devansh

Today we're launching Intercept: a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past. We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. So, if they’re such a big problem, why haven’t we dealt with them yet? Last year we convened ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech investors, and regulatory experts to better understand that. We heard two main reasons: (1) First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs make this newly possible. (2) Second is a lack of funding: broad-spectrum solutions have historically been underfunded, in part because they’re not a great fit for most philanthropic or commercial funding (and while COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn't been sustained). We think that with enough focus and funding, this might be solvable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of new tools to catalyze the development and deployment of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies. This problem is undoubtedly difficult. But it’s more tractable now than it’s ever been. We think we should give it our best shot. We’re enormously grateful to our anchor funders: @stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI and individuals from Jane Street. And, I’m very excited to be building this with @incredutility and the rest of the team.

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AI is advancing quickly. Society’s ability to manage its risks must advance just as fast. Today we’re sharing our vision for AI Resilience, with more than $130M in initial grants underway across bio-resilience, cyber-resilience, AI model safety, and AI’s impact on young people: openaifoundation.org/news/resilienc…

Today we're sharing our work on interaction models. A new class of model trained from scratch to handle real-time interaction natively, instead of gluing it onto a turn-based one. youtu.be/A12AVongNN4

🥹 @si_pbc 🤝 @MikowaiA 🤝 @sonyatweetybird🤝 @lachygroom 🥹

.@devanshpandey and Galen are exceptional. Proud to be a small angel on this journey and watch them blow up. @mcannonbrookes @scottfarkas there is are more than a few interesting partnership angles here.

🥹 @si_pbc 🤝 @MikowaiA 🤝 @sonyatweetybird🤝 @lachygroom 🥹

We’ve raised 75m in new funding from Sequoia and Spark Capital—partnering with @sonyatweetybird, @MikowaiA, and @YasminRazavi, all of whom are deeply supportive of our long-term mission. We’ve also brought on angels & advisors including @karpathy, @tszzl, and @_milankovac_. ----- Our early results with FDM-1 moved computer use from a data-constrained regime to a compute-constrained one; this latest round of funding unlocks several orders of magnitude of compute scaling for that work. With the FDM model series we have a path to scale agentic capabilities through video pretraining, and we expect to achieve superhuman performance on general computer tasks in the same way that current language models have superhuman performance on coding tasks. We’re also now able to invest in the blue-sky research necessary to our long term mission of building aligned general learners. To realize the civilizationally transformative impacts of AI, models must generalize far out of their training distributions, actively exploring and building skills in new environments. This capability represents a substantial shift from the current paradigm of model training. We believe that current alignment techniques are insufficient to predictably and safely steer a model with human-level learning capabilities, and so we’re doing work to study small versions of this problem in controlled environments to develop a science of alignment for general learners. We’re a team of 6 people in San Francisco. We’re hiring world-class researchers and engineers to help us achieve our mission. If that’s you, please get in touch.