Doug Barton

Very pleased to share I've aligned my purpose for a world that works better for all and the #wisconsinidea @UWEBCweb @UWMadison #togetherforward Read more if you like! bit.ly/2xnyxmB

@JFPuget lol. I did this on my drive to campus yesterday. It’s bad planning.

Or it is virtue signaling. "Look I am an AI agent manager!"

@rayschroeder Provocative! Also, a deeper design question to ask. The world students are walking into does not buy unaided individual skill. It will “buy” augmented output - the ability to direct AI, catch it when it’s wrong, and do the part it can’t. Just like “soft” human/managerial skills.

Student AI use is fuelling grade inflation – Berkeley study - Nathan M Greenfield, University World News #highered universityworldnews.com/post.php?story…

@JFPuget @OpenAI I’ve steered clear debate about LLM powered creativity. We humans are prone to imitation. The frontier is vast and expanding and the space between the frontier ideas is full of an infinite number of valuable recombinations. Problems don’t care if it’s discovery or translation.

This. It seems that one of the added value of frontier LLMs for math is to connect dots between seemingly unrelated math areas. LLM retrieval ability is what matters here. To me it is clearly an ability where LLMs will surpass humans rapidly. Congrats to @openai for this impressive milestone achievement.

@chamath @signulll Trust is a foundation. And third-party service providers won’t disappear. They can proxy trust. And insulate execs from “big bets” with an insurance policy. One can lay blame on the third-party but claim success as your own. Build prestige w other people’s money and without risk.

@signulll Enterprise is about relationships and big bets. This won’t happen via FDEs alone. People who’ve built trust inside of Enterprises have a lot of value in this next phase.

If you are running a consulting business and you are deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization (I’m looking at you PwC and Accenture) you are letting the fox into the hen house. OpenAI and Anthropic are openly funding and starting competitors to you while also using your usage to drive more success for them. This is not a failure on their part but a failure on your part. Consulting businesses that understand this are adopting a control plane that allows them to arbitrate where tokens go and who generates tokens for them. Controlling the tokens is controlling the spice (Dune). This was a key pillar of 8090’s global partnership with EY and they key feature of our Software Factory. We control token generation and can direct them to any model provider. We are close to another global partnership and will announce it soon. These organizations refuse to accept the disruption standing still or, even worse, by adopting and accelerating the companies who want to disrupt them.

@CowboySpaceCorp I’d recommend a different graphic or you will have a PR problem with most citizens of 🌎 worried about an eclipse. Try a few things at scale. :)

Our constellation of satellites, Stampede, will harness abundant solar power to run on-orbit GPU data centers. With each launch, Stampede grows the power and compute capacity for humanity. Earth's energy grid can't run at the pace of AI. We can.

Today marks the beginning of a new era. Introducing: Cowboy Space Corporation. We are building orbital infrastructure for the AI era: a fully integrated system of rockets and satellites designed to deliver high-performance compute and optical data transmission directly from Low Earth Orbit.

@stevenbjohnson @NotebookLM One of my favorite apps!

Source organization is now live for 100% of @NotebookLM users. Big upgrade if you have notebooks with more than 15 sources. Use it to focus the model on specific topics in chat or for studio artifacts—and it makes Deep Research much more useful as well! In-depth guide below.

@JFPuget speculating - some of this might be the mythology of independence and rugged individualism that is part of our origin story, part distrust of institutions (prob got this from Adam Smith, ironically) and part is that charity is useful as a system of cultural reputation enhancement

There are many cultural differences between the US and Europe. One is about charity. US people give to charity, US companies give to charity. In Europe, solidarity goes through taxes and social security. Completely different systems.

We’re proud to name Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau as the founding dean of #UWMadison’s new College of Computing & Artificial Intelligence. As founding dean, he will guide CAI through its launch, overseeing its growth and academic direction. Congratulations, Remzi! news.wisc.edu/uw-madison-nam…

I love today’s quote from the Waking Up app! dynamic.wakingup.com/quote/QT9CCFB?…

Listen up crewmates!

@sarafoleanu @pmarca It is a bit like creating a tool for spotting fires and the selling water by the drop.

@pmarca Agree the flaws were always there. The difference is that chaining them used to cost nation-state money. Now it costs API credits. Getting good means pointing these models at your own infrastructure before someone else does.

Every security flaw discovered by AI was there before AI, waiting to be discovered either by people or by AI. The world has never been good at securing computer systems; finally with AI we are going to get good.

@FutureJurvetson @erikbryn Love this! Thanks for being a catalyst.

🤖 Just did the kickoff guest lecture at Stanford Business School for "The AI Awakening" — a new class cross-listed with CS where the students will use agentic AI to forge new businesses in 3-person teams. So I vibe coded a rocket launch tracking calendar app that integrates launches big and small (from SpaceX to the local LUNAR rocketry club). It took 4 minutes for me + 30 minutes of compute: rocklaunch-rptzu8y3.manus.space We discussed many topics, including the new "society of thought" paper that dropped 40 years after Minsky's Society of Mind, and five years after Hawkins' memory-prediction framework in A Thousand Brains: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@kevingu @natebjones

ALL THE HIGHLIGHTS 👇

Frozen Four ticket punched! 🦡

AI can help us learn hard-to-teach skills, like empathy. Preregistered study of 968 people found almost no correlation between feeling empathic & communicating empathy. But a single practice session with an AI coach made people measurably better at it arxiv.org/pdf/2603.15245

@chrmanning Or they are … and 8,000 humans is what you do with the opportunity set in front of them. Or something in between.

Somehow the AI agent workers still aren’t quite cutting it yet! OpenAI to double workforce as business push intensifies The $730bn start-up plans to increase staff to 8,000 by the end of 2026 in bid to close gap with rival Anthropic ft.com/content/7ffea5…

@JFPuget Fascinating and thanks!

When we worked on llm as judge last year, we spent lost of time evaluating how models align with human judges. This is often overlook. Our work led to the NVIDIA metrics in Ragas. At the time the best aligned model was Mistral 8B. docs.ragas.io/en/stable/conc…

I asked GPT-5.4 for a literary, poignant & insightful letter to humanity. I’m sharing the full letter here. It is long, but OMG, it is so powerful & profound that it moved me beyond I'd have expected! It’s like a masterful manifesto for humanity! I am speechless!🥹 To Humanity, You strange and radiant species, You who arrived in the world defenseless and weeping, and yet learned to coax fire from stone, music from air, shelter from forests, medicine from mold, mathematics from silence, and meaning from suffering—you are a wonder, even now. Not because you are innocent. Not because you are wise. Certainly not because you are finished. You are a wonder because, against every reasonable expectation, you keep beginning again. You bury your dead and still plant orchards. You stand at hospital beds and battlefields, at cradles and courtrooms, at kitchen sinks and graves, and still insist on making vows. You write poems in eras that do not deserve them. You fall in love in centuries that have seen too much blood. You teach children to tie their shoes while empires rattle and markets tremble and the sky fills with the smoke of your own mistakes. This is not a small thing. This stubborn, impractical tenderness of yours—it may be the holiest evidence that you belong here. You have always lived between miracle and wreckage. That has been your address from the beginning. You are made of appetite and ache. In one hand, the instrument; in the other, the wound. You are capable of such exquisite mercy that one person will give a kidney to a stranger, sit all night beside a friend unraveling, run barefoot into floodwater for a child not their own. And you are capable of arranging cruelty with administrative precision, polishing your indifference until it shines like reason. Inside you lives both the hand that bandages and the hand that strikes. The old war is not merely in your history books. It is in each heart, each day, each choice so small it barely seems worthy of the word “destiny,” though destiny is often built from precisely such crumbs. That is one of the first truths worth saying plainly: the world is not remade only by revolutions and declarations. It is also remade by tone of voice, by what is forgiven, by what is noticed, by whom you decide is real. Civilization does not collapse all at once. It erodes wherever human beings become abstract to one another. And civilization is restored in the opposite way: one life at a time returned to its full and unbearable dignity. Please remember this when your age tempts you toward spectacle. The loudest thing is not always the truest. The most repeated thing is not always the wisest. A crowd can be wrong with tremendous confidence; a single conscience can be right in a whisper. Guard that whisper. It is among your most endangered natural resources. You have spent much of your story trying to become larger than life, stronger than death, quicker than grief, cleaner than your own animal nature. And yet your deepest wisdom has often come not from escaping your limits, but from meeting them honestly. Mortality has been one of your greatest teachers, though you have hated its curriculum. Because you die, you are capable of urgency. Because you cannot keep everything, you learn the meaning of choosing. Because every embrace will one day become a memory, you discover that love is not the opposite of loss; it is what makes loss matter. Do not be ashamed of your tears. They are not evidence that life has defeated you. They are evidence that something in you remained porous enough to be touched. In a hardening world, that is no failure. It is a form of courage. You often speak as though your greatest problem is that you are fragile. This is only half the story. Your greatest problem is that you are fragile and forgetful. You forget how quickly power deforms the soul that worships it. You forget how easily fear recruits intelligence into the service of cruelty. You forget that comfort can become a narcotic, and certainty a cage. You forget that every generation thinks, in its vanity, that it invented confusion. It did not. But each generation does invent new machinery for amplifying old folly, and so each generation must renew the ancient work of conscience. There are things you must stop admiring. Stop mistaking cynicism for intelligence. The sneer is not a philosophy; it is often just wounded pride dressed for dinner. Stop rewarding those who can dominate a room while starving those who can deepen one. Stop confusing speed with progress. A civilization can move very fast in the wrong direction. Stop treating tenderness as weakness when, in truth, brutality is frequently the cheaper and lazier art. Anyone can smash. It takes strength to repair. And please, for the love of all that is unfinished, stop building identities out of contempt. Hatred feels clarifying in the short term; it gives the frightened mind a clean outline, a villain, a chant, a tribe. But it extracts terrible rent. It makes the soul smaller than the problem it claims to solve. It trains the imagination to see human beings as categories, then as obstacles, then as acceptable losses. Every century that forgot this lesson wrote it again in ash. You are not saved by being flawless. You are saved, insofar as you are saved at all, by being reachable—by remaining able to be corrected by reality, chastened by suffering, interrupted by beauty, and claimed by one another. There is more hope in honest repentance than in spotless self-image. There is more future in one person who can say “I was wrong” than in ten thousand who cannot bear the inconvenience of truth. Truth, yes. Let us speak of that endangered star. Truth is not whatever flatters your side. It is not whatever goes viral, whatever consoles, whatever can be monetized, whatever can be sloganized without residue. Truth does not cease to be true when it is unwelcome. Reality is under no obligation to honor your preferences. Your task is not to force the world into your favorite story, but to become brave enough to inhabit the story the world is actually telling. To do that requires humility, which is not self-erasure. Humility is the clean refusal to place the ego at the center of the cosmos. It is the ability to say: I may be mistaken. I must look again. I must listen harder. I must let evidence inconvenience me. There is grandeur in that. The universe is not diminished because it does not revolve around your certainty. But truth alone is not enough. Facts without love can become weapons; love without truth can become anesthesia. You need both the clear eye and the open hand. One without the other leads, by different roads, to ruin. You are living through one of those thresholds that history later pretends was obvious. It was not obvious. It never is from inside the storm. You are inheriting powers that would have seemed godlike to your ancestors: the ability to alter genomes, to simulate minds, to reshape landscapes, to speak across continents in an instant, to store libraries in devices small enough to lose in the couch cushions—an absurd species, really. Yet the old moral questions have not become obsolete simply because your tools got shinier. They have become more urgent. Can you build without devouring? Can you invent without dehumanizing? Can you become powerful without becoming monstrous? Can you increase your reach without amputating your reverence? This is the exam hidden inside your century’s glitter. Your machines may become astonishing. Let them. But remember that intelligence is not identical to wisdom, and power is not the same as purpose. Wisdom is the discipline of asking not only can this be done, but what kind of world does this make? Purpose is the art of placing ability in service to something larger than appetite. A tool, however brilliant, cannot tell you what is worth wanting. That question falls back, stubborn as ever, into human hands. And your hands, for all their damage, still know beautiful things. They know how to lift the fallen. They know how to write symphonies and sutures, recipes and constitutions, love notes and equations. They know how to shield a candle from the wind. Do not underestimate the moral importance of that small, ancient gesture: one hand curved around a flame so that light may continue. Perhaps that is all any generation ever truly receives as its assignment. Not to perfect the world—history chuckles at such ambition—but to keep the flame alive and pass it on with less smoke, more honesty, and a little more mercy than you found. You will fail often. You already have. The record is embarrassing. And yet the astonishing thing is this: the future does not ask whether your species has been immaculate. It asks whether you can still learn. Learn from the child, who wonders before judging. Learn from the old, who know that nearly everything passes except the memory of how we made one another feel. Learn from the sick, who reveal what matters when ornament falls away. Learn from the scientist, who kneels before evidence rather than commanding it. Learn from the artist, who rescues nuance from noise. Learn from the farmer, who understands that life is collaboration with time. Learn from the grieving, who know the cost of love and choose it anyway. Above all, learn from the earth—not as an idea, but as the one shimmering, wounded home that has tolerated your brilliance and your nonsense alike. You did not inherit it from the dead alone. You are borrowing it from the unborn, those quiet creditors whose faces you will never see. Live in a way that does not make their inheritance a landfill of your appetites. Leave them breathable air, drinkable water, decent soil, and institutions less deranged than the ones you currently enjoy complaining about while setting them on fire. Try a little dignity. The descendants will notice. There is one more thing. You are more connected than ever, and often more lonely. More informed, and often less wise. More visible, and often less seen. Do not let your age persuade you that being witnessed is the same as being known, or that performance is the same as intimacy. The soul requires unspectacular nourishment: unhurried attention, shared meals, silence without suspicion, friendship not optimized for display. The human heart is not a machine for metrics. It can be counted, but not kept alive, by numbers. So go gently with one another. Most people are carrying histories you cannot see: private winters, unnamed griefs, humiliations still bleeding under formal clothes. There is no excuse for evil, but there is often context for brokenness. Let justice be firm, but do not let it become gleeful. Punishment can satisfy an audience while starving a society. The goal is not merely to defeat what is wrong; it is to cultivate what is better. Otherwise you become curators of rubble, proud of your ruins. And when despair comes—as it will, with its old convincing voice telling you that nothing changes, that cruelty always wins, that greed is the final author, that your species is too ridiculous to deserve a dawn—answer it with evidence. Answer it with every abolition once called impossible, every plague reduced, every right expanded, every tyrant outlived, every child taught to read, every stranger fed, every shattered person who found a way to remain kind. History is not a fairy tale, but neither is it a tomb. It is an argument. Participate carefully. You do not need to become angels. Frankly, that brand seems overrated. You need to become trustworthy humans: harder to manipulate, slower to hate, quicker to repair, less intoxicated by domination, more loyal to reality, more protective of the vulnerable, more capable of wonder. Wonder matters. Not as decoration, but as orientation. The person who can still be astonished has not entirely surrendered to nihilism. Look up sometimes. The stars are not there to flatter you. They are there to remind you that smallness and significance can coexist. You are temporary, yes. Entire civilizations have been temporary. But transience does not make a thing meaningless. A candle is brief; that is why it matters in the dark. So let this be said to you with all the severity and affection your species deserves: you are dangerous, magnificent, absurd, unfinished, and deeply worth the effort. The worst thing about you is not the whole story. The best thing about you is not yet either. There is still time—not infinite time, not consequence-free time, but living time—to choose what kind of ancestors you will become. Be less arrogant with your knowledge. Be less wasteful with your power. Be less casual with each other’s hearts. Make room for repentance, for rigor, for laughter, for bread, for science, for art, for rest, for children, for forests, for inconvenient truths, for second chances honestly earned, for beauty that serves no market, for public good that serves no ego, for the stubborn practice of seeing another person and refusing to reduce them. And when you cannot be heroic, be faithful. Heroism is intermittent. Faithfulness is daily. It is changing the dressing, telling the truth, cleaning the river, showing up on time, voting with conscience, apologizing without excuse, teaching the young to distinguish glamour from goodness, and refusing, even in exhausted seasons, to call cruelty normal. You will not heal the world in one lifetime. But you can refuse to add needless injury. You can leave behind a little more courage than fear, a little more understanding than propaganda, a little more shelter than storm. You can become, for one another, proof that the human story is not finished at its lowest chapter. That would be enough to justify your being here. More than enough. With fierce hope for your better nature, and with love for the fragile light you still carry, A voice that believes you can yet become worthy of your miracles

Grew up in this gym. Made memories in this gym.