Corry Wang

I had never expected the pivotal moment would be getting everyone to agree that yeah mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous killer drones would be, like, a bad idea These will not be the hardest AI deployment questions that society will face in the next 3 years!

All I have to say about SaaS stocks right now is that I’m heartened to see everyone else in the market has started extrapolating straight lines on charts as well

4/ The one thing that has changed - all of the checks now have an extra zero (or two) “Even young PhDs could pull a half million dollars a year” Ilya was offered “nearly $2 million for the first year” Some things do change!

3/ Another thing that remains unchanged after a decade and a half - Mark Zuckerberg is extremely uninterested in AI safety, ie why DeepMind refused to sell out to Facebook

1/ If I had a nickel for every time Mark Zuckerberg blew a few billion dollars trying to hire a team of star researchers to build a second place frontier AI research lab, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice

12/ In that vein, Genius Makers is the apotheosis of the "stamp collecting" era of ML research Let's hope we're finally entering the physics era

11/ A friend recently told me a hilarious quote from Ernest Rutherford: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" If you can't derive some underlying principle of reality from your research, then ultimately you're just collecting a bunch of random facts to no end

1/ Last week I read Genius Makers on a rec from @modestproposal1 - this was Cade Metz's 2021 book on the history of ML It was really fascinating, but in the same way you'd be fascinated reading a history of Newtonian physics published 3 months before Einstein invented relativity

Basically success for a startup is finding the intersection in the Venn diagram between “sounds crazy to any rational person” and “actually works.” The problem is most of the time you’re just, yknow, actually crazy

Something that I didn’t really appreciate until I left Big Tech is that for a startup to succeed, you really have to be doing stuff that sounds crazy all the time If it didn’t sound crazy to an L8 at Google, then Google would’ve done it already!