
algobaker
4.4K posts

algobaker
@algobaker
ML PhD student Previous: research at LLM hyperscaler, AI in pharma.







The only 2 places where I felt ambition like this are the US and China Nomad hubs like Bali and Thailand are nice but often people there get stuck coasting at $5K MRR because it's just cheaper to live there, so that puts kind of a natural limit on ambition, very quickly you already make "enough" SF/NYC are so ridiculously expensive to live, so you HAVE to make a lot of money, and the high cost of living is a natural filter that keeps only broke but super ambitious or already successful people (and of course nepo babies esp NYC) China is not so much expensive to live, but there's some natural cultural ambition to become #1 in everything that's very infectious







This tube is a library of bacteria with every single-base-pair genome mutation, all DNA-barcoded.🧪Growth + barcode sequencing = data on millions of mutations. 📄 Report: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… Retweet if you want more data, and read on if you want to use the library! 🧵


To all the post-scarcity operators “on sabbatical” to raise kids: that’s a terrible example to set. Go build something even more ambitious. Retiring early is a loser attitude.


They just don’t make em anymore. We used to have oligo pool synthesizers you could just buy (~2008). In the 90s and early 2000s you could have a personal oligo synthesizer. Those days are gone. Nowadays everyone just buys oligos from one of the massive service providers. It’s more efficient and easier, comes next day! Economies of scale! No real used market anymore, since demand dropped so much. I can’t even own an oligo pool synthesizer even if I tried. And I think we lost something there. We had accessible technology, and then we lost it. Hell, the price of DNA has gone up over the past ~10 years! Technology doesn’t just improve. Some technology is robust; it can always be revived. But much of biotech’s machines have such complicated supply lines that if they’re gone, they’re just…. Gone. Poof. Gone are the days of the affordable Opentrons! Gone are the days of oligo pool synthesizers! Gone are the days rapidly improving gene synthesis price! It’s a sense of loss I can’t ignore. Fuck it man, they just don’t make em anymore.


Takeda Pharma is hiring scientists at both the straight-out-of-PhD and senior levels in the AIML group, particularly those with experience training, modifying, and applying foundation models. Please reach out if youre interested and want to make the jump to industry, link below👇


Such a great evening to start a brand new research for NeurIPS in 3.5 days.🧘♂️ Day 1: planning. Night 1: running experiments and sending the abstract. Day 2: reading results fighting with Claude, and sending again. Night 2: sleep (optional). Day 3: opening Codex, and finally, write the pape in parallel. Night 3: resolving the “beef” with Claude (temporary peace) and going to sleep. Day 4: final reading, last-minute fixes, submission then some relaxation, maybe a beach walk. I’ll keep you posted on the results. This will be my only single-author paper, so I can’t hide behind other submissions if it gets rejected 😅



Sam Altman: "We're going to see 10 person billion-dollar companies pretty soon. In my little group chat with CEO-friends, there's this One-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now it'll happen."

Few realize how big of a deal this is and what it will mean for improving medicine...













