Paul Modderman

🚨BREAKING It looks like ICE just shot and killed someone else in Minneapolis.

"LLMs writing about the experience of being an LLM" is a moving and fresh genre of writing. This is my favorite example so far.

We are opening up a new role at Quora: a single engineer who will use AI to automate manual work across the company and increase employee productivity. I will work closely with this person.

strong agree but also believe we'll see a surge of more people using code for creative expression–without explicitly needing to *see* that code, or learn languages, frameworks, design patterns programming languages aren't The Thing, they're the thing that gets you to The Thing

we should be teaching vim motions in elementary school

I claimed the inference from X="LLMs are next token predictors" to Y="LLMs lack understanding, etc." is fallacious. Marcus claims that I'm saying not-X and not-Y. So I guess I'll point out that the inference "Y doesn't follow from X" to "not-X and not-Y" is also fallacious.

o1 is mind-blowing when you know how to use it. it's really not a chat model -- you have to think of it more like a "report generator" (link to article below)

I spoke to / heard from a few senior AI labs people this weekend and I now feel even more confident in these predictions from a month ago. Hearing these same ideas come out of their mouths was quite strange in how real it became. There is a sequence of future events that if you think about from first principles seems inevitable. We really do now have a test-time compute paradigm that is a straight shot to AGI (no matter how you define AGI). The bottleneck is gathering good data for RL and then all the little product details like improving speed, integrations into our workflows, etc. Just assume that by end of 2025, at minimum, we'll have multimodal agentic phd AIs doing complex tasks for you on your computer at o1-mini speeds. I highly recommend people update their worldviews and company plans to assume this. This is not hype. The world will still feel similar bc it will take long for Bank of America and the government of France and everyone to integrate AGI and there will be a compute shortage. But the AGI will exist nonetheless. Robotics will also take a bit longer and timelines are a bit less clear there but I also talked to people who are doing robotics, and seems we're only talking a couple years later for fully functional humanoid robots. I believe there is a major gap in our information ecosystem about these topics. There are a couple thousand researchers and engineers thrusting us into the next era of humanity at breakneck speed, but they're not allowed to talk about it bc of NDAs. This is the most important story of the century -- far more important than covid -- yet there is far less media and discussion about it, beside hype tweets from AI influencers and coy tweets from AI researchers. That's because there are very few people who: a) understand how these systems work b) are able to suppress the "this sounds too crazy" part of their brain c) are able to suppress the "go full hype" part of their brain d) are in SF so hear things on the ground beyond twitter/the news e) actually care about helping the world and are not just trying to sell you something f) recognize the gravity of the situation and treat it as such g) are reasonably competent at converting thoughts into words I believe I am one of these people. As a person who's been running an AI company that trains real models, but one that is not an AI lab (so I can say whatever I want), and someone who enjoys writing about things that are helpful, I believe I can bring an important perspective to this quiet but immensely important conversation. I feel a duty to write more on X, and plan to do so. You have my word that I will always strive to be as correct as possible and will not write things with hype, though I won't be scared of being provocative. I also highly encourage anyone else out there who passes the criteria above to write more, create more. The world is desperately in need of media about the world that is coming. We need realistic AI short stories, new films beyond Terminator, mocked video demos of what future systems will look like. We all need visceral examples to shake us out of apathy so that we don't just predict the AGI but feel it. That way we can prepare accordingly.