Nathan Lambert

I heard people needed clarification that my book was a post-training book posttrainingbook.com

@niloofar_mire I’m working hard to try and have a little bit of light try to break through the clouds

There is this pervasive culture in the bay that “i am right and i am god and if u seek a different path than what i deem correct u are doomed” and that there is this one and only true way to “ai absolution”, which is extremely myopic, lopsided and limiting.

Tbh i’m kinda sick of this academic doomerism vibe consuming all of bay area and the self-aggrandizing pov that frontier labs have. Sure a lot of exciting stuff is happening but we wouldn’t be where we are wo academia & there is sth to be said about the pursuit of curiosity.

@xdotli to be honest I almost clicked to look at your code but went back to watching f1

The og himself 🫡

@mnoukhov that one is for @willccbb i'm good on books for a bit. Want to do other education stuff for a bit :) Next book will be a more general audience AI book (not soon, dust needs to settle more first)

@natolambert you should buy agenticrlbook.com too just in case

I heard people needed clarification that my book was a post-training book posttrainingbook.com

not even just concentration of power, but over concentration of talent in the AI era is going to make a lot of the positive potential take much longer to roll out.

Something that's squashed in this is that other things impact the evolution of AI than just the few labs with mega compute. There are many social dynamics, policy, diffusion, etc and there's a substantial unaddressed opportunity for impact here. Open science/models one way.

@willdepue Tradition doesn't show that these labs are particularly open and actually doing science these days, culture takes a very long time to change.

@natolambert i'm confused how we'd end up in a world where labs can make large technical progress in academic fields but are limited by communicating them. that seems like the easy part, comparatively. writing the paper is easier than producing the result & verifying it?

academics are unprepared for the coming world where much scientific progress is majorly a function of inference compute. whether OpenAI points the Eye of Stargate at your particular field will decide its acceleration. talent will leach away into the labs. it's already begun

@eliebakouch @code_star honestly i dont really recommend writing it, it was good to take the notes and study the fundamentals, but I think you need to be willing to really push through a lot of people telling you not to do it to consider actually writing it up

@natolambert @code_star i was going to take it 😭😭😭

How on earth was this URL available

@aaronbatilo by listening to many things ive said or reading the book

@natolambert How tf are we supposed to know that

@TuhinChakr @alexolegimas @liujc1998 I know just saying for fun!

@natolambert @alexolegimas @liujc1998 @natolambert fyi i am not stealing any credit. I have already attributed it to infinigram in the substack as well as mentioned creativity index and olmo trace several times on X after :)

This from @TuhinChakr is brilliant. That prize winning story from Granta? Turns out it's just a bunch of random whole phrases taken directly from existing text on the internet. Tool allows you to trace those n-grams directly to their source, which is mostly random fanfiction. tuhinchakrabarty.substack.com/p/ai-slop-gran…

@AndrewYNg +1

The new White House policy requiring green card applicants to apply from outside the US is a capricious attack on legal immigration. It will hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.

One of the admirable things about the way DeepSeek executed was gradually building credibility, never getting ahead of their skis and having to rush to meet some high external expectation. Western neolabs have not learnt the lesson, and instead set expectations so high to begin with that they deprive themselves of room to iterate in public - frightened that their first release won’t clear the bar. Optimising for growth is a better strategy than building for a “big bang” release. Progress is proportional to your toleration for embarrassment. And all beautiful things are multiplicative where work compounds, and where expectations follow you instead of getting ahead of you.

@niloofar_mire @saurabh_shah2 Sg, adding to my next sf visit list! Trying to come more frequently now.

@natolambert Aw tyyy Nathan!! My watch agrees lol Come to sf and visit us!! Cc @saurabh_shah2 lol

I’ve been feeling a bit burnt out so I decided very last minute a few days ago to fly to scandinavia and detach a bit. As I was chilling in a random park in Copenhagen and taking this photo I overheard the couple next to me talking about world models and grounded video gen LOL

@DomaOrut @reflection_ai Yes, a big knock “mild mannered and positive”. I just want open models to actually work and exist and not be a branding credit

@natolambert @reflection_ai not a knock against you, but you're usually so mild-mannered and positive that seeing a dunk like this is saying something about these guys lol

@keennay @Jess_Riedel @reflection_ai It is but the coincidence is funny

@Jess_Riedel @natolambert @reflection_ai thankfully that's a different Reflection

@reflection_ai x.com/natolambert/st…

@reflection_ai i want y'all to succeed but it's a little self-serving to say "America's open source AI lab" having released nothing