johnkellden

Thinking Machines Lab exists to empower humanity through advancing collaborative general intelligence. We're building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world - through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate. We're excited that in the next couple months we’ll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models. Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems. To accelerate our progress, we’re happy to confirm that we’ve raised $2B led by a16z with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO, AMD, Jane Street and more who share our mission. We’re always looking for extraordinary talent that learns by doing, turning research into useful things. We believe AI should serve as an extension of individual agency and, in the spirit of freedom, be distributed as widely and equitably as possible.  We hope this vision resonates with those who share our commitment to advancing the field. If so, join us. thinkingmachines.paperform.co

i am inspired by the men and women pursuing greatness , remaining kind , staying focused , being true to themselves

Cells aren’t robots executing their DNA as code. They are better understood inferential learning systems, with expression levels of DNA in the gene regulatory network roughly corresponding to the weights and activations of a transformer or neural net.

@eshear More or less so, yes.

Old and tired: yes and no New and awesome: more and less

It's a beautiful thing to have faith that all parts of yourself, all of your relationships, experiences, and interests, no matter how seemingly disparate, disjointed, and dysfunctional, are forming an organic and essential divine unity that will be revealed in due time

When did elite institutions shift from being largely embedded local & national entities into international & global ones? Think of elite law, capital, medicine, business, education? When local ties that bind (“religio”) were attenuated, it was only a matter of time until the implicit A/B testing would illuminate the real (unnamed) value. You can bury it for a time, but once you move into the spreadsheet imaginary, you forfeit the value of the personal, the local, the familial.

@komorama Dowsing rod is inspired.

I just published my weekly reflections: #heading=h.t6tfnxj1f2h0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">docs.google.com/document/d/1Gr… LLMs as compression technology. LLMs as chainsaws. LLM as thought partner, not oracle. LLMs as dowsing rod. Infinite software. Retconning. MAYA. Auto-nerd-sniping.

@shayvswift Grieving in service to knowledge annealing, annealing in light of seed.

so much of adulthood is just grieving in secret. grieving ex lovers, grieving dead friendships, grieving your parents sinking into old age, grieving the person you thought you'd grow into. grieving cities you never got to live in. grieving parts of you that couldn't survive.

What is the greatest, rarest PDF that you have saved down?

The physicist John Wheeler, inventor of the phrase, "it from bit" at a Princeton blackboard discussing what in nature can be quantized but as if he were looking at Walton Ford's, "Falling Bough," a fantastic depiction of collective behavior.

This is the most important paper in a long time . It shows with strong evidence we are reaching the limits of quantization. The paper says this: the more tokens you train on, the more precision you need. This has broad implications for the entire field and the future of GPUs🧵

All of this means that the paradigm will soon shift from scaling to "what can we do with what we have". I think the paradigm of "how do we help people be more productive with AI" is the best mindset forward. This mindset is about processes and people rather than technology.

@cognazor @DoomerOptimism Your insights are relevant across multiple realms. Safe travels…

Nothing in the contingent world lasts forever. I have decided to move on from @DoomerOptimism. While I stand by what we have created over the past few years, it is no longer well suited for me. I remain open to potential collaboration with people in DO

you’re not building a product you’re engineering culture

In 2024, I had the opportunity to attend (and speak at) a handful of industry machine learning conferences. Whenever there was a break, I'd jot down some insights and lessons in apple notes. Here are 39 lessons I took away from conferences this year. eugeneyan.com/writing/conf-l…

💡 How to Build an Experimentation Machine and Where Most Go Wrong with @rameshjohari (Stanford, Airbnb, Uber, Bumble, and more) 🎙️ In this episode of High Signal, I talk to Ramesh Johari—Stanford professor and advisor to platforms like Airbnb, Uber, and Bumble—about building systems for experimentation that drive innovation and avoiding the traps most organizations fall into. We explore practical takeaways like: - ⚡ How to combat risk aversion by running faster, smaller tests that reduce stakes while increasing learning. - 🔄 Why a successful experimentation strategy requires learning across tests instead of treating experiments as one-offs. - 🌟 How to create a self-learning organization, where experimentation fuels continuous improvement and innovation. 🎬 Watch the clip where Ramesh shares how organizations can build a "learning flywheel" to stay adaptive in dynamic environments. 💻 Check out the full episode via the link in the comments!

Peter Thiel making the case for open source, decentralized AI "The real AI risk is a totalitarian world government... Global compute governance would be very heavy-handed, creating a dystopian one-world nanny-state government." youtu.be/42iVcEg5SOM?si…

@cognazor Neither of the two dominant parties are serving the citizens. What you and others are doing, locally and regionally, is part of something beyond, a new narrative.

Alas, this is probably the case. In which case they don't deserve to win ever again and the political energy must go elsewhere x.com/TheLastFarm/st…

For democrats, this is a reckoning. The woke technocrat / neolib / neocon coalition is thoroughly discredited. Time for them to focus on local organizing around tangible issues in people's lives, to become the anti-corporate, anti-war, pro working class party again

@jgreenhall Not guild. Something else. De Landa.

I’ll add to this. The US does not have drone supremacy. We are currently in a highly unstable condition where we think we are the most powerful nation in the world, but our conventional forces are (or very soon will be) obsolete. Note - an incredible opportunity for a transnational “guild” to achieve drone supremacy in a way that delivers stable peace.

Important finding: atmospheric rivers shifted 6-10 degrees (400-700 miles) toward the 2 poles over the past 4 decades, mostly due to a poorly-understood shift toward a more La Nina-like climate. More drought for California, and flooding for BC and Alaska. theconversation.com/atmospheric-ri…