Tony T

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"Prognosticative pastry." "A hound circling a tree, nose to bark." These aren’t parodies - they’re actual quotes from SOTA models in response to creative writing prompts, and they’re winning leaderboards that are rewarding slop. We’re introducing *Hemingway-bench*, a new AI writing leaderboard, to fix this: surgehq.ai/leaderboard surgehq.ai/blog/hemingway… We designed Hemingway-bench to push frontier model writing toward genuine nuance and impact. Instead of autograders and two-second vibe checks - both of which love fancy literary devices and dense formatting, over actual quality - we used expert human writers across a variety of fields to judge real-world writing tasks. Why? I love writing. I love reading. Great science fiction is one of the things that's always inspired me. Even in terms of "enterprise value", so much of what we do in our day-to-day involves writing - we want crisp emails and insightful reports, not dry, verbose summaries. Yeah, coding is important - but there's a reason I use CC-assisted apps, but still haven't read a full-fledged AI novel. What did we find? Current leaderboards are easily hacked, and often negatively correlated with actual quality. If a model (over)uses all the stuff you learn about in school (metaphors in every sentence! transition words! complex, flowery phrases!), it ranks high on EQ-bench and LMArena. But that’s not good writing that people actually want. The winners of Hemingway-bench didn't sound like they were trying to win a poetry slam. Gemini 3 Flash, Pro, and Opus 4.5 took the top 3 spots because they had natural voices that didn't sound pretentious. They were poetic and immersive, but in the right ways. When they used wit, they didn't sound cringey and try-hard - they sounded like your naturally funny friend. I'm waiting for the day AI wins a Pulitzer, and hopefully Hemingway-bench helps guide it on its way. Check out the leaderboard and examples here: surgehq.ai/leaderboard And our blog post describing it: surgehq.ai/blog/hemingway…

I can’t believe this is real. Gauntlet AI is taking over former adtech giant Marin Software out of bankruptcy. We’re going to try to turn the company around in SIX WEEKS using AI. With a reality TV crew filming the whole thing. To follow along: Marin.GauntletAI.com

The 3rd edition of my book Deep Learning with Python is being printed right now, and will be in bookstores within 2 weeks. You can order it now from Amazon or from Manning. This time, we're also releasing the whole thing as a 100% free website. I don't care if it reduces book sales, I think it's the best deep learning intro around, and more people should be able to read it.

good morning the only way out, is through we must build the future we want

"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." - Jack London

Shower of thoughts: Instead of keeping your Twitter/𝕏 payout, direct it towards a "PayoutChallenge" of your choosing - anything you want more of in the world! Here is mine for this round, combining my last 3 payouts of $5478.51: It is imperative that humanity not fall while AI ascends. Humanity has to continue to rise, become better alongside. Create something that is specifically designed to uplift team human. Definition intentionally left a bit vague to keep some entropy around people's interpretation, but imo examples include: - Any piece of software that aids explanation, visualization, memorization, inspiration, understanding, coordination, etc... - It doesn't have to be too lofty, e.g. it can be a specific educational article/video explaining something some other people could benefit from or that you have unique knowledge of. - Prompts/agents for explanation, e.g. along the lines of recently released ChatGPT study mode. - Related works of art This challenge will run for 2 weeks until Aug 17th EOD PST. Submit your contribution as a reply. It has to be something that was uniquely created for this challenge and would not exist otherwise. Criteria includes execution, leverage, novelty, inspiration, aesthetics, amusement. People can upvote submissions by liking, this "people's choice" will also be a factor. I will decide the winner on Aug 17th and send $5478.51 :)

A great reminder from @patrickc that we can, and should, operate with urgency in life patrickcollison.com/fast

DPI seems to be pushing VCs to offload top startups in secondary deals. Smart move? #VentureCapital #incentives

DPI seems to be an important metric these days. DPI = Distributions/Paid-in Capital. In other words, the ratio of money returned to you divided by how much money you put in. If you invested in an early stage company, your DPI may be 0 for a while (or forever).

If you’re a startup employee that wants to learn more about how “the VC side of things” works check out @HustleFundVC . They put out great content and have interesting deals as well. It will help you better understand why some decisions are made at a company level as well.

One of the most useful tactics I’ve found when managing people is to establish a “How to best work with me” document inspired by @chughesjohnson (growth.eladgil.com/book/the-role-…). It helps set clear expectations upfront.

So let me get this straight: investors in a 3rd-layer SPV will likely have to overcome three 20% carry hurdles (and not to mention other possible fees for SPV setup and management fees for EACH SPV) before they get paid? That is, if they get paid if/when Anthropic exceeds $130B in valuation upon liquidity event? This is straight up horrific. Not investment advice, but don’t do this!

@ericbahn @ericbahn ask for how they derived the price per share 😅. Some of the most confusing/obfuscated math I've seen in my life (sometimes on spreadsheets).

Working with developers in Argentina you come to realize that there's a whole different form of Spanish conjugation that's not taught in American Schools (the "vos" form)🇦🇷 x.com/i/grok/share/n…

@YunTaTsai1 Beautiful take @YunTaTsai1 . Reminds me of ~ "Given complete information about the universe you can accurately predict the future. But since we don't, we have built tools such as probability theory to deal with our uncertainties."

Physics is a form of compression. It could recreate a phenomenon with absolute minimum bits at highest accuracy. ML is an also a form of compression, albeit a lossy one. But it is an attempt of space and computing time compression to recreate something that is the outcome of intricate equations. It would be infeasible to render a scene by counting each photons and surface properties, but by going through layers of likelihood predictions we were able to render somewhat convincing results that would take thousand years of compute in a limited memory budget. Eventually, the physics and the world model would become one.

In startup, and in life, reward those who took the risk with you and stayed loyal to you.

a general reminder to not trust any software that you didn't read or audit yourself

C/C++ is still bread and butter of system engineering. Even most models can be trained and exported via Python, most kernel drivers for the robotic parts are still written in C/C++ down to something as basic as i2c busses and DMA controllers. You still need to be able to express your thought process directly to the machine how you want to actuate, with all the fault handling and hardening.

Onboarding a new Engineer to your startup? Quickest way to ramp them up is to have them act as a QA Engineer for the first 2-3 weeks.