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James Pelly
109 posts
James Pelly
@JamesPelly
Once tried to ride horses from Beijing to London. Turns out it's a long way.
San Francisco, CA Katılım Kasım 2009
652 Takip Edilen118 Takipçiler
It's philosophically educational - hermenutic circles and integrating that into problem solving - I like just "experienced" a philosophical concept imo - this gives me fully new aspirations for how deep to go in the artistic process. Like it's an essay on diplomacy and the human psyche too. Like u can deep read this film harder than almost anything I've ever seen - if there are other movies like this please let me know I will watch them this is making me think about new ways to learn and teach
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@brandondamos @reflection_ai excited to have you on the team Brandon!
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An update: I have left Meta Superintelligence Labs and joined @reflection_ai in NYC!! Today is my first day.
I started in the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab at Meta, then Facebook, over six (!) years ago as my first job out of the PhD. They were some formative years. The group is full of exceptionally talented people that have profoundly shaped my perspective on life and research. I am grateful for everything we have shared and proud of everything we created together.
I have decided it's time to try to build a startup and new frontier models with Reflection. Superintelligence will be one of the most significant advancements of our lifetimes, resulting in a computational reflection of ourselves. We believe it should be safe, open, and accessible to all. I am excited to be jumping into the post-training and reinforcement learning pipelines to advance capabilities and alignment.
And we are hiring! Please get in touch.
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Such a great founding team - and they go out of their way to help others. This is just the beginning
alphaXiv@askalphaxiv
We just raised a $7M Seed round co-led by @MenloVentures and @haystackvc with participation from @Shakti_VC, @conviction and @upfrontvc 🚀 We're honored to have the support of incredible angels including @ericschmidt, @SebastianThrun, @sarahookr Join us: alphaxiv.org/careers
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@zebriez @joincolossus loved reading this Brie. "The default setting is fast"
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I spent the last 60 days working at Cursor. It's been one of the most thrilling phases of my professional life.
There's a lot of mystique around the company. Over the last two months, some things matched my expectations; many did not.
I wrote an essay for @joincolossus about things that have surprised me about the company and its culture so far.
joincolossus.com/article/inside…
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🎉 Next week, I am excited to join @reflection_ai as a Member of Technical Staff to help build the open intelligence ecosystem of the Western world.
It's the most exciting opportunity to help software builders in our time, and will shape many years of AI Engineering in the medium-term before AGI. Not just about Western vs Eastern open models, but more about how AI-driven software will look like in 2030.
I spent some time articulating my thoughts about where we're going as a community and why... which became a whole blog post. Take a look, hope it interests you!
(And if it really does, we are hiring in NYC, SF, and London 😉)
alexpolozov.com/blog/reflectio…
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@dwarkesh_sp @karpathy What if birth isn’t starting from zero (or DNA/ATCG initialization only) but the continuation of months of sandbox learning in the womb
x.com/JamesPelly/sta…
James Pelly@JamesPelly
@karpathy @karpathy frames birth as the beginning of learning. In reality fetus muscle contractions start from 6 weeks. Zebra gestation is 12-13 months. That’s almost a year of embodied learning in the womb and a ~15,000x increase on the few-dozen wobbly-legged minutes we see.
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The @karpathy interview
0:00:00 – AGI is still a decade away
0:30:33 – LLM cognitive deficits
0:40:53 – RL is terrible
0:50:26 – How do humans learn?
1:07:13 – AGI will blend into 2% GDP growth
1:18:24 – ASI
1:33:38 – Evolution of intelligence & culture
1:43:43 - Why self driving took so long
1:57:08 - Future of education
Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Enjoy!
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@karpathy argues that “If the baby zebra spasmed its muscles around at random as a reinforcement learning policy would have you do at initialization, it wouldn't get very far at all.”
In the womb it doesn’t have to. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be learning.
What if birth isn’t starting from zero (or DNA/ATCG initialization only) but the continuation of months of sandbox learning?
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Finally had a chance to listen through this pod with Sutton, which was interesting and amusing.
As background, Sutton's "The Bitter Lesson" has become a bit of biblical text in frontier LLM circles. Researchers routinely talk about and ask whether this or that approach or idea is sufficiently "bitter lesson pilled" (meaning arranged so that it benefits from added computation for free) as a proxy for whether it's going to work or worth even pursuing. The underlying assumption being that LLMs are of course highly "bitter lesson pilled" indeed, just look at LLM scaling laws where if you put compute on the x-axis, number go up and to the right. So it's amusing to see that Sutton, the author of the post, is not so sure that LLMs are "bitter lesson pilled" at all. They are trained on giant datasets of fundamentally human data, which is both 1) human generated and 2) finite. What do you do when you run out? How do you prevent a human bias? So there you have it, bitter lesson pilled LLM researchers taken down by the author of the bitter lesson - rough!
In some sense, Dwarkesh (who represents the LLM researchers viewpoint in the pod) and Sutton are slightly speaking past each other because Sutton has a very different architecture in mind and LLMs break a lot of its principles. He calls himself a "classicist" and evokes the original concept of Alan Turing of building a "child machine" - a system capable of learning through experience by dynamically interacting with the world. There's no giant pretraining stage of imitating internet webpages. There's also no supervised finetuning, which he points out is absent in the animal kingdom (it's a subtle point but Sutton is right in the strong sense: animals may of course observe demonstrations, but their actions are not directly forced/"teleoperated" by other animals). Another important note he makes is that even if you just treat pretraining as an initialization of a prior before you finetune with reinforcement learning, Sutton sees the approach as tainted with human bias and fundamentally off course, a bit like when AlphaZero (which has never seen human games of Go) beats AlphaGo (which initializes from them). In Sutton's world view, all there is is an interaction with a world via reinforcement learning, where the reward functions are partially environment specific, but also intrinsically motivated, e.g. "fun", "curiosity", and related to the quality of the prediction in your world model. And the agent is always learning at test time by default, it's not trained once and then deployed thereafter. Overall, Sutton is a lot more interested in what we have common with the animal kingdom instead of what differentiates us. "If we understood a squirrel, we'd be almost done".
As for my take...
First, I should say that I think Sutton was a great guest for the pod and I like that the AI field maintains entropy of thought and that not everyone is exploiting the next local iteration LLMs. AI has gone through too many discrete transitions of the dominant approach to lose that. And I also think that his criticism of LLMs as not bitter lesson pilled is not inadequate. Frontier LLMs are now highly complex artifacts with a lot of humanness involved at all the stages - the foundation (the pretraining data) is all human text, the finetuning data is human and curated, the reinforcement learning environment mixture is tuned by human engineers. We do not in fact have an actual, single, clean, actually bitter lesson pilled, "turn the crank" algorithm that you could unleash upon the world and see it learn automatically from experience alone.
Does such an algorithm even exist? Finding it would of course be a huge AI breakthrough. Two "example proofs" are commonly offered to argue that such a thing is possible. The first example is the success of AlphaZero learning to play Go completely from scratch with no human supervision whatsoever. But the game of Go is clearly such a simple, closed, environment that it's difficult to see the analogous formulation in the messiness of reality. I love Go, but algorithmically and categorically, it is essentially a harder version of tic tac toe. The second example is that of animals, like squirrels. And here, personally, I am also quite hesitant whether it's appropriate because animals arise by a very different computational process and via different constraints than what we have practically available to us in the industry. Animal brains are nowhere near the blank slate they appear to be at birth. First, a lot of what is commonly attributed to "learning" is imo a lot more "maturation". And second, even that which clearly is "learning" and not maturation is a lot more "finetuning" on top of something clearly powerful and preexisting. Example. A baby zebra is born and within a few dozen minutes it can run around the savannah and follow its mother. This is a highly complex sensory-motor task and there is no way in my mind that this is achieved from scratch, tabula rasa. The brains of animals and the billions of parameters within have a powerful initialization encoded in the ATCGs of their DNA, trained via the "outer loop" optimization in the course of evolution. If the baby zebra spasmed its muscles around at random as a reinforcement learning policy would have you do at initialization, it wouldn't get very far at all. Similarly, our AIs now also have neural networks with billions of parameters. These parameters need their own rich, high information density supervision signal. We are not going to re-run evolution. But we do have mountains of internet documents. Yes it is basically supervised learning that is ~absent in the animal kingdom. But it is a way to practically gather enough soft constraints over billions of parameters, to try to get to a point where you're not starting from scratch. TLDR: Pretraining is our crappy evolution. It is one candidate solution to the cold start problem, to be followed later by finetuning on tasks that look more correct, e.g. within the reinforcement learning framework, as state of the art frontier LLM labs now do pervasively.
I still think it is worth to be inspired by animals. I think there are multiple powerful ideas that LLM agents are algorithmically missing that can still be adapted from animal intelligence. And I still think the bitter lesson is correct, but I see it more as something platonic to pursue, not necessarily to reach, in our real world and practically speaking. And I say both of these with double digit percent uncertainty and cheer the work of those who disagree, especially those a lot more ambitious bitter lesson wise.
So that brings us to where we are. Stated plainly, today's frontier LLM research is not about building animals. It is about summoning ghosts. You can think of ghosts as a fundamentally different kind of point in the space of possible intelligences. They are muddled by humanity. Thoroughly engineered by it. They are these imperfect replicas, a kind of statistical distillation of humanity's documents with some sprinkle on top. They are not platonically bitter lesson pilled, but they are perhaps "practically" bitter lesson pilled, at least compared to a lot of what came before. It seems possibly to me that over time, we can further finetune our ghosts more and more in the direction of animals; That it's not so much a fundamental incompatibility but a matter of initialization in the intelligence space. But it's also quite possible that they diverge even further and end up permanently different, un-animal-like, but still incredibly helpful and properly world-altering. It's possible that ghosts:animals :: planes:birds.
Anyway, in summary, overall and actionably, I think this pod is solid "real talk" from Sutton to the frontier LLM researchers, who might be gear shifted a little too much in the exploit mode. Probably we are still not sufficiently bitter lesson pilled and there is a very good chance of more powerful ideas and paradigms, other than exhaustive benchbuilding and benchmaxxing. And animals might be a good source of inspiration. Intrinsic motivation, fun, curiosity, empowerment, multi-agent self-play, culture. Use your imagination.
Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp
.@RichardSSutton, father of reinforcement learning, doesn’t think LLMs are bitter-lesson-pilled. My steel man of Richard’s position: we need some new architecture to enable continual (on-the-job) learning. And if we have continual learning, we don't need a special training phase - the agent just learns on-the-fly - like all humans, and indeed, like all animals. This new paradigm will render our current approach with LLMs obsolete. I did my best to represent the view that LLMs will function as the foundation on which this experiential learning can happen. Some sparks flew. 0:00:00 – Are LLMs a dead-end? 0:13:51 – Do humans do imitation learning? 0:23:57 – The Era of Experience 0:34:25 – Current architectures generalize poorly out of distribution 0:42:17 – Surprises in the AI field 0:47:28 – Will The Bitter Lesson still apply after AGI? 0:54:35 – Succession to AI
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what’s the best airport in the country? (after san francisco of course)
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we <3 open intelligence accessible to all. huge congrats to @MishaLaskin and the amazing team you've assembled at @reflection_ai (👀 @JamesPelly)
Reflection@reflection_ai
Today we're sharing the next phase of Reflection. We're building frontier open intelligence accessible to all. We've assembled an extraordinary AI team, built a frontier LLM training stack, and raised $2 billion. Why Open Intelligence Matters Technological and scientific progress is driven by values of openness and collaboration. The internet, Linux, and the protocols and standards that underpin modern computing are all open. This isn't a coincidence. Open software is what gets forked, customized, and embedded into systems worldwide. It's what universities teach, what startups build on, what enterprises deploy. Open science enables others to learn from the results, be inspired by them, interrogate them, and build upon them in order to push the frontier of human knowledge and scientific advancement. AI got to where it is today through scaling ideas (e.g. self-attention, next token prediction, reinforcement learning) that were shared and published openly. Now AI is becoming the technology layer that everything else runs on top of. The systems that accelerate scientific research, enhance education, optimize energy usage, supercharge medical diagnoses, and run supply chains will all be built on AI infrastructure. But the frontier is currently concentrated in closed labs. If this continues, a handful of entities will control the capital, compute, and talent required to build AI, creating a runaway dynamic that locks everyone else out. There's a narrow window to change this trajectory. We need to build open models so capable that they become the obvious choice for users and developers worldwide, ensuring the foundation of intelligence remains open and accessible rather than controlled by a few. What We've Built Over the last year, we've been preparing for this mission. We’ve assembled a team who have pioneered breakthroughs including PaLM, Gemini, AlphaGo, AlphaCode, AlphaProof, and contributed to ChatGPT and Character AI, among many others. We built something once thought possible only inside the world’s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models at frontier scale. We saw the effectiveness of our approach first-hand when we applied it to the critical domain of autonomous coding. With this milestone unlocked, we're now bringing these methods to general agentic reasoning. We've raised significant capital and identified a scalable commercial model that aligns with our open intelligence strategy, ensuring we can continue building and releasing frontier models sustainably. We are now scaling up to build open models that bring together large-scale pretraining and advanced reinforcement learning from the ground up. Safety and Responsibility Open intelligence also changes how we think about safety. It enables the broader community to participate in safety research and discourse, rather than leaving critical decisions to a few closed labs. Transparency allows independent researchers to identify risks, develop mitigations, and hold systems accountable in ways that closed development cannot. But openness also requires confronting the challenges of capable models being widely accessible. We're investing in evaluations to assess capabilities and risks before release, security research to protect against misuse, and responsible deployment standards. We believe the answer to AI safety is not “security through obscurity” but rigorous science conducted in the open, where the global research community can contribute to solutions rather than a handful of companies making decisions behind closed doors. Join Us There is a window of opportunity today to build frontier open intelligence, but it is closing and this may be the last. If this mission resonates, join us.
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@JamesPelly Right back at you! And let's keep those helmets on!
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For the past year, I’ve had the absolute privilege to work with the incredible team at Reflection. Today, we are announcing the next chapter for the company enabling us to take on training open weight frontier models. Please check reflection.ai/careers and dm for openings!
Reflection@reflection_ai
Today we're sharing the next phase of Reflection. We're building frontier open intelligence accessible to all. We've assembled an extraordinary AI team, built a frontier LLM training stack, and raised $2 billion. Why Open Intelligence Matters Technological and scientific progress is driven by values of openness and collaboration. The internet, Linux, and the protocols and standards that underpin modern computing are all open. This isn't a coincidence. Open software is what gets forked, customized, and embedded into systems worldwide. It's what universities teach, what startups build on, what enterprises deploy. Open science enables others to learn from the results, be inspired by them, interrogate them, and build upon them in order to push the frontier of human knowledge and scientific advancement. AI got to where it is today through scaling ideas (e.g. self-attention, next token prediction, reinforcement learning) that were shared and published openly. Now AI is becoming the technology layer that everything else runs on top of. The systems that accelerate scientific research, enhance education, optimize energy usage, supercharge medical diagnoses, and run supply chains will all be built on AI infrastructure. But the frontier is currently concentrated in closed labs. If this continues, a handful of entities will control the capital, compute, and talent required to build AI, creating a runaway dynamic that locks everyone else out. There's a narrow window to change this trajectory. We need to build open models so capable that they become the obvious choice for users and developers worldwide, ensuring the foundation of intelligence remains open and accessible rather than controlled by a few. What We've Built Over the last year, we've been preparing for this mission. We’ve assembled a team who have pioneered breakthroughs including PaLM, Gemini, AlphaGo, AlphaCode, AlphaProof, and contributed to ChatGPT and Character AI, among many others. We built something once thought possible only inside the world’s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models at frontier scale. We saw the effectiveness of our approach first-hand when we applied it to the critical domain of autonomous coding. With this milestone unlocked, we're now bringing these methods to general agentic reasoning. We've raised significant capital and identified a scalable commercial model that aligns with our open intelligence strategy, ensuring we can continue building and releasing frontier models sustainably. We are now scaling up to build open models that bring together large-scale pretraining and advanced reinforcement learning from the ground up. Safety and Responsibility Open intelligence also changes how we think about safety. It enables the broader community to participate in safety research and discourse, rather than leaving critical decisions to a few closed labs. Transparency allows independent researchers to identify risks, develop mitigations, and hold systems accountable in ways that closed development cannot. But openness also requires confronting the challenges of capable models being widely accessible. We're investing in evaluations to assess capabilities and risks before release, security research to protect against misuse, and responsible deployment standards. We believe the answer to AI safety is not “security through obscurity” but rigorous science conducted in the open, where the global research community can contribute to solutions rather than a handful of companies making decisions behind closed doors. Join Us There is a window of opportunity today to build frontier open intelligence, but it is closing and this may be the last. If this mission resonates, join us.
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@ponderousbs you're awesome to work with Ethan. Strong opinions, sharp insights, fun energy to be around
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@jakesaper @reflection_ai ty Jake! having a blast alongside an awesome team
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@reflection_ai Congrats on the raise! And, more importantly, on the @JamesPelly get!
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Today we're sharing the next phase of Reflection.
We're building frontier open intelligence accessible to all.
We've assembled an extraordinary AI team, built a frontier LLM training stack, and raised $2 billion.
Why Open Intelligence Matters
Technological and scientific progress is driven by values of openness and collaboration.
The internet, Linux, and the protocols and standards that underpin modern computing are all open. This isn't a coincidence. Open software is what gets forked, customized, and embedded into systems worldwide. It's what universities teach, what startups build on, what enterprises deploy.
Open science enables others to learn from the results, be inspired by them, interrogate them, and build upon them in order to push the frontier of human knowledge and scientific advancement. AI got to where it is today through scaling ideas (e.g. self-attention, next token prediction, reinforcement learning) that were shared and published openly.
Now AI is becoming the technology layer that everything else runs on top of. The systems that accelerate scientific research, enhance education, optimize energy usage, supercharge medical diagnoses, and run supply chains will all be built on AI infrastructure.
But the frontier is currently concentrated in closed labs. If this continues, a handful of entities will control the capital, compute, and talent required to build AI, creating a runaway dynamic that locks everyone else out. There's a narrow window to change this trajectory. We need to build open models so capable that they become the obvious choice for users and developers worldwide, ensuring the foundation of intelligence remains open and accessible rather than controlled by a few.
What We've Built
Over the last year, we've been preparing for this mission.
We’ve assembled a team who have pioneered breakthroughs including PaLM, Gemini, AlphaGo, AlphaCode, AlphaProof, and contributed to ChatGPT and Character AI, among many others.
We built something once thought possible only inside the world’s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models at frontier scale. We saw the effectiveness of our approach first-hand when we applied it to the critical domain of autonomous coding. With this milestone unlocked, we're now bringing these methods to general agentic reasoning.
We've raised significant capital and identified a scalable commercial model that aligns with our open intelligence strategy, ensuring we can continue building and releasing frontier models sustainably. We are now scaling up to build open models that bring together large-scale pretraining and advanced reinforcement learning from the ground up.
Safety and Responsibility
Open intelligence also changes how we think about safety. It enables the broader community to participate in safety research and discourse, rather than leaving critical decisions to a few closed labs. Transparency allows independent researchers to identify risks, develop mitigations, and hold systems accountable in ways that closed development cannot.
But openness also requires confronting the challenges of capable models being widely accessible. We're investing in evaluations to assess capabilities and risks before release, security research to protect against misuse, and responsible deployment standards. We believe the answer to AI safety is not “security through obscurity” but rigorous science conducted in the open, where the global research community can contribute to solutions rather than a handful of companies making decisions behind closed doors.
Join Us
There is a window of opportunity today to build frontier open intelligence, but it is closing and this may be the last. If this mission resonates, join us.
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@ponderousbs That goes both ways Ethan! Excited for many more fast paced chats around the office
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@JamesPelly James it's really been a pleasure speaking with you and hearing your insights. Love the experience and energy you bring to the team.
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@reflection_ai Reflection has been such a great team to be part of - this is going to be fun
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the speed of company-building in the AI era and of all the things I’m reading and chewing on, this one hit me the hardest
youtu.be/Cm0MGnuRnH0?si…
YouTube
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