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the singularity is nearer

the singularity is...
Death of the Visceral Pulled up at a stop light Imagine flying an x-wing down a corridor, having to turn the plane...
a week ago
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a week ago
Pulled up at a stop light Imagine flying an x-wing down a corridor, having to turn the plane sideways to fit, a missile on your tail and closing, hitting the turbo, feeling the g force, coming up on the end of the corridor, pulling back hard on the stick the second the corridor...
the singularity is...
The Elon Swing Voter I’m getting on a plane back to America tonight, been away for over 3 months. It sort of fills me...
a month ago
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a month ago
I’m getting on a plane back to America tonight, been away for over 3 months. It sort of fills me with dread and anxiety. I remember going to the Apple store before I was leaving, the uhhhhhhh from the sales people was awful. 0 pride. Nobody cares. So different from the sales...
the singularity is...
The Soul ugh the deep state didn’t come for me I just realized that what gets engagement is so boring. you...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
ugh the deep state didn’t come for me I just realized that what gets engagement is so boring. you wish there was a deep state that came for me. then at least there would be some adults in the room. I used to fantasize about being or kissing Skrillex the whole album is bangers...
the singularity is...
nuke/acc I wrote a tweet about this but deleted it, since it’s a much more nuanced topic than can be...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
I wrote a tweet about this but deleted it, since it’s a much more nuanced topic than can be discussed there. Nuclear weapons are the Chekhov’s gun on the world stage. When, if ever, are they going to be fired? When should they be? I suspect this is not a question a lot of people...
the singularity is...
A Place for Me Have all the jobs been fake for years? Read this, a NASA critique from 1992. Basically society is...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Have all the jobs been fake for years? Read this, a NASA critique from 1992. Basically society is run by useless people making work for other useless people so that together they can all alleviate their deep concern about not having a place in society. Elon has a bigger tent of...
the singularity is...
A One Way Bridge Okay I went to Devcon. And while there I had a great idea that the crypto space really needs. It...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Okay I went to Devcon. And while there I had a great idea that the crypto space really needs. It seems like while AI infrastructure has improved by leaps and bounds in the last 5 years, crypto infra has actually gotten worse. I’m proposing some great new infrastructure that the...
the singularity is...
The Collective Marshmallow Test Society is even harder than passing the marshmallow test. Instead of a single person, imagine 100...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Society is even harder than passing the marshmallow test. Instead of a single person, imagine 100 people in a room. One marshmallow is placed on a table. If everyone can leave it alone for 15 minutes, everyone gets 2 marshmallows. But if just one person eats it, everyone gets...
the singularity is...
…and now we see what is possible Every 70 years America goes through a revolutionary transition. Washington, Lincoln, FDR, now? The...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Every 70 years America goes through a revolutionary transition. Washington, Lincoln, FDR, now? The Republicans now control the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. Is that everything? Does government power lie there, like we are told, or is it all secretly...
the singularity is...
Influence Agents Check 1, 2 is the mic on? Most AI doom scenarios are nonsense. The idea of a rogue computer behaving...
3 months ago
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3 months ago
Check 1, 2 is the mic on? Most AI doom scenarios are nonsense. The idea of a rogue computer behaving in a way no humans want never made sense to me, only to Hollywood who doesn’t know all that much about computers. Paul Christiano has one of my favorite takes, that the creation...
the singularity is...
High Trust Society I just want you to see, I just want you to see Regardless of who wins on Tuesday, does anyone think...
3 months ago
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3 months ago
I just want you to see, I just want you to see Regardless of who wins on Tuesday, does anyone think this gets fixed? Is Kamala going to restore trust in government? Is Trump going to restore trust in government? Despite what Western media might have you believe about how the...
the singularity is...
America’s Future It seems this is a place where people are not capable of thinking rationally. Remember: If America...
3 months ago
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3 months ago
It seems this is a place where people are not capable of thinking rationally. Remember: If America is not in decline, I want to believe America is not in decline. If America is in decline, I want to believe America is in decline. So let’s ask, what does the future look like for...
the singularity is...
Dangerous Misinformation When I Google myself, I get this infobox: As you can see below, George Hotz’s height is 5’10”, not...
5 months ago
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5 months ago
When I Google myself, I get this infobox: As you can see below, George Hotz’s height is 5’10”, not 5’4” Google, please take this misinformation seriously before you end up in a very large libel suit. This is not on a site you are linking to, this is first party misinformation...
the singularity is...
Online Dating Is anyone having a good experience with this? What would it take to fix this? I investigate. First...
6 months ago
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6 months ago
Is anyone having a good experience with this? What would it take to fix this? I investigate. First off, you need a business model that isn’t mobile gaming. A monthly fee. Even better, you have a great thing to “sin tax.” Single men. Charge men money per month. Only men. Every...
the singularity is...
Where the Bitter Lesson ends Humanity only has one engineering project, building better engineers than humans. After that, the...
10 months ago
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10 months ago
Humanity only has one engineering project, building better engineers than humans. After that, the thing we built can do the engineering. Clips have been making the rounds on Twitter from my second Lex about the “bishop guy” in a chess engine, or a “cone guy” in a self driving...
the singularity is...
The World’s Computer This was the tagline of Ethereum, and it’s really smart. Sadly, I feel they have lost their way with...
11 months ago
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11 months ago
This was the tagline of Ethereum, and it’s really smart. Sadly, I feel they have lost their way with Proof of Stake, and wish they would go back to focusing on building a reasonable world computer. In 2024, it’s still painfully annoying to stand up a database. This is the only...
the singularity is...
Cruise NOTE: this is not about the similarly named self driving car company, it’s a movie idea Set 5 years...
a year ago
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a year ago
NOTE: this is not about the similarly named self driving car company, it’s a movie idea Set 5 years in the future. Scene 1 (the party): Our opening scene is a New Jersey houseparty, late college. Four kids lamenting the loss of their childhood. And it’s not just their childhood,...
the singularity is...
Tech Heroin Curtis dropped this post today, and I love the analogy. Liberals sell heroin, conservatives sell...
a year ago
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a year ago
Curtis dropped this post today, and I love the analogy. Liberals sell heroin, conservatives sell cocaine. Techno-Optimism is cocaine. Atlas Shrugged is cocaine. Futurism is cocaine. I am a progressive. A liberal. I believe in progress. I am not a conservative. Conservatives lose....
the singularity is...
Imitation Learning 7 years ago I started comma.ai with a simple idea. Gather tons of human driving data, state action...
a year ago
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a year ago
7 years ago I started comma.ai with a simple idea. Gather tons of human driving data, state action pairs: (S_t, A_t) Train a supervised model f(S_t) -> A_t Drive cars with that model. The exact original formulation was a model that predicts steering angle from image, then used a...
the singularity is...
Disrupt the Government I watched this video about South Africa and it clarified the plan. You disrupt the government by...
a year ago
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a year ago
I watched this video about South Africa and it clarified the plan. You disrupt the government by providing 10x better versions of all of the services that it provides. The key thing the government is supposed to be able to do is infrastructure. Most of the wealth that we give to...
the singularity is...
Three Class Society I heard something during the trucker protest in Canada along the lines of: “Most people here don’t...
a year ago
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a year ago
I heard something during the trucker protest in Canada along the lines of: “Most people here don’t want to live in a free society. A free society requires personal responsiblity. People here want to be managed. They want a ruling class.” I heard something similar once from a...
the singularity is...
p(doom) Yesterday I debated Eliezer Yudkowsky This is totally me spitballing here, but I think the crux of...
a year ago
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a year ago
Yesterday I debated Eliezer Yudkowsky This is totally me spitballing here, but I think the crux of the debate is whether AIs will look more like formal systems or like inscrutable weight matrices. I think it’s the latter, and I think it’s the something like the latter forever....
the singularity is...
There is no hard takeoff Back in 2014, Elon Musk referred to AI as summoning the demon. And it wasn’t hard to see that view....
a year ago
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a year ago
Back in 2014, Elon Musk referred to AI as summoning the demon. And it wasn’t hard to see that view. Soon, Go agents would beat top humans learning from self play. By the end of 2017, the same algorithm mastered Chess and Shogi. By 2020, it didn’t even need tons of calls to the...
the singularity is...
A Really Big Computer GPT-4 was trained on 25k A100s in about 90 days. That’s 3e25 FLOPs. If a person has 20 PFLOPS...
a year ago
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a year ago
GPT-4 was trained on 25k A100s in about 90 days. That’s 3e25 FLOPs. If a person has 20 PFLOPS (20e15) of compute, GPT-4 used 47.5 person-years to train. Very human scale. I want to build a computer capable of training GPT-4 in a day. I need 3e25/86400 = 347,000,000 TFLOPS, or...
the singularity is...
choose your own adventure In about 15 years, a desktop computer will be able to do everything a human can. In 25, a mobile...
a year ago
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a year ago
In about 15 years, a desktop computer will be able to do everything a human can. In 25, a mobile phone. Barring a catastrophe, these are facts. What does the future look like for humanity? The only reason we killed all the animals is because the Earth is small. The longest...
the singularity is...
A disgusting playbook So I started another company. I have even less tolerance for fake bullshit than when I started...
a year ago
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a year ago
So I started another company. I have even less tolerance for fake bullshit than when I started comma, and I probably will fail because of this. Cruise Automation is a good example here. If they told the truth, they would be out of business. In 2016, they were bought by GM for...
the singularity is...
A dive into the AMD driver workflow I ended up getting a response from high level people at AMD. It was still very light on any real...
a year ago
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a year ago
I ended up getting a response from high level people at AMD. It was still very light on any real technical information, but it did include some great phrases like “I am able to replicate the issues you are facing” and some mockable phrases like “We are hoping that this will...
the singularity is...
the tiny corp raised $5.1M Here we go again. I started another company. The money is in the bank. What is the tiny corp? The...
a year ago
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a year ago
Here we go again. I started another company. The money is in the bank. What is the tiny corp? The tiny corp is a computer company. We sell computers for more than they cost to make; I’ve been thinking about this one for a while. In the limit, it’s a chip company, but there’s a...
the singularity is...
A Person of Compute We will define one person of compute as 20 PFLOPS (64 A100s, or a single dense 42U A100 rack). We...
a year ago
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a year ago
We will define one person of compute as 20 PFLOPS (64 A100s, or a single dense 42U A100 rack). We are in the era of the 1 rack person, consuming about 30kW to provide those 20 PFLOPS. LLaMA was trained on a cluster of 2048 A100s, with ~312 TFLOPS each. 2048 is currently the...
the singularity is...
Wireheading City I spent the last 2 weeks travelling around India, and I came up with this line: There’s a fine line...
a year ago
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a year ago
I spent the last 2 weeks travelling around India, and I came up with this line: There’s a fine line that defines civilization. Several beggars approached me on the street, and I didn’t give them anything. I suspect they would be surprised to learn that we have worse beggars in...
the singularity is...
Wokeism There’s been much discussion about “wokeism”, and I think a definition might help to clarify things....
a year ago
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a year ago
There’s been much discussion about “wokeism”, and I think a definition might help to clarify things. My followers on Twitter helped me with this. When you Google it, the top two results contain radically different definitions. I googled “wokeism” and got: The first...