Karan Brar

still an intern, got a long way to graduate, but the method is not patched!!

In my view we have a few different tiers of verifiability 1) programatically verifiable (near-free) - games, coding, math, cybersecurity, chip design 2) real-world verifiable (cost-or time bounded) - sciences: biology, chemistry, physics -physical world: material science, energy, aerospace, robotics, agriculture, pharma -forecasting: trading, weather 3) verifiable with human preference - writing, design, comedy, charisma, persuasion I expect most low-hanging fruit in (1) to be solved very quickly. Not sure how much longer before more solved math conjectures are simply uninteresting. I’m least certain about chip design being in this category, perhaps we hit a ceiling and require physics or materials breakthroughs to continue progress. My guess is we will quickly run into the limits of how well we can simulate each domain in (2). The time-bounded nature of real world verification may be the reason we don’t hit fast takeoff. Sim2real remains an elusive problem to solve when real-world data is limited. Part of the reason I don’t expect to live multiple hundreds of years is simply that I expect pharmaceutical progress to be time-bounded by the physical world. I expect the items in (3) to never really get solved to a superhuman degree, as success relies on an ever-shifting plane of cultural preference. People adapted to “good” AI writing and became annoyed at new stylistic tics that, in a vacuum, are not necessarily bad.

still can't believe this

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world." My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation." I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. "We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline. Hedgie🤗

if you're broke trying to do fine-tuning - pivot to GEPA;

Frontier labs: models are the moat Custom model companies: custom models are the moat Router companies: model routing is the moat Data companies: data is the moat Application companies: applications are the moat

think as a general rule we should ignore the opinions of boomers on housing