Mo Bavarian

JRR Tolkien used genz brainrot slang over 70 years ago, that's how ahead he was

Good cooking by a cracked team 🧑‍🍳

I do not share the cynicism of some with respect to OpenAI’s actions in the DoW/Ant dispute. It basically seems to me as though OpenAI was attempting to deescalate last week; whether they executed well is a separate question, but in their defense good execution in such chaos was nearly impossible. But from where I sit it seems OpenAI tried to reduce tensions and find a productive path forward, while allowing its employees considerable latitude to speak their minds. The easy thing would have been for management to stay quiet and let this happen; they did not do that, and they also stood firm in opposition to the supply-chain risk designation. In general, OpenAI is unjustly maligned. This is the thing that bothers me the most about Dario’s leaked memo; it spends so much time on OpenAI conspiracies and cynicism that I fear industry solidarity in the future will be harder than it needs to be. This is not the last time we will see state interference into frontier AI, and until we build formalized structures for such interference it will be important for the industry to hang tough together. I fear that will be less likely now.

As an American working in frontier for the last 5 years (at Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI), it pains me to see the current unnecessary drama between Admin & Anthropic. I really hope the Admin realies its mistake and reverses course. USA needs Anthropic and vice versa! 🇺🇸

I don’t think there is an un-crossable gap between what Anthropic wants and DoW’s demands. With cooler heads it should be possible to cross the divide. Even if divide is un-crossable, off-boarding from Anthropic models seems like the right solution for USG. The solution is not designating a great American company by the SCR label, which is reserved for the enemies of the US and comes with crippling business implications.

Anthropic SCR designation is unfair, unwise, and an extreme overreaction. Anthropic is filled with brilliant hard-working well-intentioned people who truly care about Western civilization & democratic nations success in frontier AI. They are real patriots. Designating an organization which has contributed so much to pushing AI forward and with so much integrity does not serve the country or humanity well.

@AmandaAskell @elonmusk What is the opposite of xAI?! 🤔

@elonmusk I'm hoping we can break the curse. The alternative is picking a name like EvilAI, which seems like a hard sell.

Claude's constitution is out! It's the culmination of a lot of work by many people, but it's also a work in progress that will no doubt change and hopefully improve over time. I'm looking forward to people's thoughts, and to talking with more people about this kind of work ❤️

@barret_zoph Yaaay!

Super excited to join the team!

I can’t help but think (and feel) that the world is generally very sad right now. Injured really. Yesterday I was in Utah with family. Three generations. We played sports, enjoyed good food, saw friends, and just messed around all day. One of the best days in recent memory for all of us. This is where I grew up. It took me back to my childhood. Allowing me to embody those psychological states and feel the comparative difference between then and now. The hollowing and sadness of the modern world seems to stem in part from our phones, social media, and the ferocious need to be seen and relevant in every moment. We have mistakenly idolized a specific kind of dysfunction: a manic, sleepless hyper-vigilance that needs to be omnipresent. Everyone I know who’s unplugged for a week, returns reporting life-changing levels of improved life satisfaction. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t return feeling spry and vibrant and clear-eyed about the corrosive nature of current social culture. The science supports them feeling that way. They were in a dopamine deficit from the hyper-stimulated state of the world so everything felt gray.  So why don’t we unplug more and more often? We’re all kind of trapped in a prisoner's dilemma. Most want to move to the mountains and be relieved of it all but are terrified that if they unplug, they’ll be invisible. Real life consequences of reduced power and status. So we stay plugged in and drink the poison. This hypervigilant state keeps us in chronic fight or flight (anxiety). Simultaneously, our addiction creates a dopamine deficit (the emptiness/grayness feeling) and a background hum of anxiety. Mammals are biologically hardwired to co-regulate: physical touch, eye contact, proximity and in-person vibes. Things which release oxytocin and activate the vagal nerve's parasympathetic system. Screens eliminate all of this goodness. There are small wins to be had here. More in-person time. A day off technology per week. A block of 4 hours. One hour before bedtime.  I hope that there’s a collective awakening that we’re all being mined for engagement. Then we get trapped. And then trap each other.

Either OpenAI has a team of leprechauns and top mathematicians working 24/7 on FrontierMath questions, or GPT-5.2 Pro has actually become that good at mathematics. I can hardly find any non-trivial hard problem that the model cannot answer after 1–2 hours of interaction. Singularity is near…

@andrew_n_carr The legend has it he did all this while having three young 👶 One born just last year…

@mobav0 One of the best to ever do it

Jerry was my tech lead & manager in early part of my life at OAI, and then again my manager for the last year. Loved working with him. Jerry had a hella career at OpenAI: as an IC, manager, and org leader. In my view, few people had so much influence in trajectory of OpenAI & AI broadly as Jerry in the last few years. From robotics, codegen, AI scientist to RL scaling, Jerry's work has been the secret sauce making so many things click. This is a moment to celebrate the amazing contributions of a true 🐐❤️

So what are they going to call the series #27 when we run out of alphabet? Only Databricks can help us find out

@brandonkumar Yes, I have met doctors who use OE

Has anyone actually met a doctor who uses OpenEvidence or a lawyer who uses Harvey? Both of these companies have raised obscene amounts of money yet none of my friends who are MDs/JDs have touched them. Want to know if these products are vaporware or if my friends are just incompetent.

@__alpoge__ In my view, there are all quite correlated even if distinct . In some way, intelligence might just be cleverness + more abstraction + longer “context”

@__alpoge__ No idea what Tao means by cleverness here and why he thinks it’s that distinct from intelligence.

Bet my career against this. Let’s see:D Good luck! @tao/115722360006034040" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115722360…

Very bullish on Angela, Deepak, and Worktrace! I worked wirh Angela closely around GPT 3.5, and she was a true hero behind that launch 🐐 She then went on to wear many different hats at OpenAI, and in every role she knocked it out of the park. This is a company to 👀

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. This also applies to Members of Technical Staff

The Strategic Explorations team @OpenAI is looking to recruit researchers interested in working on the next frontier of language modeling! Feel free to reach out to me by email. @darkproger and I will also be at NeurIPS to connect and discuss in person.