Ben Kompa

Current AI is a librarian of existing knowledge. Science requires an explorer of the unknown. You don't win a Nobel Prize by staying in the library.

Remembering Mike Lanning, who passed today, leader of the greatest Boy Scout troop in America: Troop 233. Mike was an incredible person, leader & mentor to many. He maintains the record for most Eagle Scouts from one Scoutmaster: 1000+ with Troop 223. He will be deeply missed.

Today we launch NVIDIA’s Nemotron Super 3, a 120B param open model designed to run agentic AI systems across scientific, enterprise and industrial applications. Partners working with us include Dassault Systèmes, Palantir Technologies, Lila Sciences and Edison Scientific Key highlights: - Nemotron 3 Super uses a hybrid mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with three core innovations, delivering up to 5x higher throughput and 2x higher accuracy than the previous model. - Hybrid architecture: Combines Mamba layers for ~4× higher memory and compute efficiency with transformer layers for advanced reasoning. - MoE efficiency: Only 12B of 120B parameters are active during inference. Activates 4 expert specialists for the cost of one to generate the next token, improving accuracy. - Multi-token prediction: Predicts multiple future tokens simultaneously, enabling ~3x faster inference. Read the tech blog👇

the most underrated hire right now is a great product person. when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that. i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it. & the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start. the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled. before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.

a few friends are trying polyphasic sleep so they can supervise their coding agents 24/7