grew a TikTok page to 150k+ followers talking about non-fiction books (and the occasional thirst trap...)
- Took a gap year
- Lived in Colombia for 3 months coding and doing TikToks
- Did book research for prev owner of The Atlantic

21 yrs old
- Worked at a startup with ex-Google engineers doing iOS backend engineering + building creator AI tools
- Did boxing for 6 months
- Ran a marathon w/ 2 weeks training
- Backpacked Western Europe with one of my best friends for a month

22 yrs old
- Realized I learnt 10x more of what I want to learn at a startup vs. college classes
- Worked at a YC startup part-time during the school year writing technical blog posts about iOS app optimization
- Published a paper in AR + flew to Hawaii to present it at CHI
- Worked with Sebastian Thrun and Eric Schmidt on applications of video generation models
- Spent a semester in SF working on a stealth AI project and flew to Qatar to pitch it
- Worked on various side projects during the school year in the video generation space (comic-to-anime generation, dynamic choose-your-own-adventure games, etc.)

23 yrs old
- Joined a stealth AI startup as the 1st eng building AI agents for F500 companies + governments
- Moved to SF
- Flew to the Middle East for a month to build an on-prem AI solution running on real government data
- Graduated (finally)

[Stephan Hoyer @shoyer]

Wow, this is incredibly disappointing to hear from Anthropic -- basically a death sentence for Claude in @conductor_build, which simply wraps Claude Code in a nicer GUI. Not sure how it got lumped in with autonomous agents like OpenClaw.

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

@aquariusacquah @joinkaizen @8vc Incredible team and incredible product. Congrats on the launch!

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

Claude 4.5 Sonnet has been consistently dropping the f bomb in Cursor and Claude Code...

Anyone else getting this? 😅 (I do not curse in any of my inputs)

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

Non-technical politicians should not be making decisions about technical issues.

Using AWS or GCP is genuinely 100x better than using other cloud providers. This is why they power the Internet - they have the best products.

Maybe you could gamble on a smaller cloud provider... but Elizabeth Warren's website is still reliant on Cloudfront.

[Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren]

If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period.

It's time to break up Big Tech.

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

@eiselems It took a while - had me flushing my DNS cache because AWS hadn't updated their health dashboard yet...

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

Was running a terraform script in the middle of the AWS outage + thought I nuked our infra 🤣

Canva, Notion, and Asana down too

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

@itsCathyDi @KindredVentures @stevejang @Saga_Ventures @maxaltman @braveben @itsthomson @dedaluslabs @WindsorNguyen Congrats!!!

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

@thinkymachines https://t.co/AFJkBiBXdV

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

@thinkymachines just released their second ever blog post on training updates. Here's what they found:

> Manifold Muon (their variant): keeps certain layers’ weights “well-behaved” (fewer explode/vanish)
> Not a new model: it’s a per-step optimizer update you can plug into any transformers
> How to use: swap into linear/attention matrices; keep other layers on AdamW (common hybrid)
> They newly defined "Modular manifolds": a framework to budget learning rate per layer via Lipschitz sensitivity
> Outcome: more stable training, more predictable tuning, built-in regularization
> Tradeoff: some extra compute from the inner loop; cap steps or add momentum to tune cost

> So if you're fine-tuning with LoRA, try using the Muon optimizer on the same adapted projection layers (instead of Adam) for more stable tweaks (less exploding / vanishing)

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

A cheat code I learned from a mentor who sold his company for $300M+.

At dinner one day, he tells a story about scaling Mount Kilimanjaro. He talks about the brutal snowstorm, fatigue, and pokes fun at himself for hiring two sherpas and a chef to escort him.

What I found out later is that this is a deliberate practice he tracks everyday.

He has a spreadsheet with all of the interesting stories in his life that he reviews before meals and meeting with important figures / friends.

He tracks every interesting story in his life through his assistant and practices telling the stories in the best possible way for dinner conversations.

All of the $100M+ net worth individuals I've met have loved telling and hearing great stories.

Like any other skill, storytelling is one that can be improved with deliberate practice and helps greatly with building relationships with people you admire.

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

Claude Code has a major outage... Probably taking a while to fix because they can't use Claude Code to debug 🤣

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

xAI is hiring for a "Full Stack Engineer - WAIFUS" role... to "make Grok's realtime avatar products"

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

@jshchnz Let's see!!

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

@jshchnz LOL not at all, a shot at someone calling Perplexity just a ChatGPT wrapper today

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

Most people don't understand how hard distribution is until they've tried getting users on a B2C app.

Perplexity can be reduced to "just a ChatGPT wrapper" by engineers, but those same engineers have never built anything with the brand equity Perplexity has.

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

Follow your passion is bullshit advice. Passion is grown.

There's nothing better than diving deep into a niche where your curiosity and passion keep growing the further you go.

Only people who've done it can understand the excitement I have to read these Data Stewardship books right now

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

Motivation is mimetic.

The 5 people children surround themselves most with is now a function of the YouTube videos they watch, the podcasts they listen to, the Instagram Reels they doomscroll, and the TikToks influencers they follow.

Social media may be making teenagers more depressed. But it can also change a kids' life trajectory.

I grew up watching @YesTheory, @hubermanlab, and @davidgoggins obsessively.

This had an incredible impact on my ambition and life trajectory. You can probably predict a teenagers' success in getting what they want out of life by their watch history over their GPA.

[Ben Somers @ben_m_somers]

Why do kids want what they want?

[Kris Selberg @SelbergKris]

Anthropic anthropomorphized an LLM as a "person" that is taught to read and write through books to win a lawsuit that allows AI to train on books without the authors' permission.

Very fitting to their company name!