@samzliu @suchenzang Predictor models? But those may not be the best intermediate rewards.
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Shantanu Bhalerao
820 posts
Shantanu Bhalerao
@sabhalerao
Building chips https://t.co/5eS2L7sQGB
SF Bay Area, CA Katılım Haziran 2009
236 Takip Edilen212 Takipçiler
@sabhalerao @suchenzang Humans solve this problem through some type of intermediate reward - my guess is something like that could work too
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one thing about studying math at princeton back in the day
was realizing how useless the substance of this degree would be once i decided not to pursue a career as a mathematician (not everyone can become john nash, conway, or pardon)
and instead pivot to mastering economically valuable tasks around what was tractably computable (ad tech lol)
particularly skills for which experience accumulated with time cannot be replaced via a textbook, or easily mastered without significant financial investment (regardless of how many billies in endowment a university might have)
and maybe it's survivorship bias talking
but it seems like in this day and age, the remarkable feats we see being accomplished by AI
are directly proportional to what is most cleanly explained and encapsulated via volumes upon volumes of "textbook" data or "textbook" environments (rip math & games & art, but not really, since that's all part of the fun)
and where the gaps remain are where data, if any, are scarce and financially intractable to simulate successfully
so maybe all this is to say
if you want to AI-proof your "careers"
go where there's no data
where reality is messy, inconsistent, and nearly impossible to explain in words how things ought to and should be in full
because if there is a way to stay ahead
it will be in relentlessly exploiting the data gap
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@suchenzang This extends to other fields too.
Chips (hyper specialized folks who haven’t seen it end to end) or Saas (don’t know the key edge cases).
This lack of experience on building the fundamental blocks will be a key limiter to thesis of neolabs eating Saas products.
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applies even for the mildly more technical neolabs, many of whom have never had the burden of building anything from scratch themselves, having thoroughly enjoyed building their own legacies on top of the pre-existing infrastructure of their previous affiliations
they don't know what they don't know, and these extremely intellectual and generally relatively smart people somehow think certain robots and their robot harnesses will solve everything beyond n=1
"but... but... anthropic! mistral!"
yes those are two exceptions because in both cases they got to either build everything or see how things were built "from scratch", with one being wildly more successful than the other having been closer to execution / been the actual execution themselves
similarly, back in the days of being a cloud infra person, there was always an aversion to hiring "experienced" FAANG engineers (more G than anyone else) since they usually all looked extremely good on paper, but could rarely reverse-engineer a half-descent cloud system since they've never had to think about primitives they take for granted
"what do you mean you can't just push a button and get more storage on the compute cluster?"
- a quote from an incredulous L8+ engineer when they got to Meta and attempted to "scale" on Meta's gpu infra back in 2023
again, all very smart people with very smart resumes and pedigrees... and with surprisingly large blind spots
Mitchell Hashimoto@mitchellh
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.
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@samzliu @suchenzang What if the verifier takes too long?
There are areas outside of coding where the verifier takes days or longer
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@suchenzang It also depends on where tech is going - eg RLVR means areas without data but are easily verifiable can also be “AI”ed. Who knows what new techniques will be invented…
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Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
Joined a new AI-native company this week and it’s kind of wild how different it feels already.
The laptop arrived, I logged in, and an agent basically took over from there. It set up my dev env, pulled repos, fixed dependency issues, got permissions approved, pointed me at the backlog, linked the architecture docs, and surfaced the Slack debates I actually needed to read before touching production.
When I needed context on something, I asked the agent and it found the exact thread from months ago explaining why a decision was made, who owned it, the related Linear issues, and the PRs connected to it.
I’ve only been here 3 days but it honestly feels like I’ve worked here for a year because the usual friction and scavenger hunt for context just isn’t there anymore.
We should probably stop calling this “onboarding” and rename it to “mounting” because this feels a lot more like mounting a distributed filesystem called “institutional memory” than slowly getting drip-fed context over 6 months.
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Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
Huge news today at Isomorphic Labs!
We have secured $2.1 Billion investment to advance the most important mission that AI can unlock: to change the way we can improve human health and create new medicines for patients around the world.
This funding milestone was built on the strength of our AI drug design engine (IsoDDE), which has already proven its worth (aside from smashing benchmarks) by designing breakthrough new molecules and creating new scientific breakthroughs across our drug discovery programs.
Our IsoDDE is giving us a repeatable way to design new medicines for a wide range of diseases, building a future of medicine that we couldn’t unlock until now.
A massive thank you to our incredible team across London, Boston and Lausanne, whose relentless work made this possible, and to our partners who share our ultimate vision.
Now we have so much more to build together!
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@suchenzang Not just Chinese AI papers.
there was a “stronger baselines” controversy on Alphachip RL paper
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if this came for AI papers, i'd wager a retraction rate of 70% and above
Nagamy🦉@nagamyzuna
Despite contributing to just 16% of all research output, Chinese papers make up over 50% of all retractions.
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Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
Let me convince you to save money.
collaborativefund.com/blog/let-me-co…
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Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
Join us at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on May 10th! Early bird tickets are going fast... medshare.org/healing-people/ #20YearsofImpact
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Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
@MayorCassidy @RobertGammon High construction costs come from lack of workers which in turn comes from high housing costs. Also, all the planning red tape which delays projects!
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@shanedphillips Its clear that current zoning policy and local control is not working!
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Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
The question is whether housing around public transportation should be legally restricted to single family homes. We should stop banning small and mid-size apartment buildings near transit. That’s what #SB827 is about. mercurynews.com/2018/03/03/sb-…
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Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
#SB827 is radical in the sense that it gets at the root cause of the problem, but it's also eminently reasonable. The type of housing it authorizes is how cities used to be built: mid-rise, relatively cheap construction near jobs and transit. - @hanlonbt
vox.com/cities-and-urb…
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@MayorCassidy @tom_hirschfeld @usmbowman @DSA_LosAngeles @Scott_Wiener Millions are already affected because they can't get affordable housing. At some point, this is going to affect the economy. We need to enable developers to buy SFH and replace with fourplexes atleast to expand the housing stock. Off course, there will still be SFH.
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@steve_hanke yeah, remove zoning regulations to let free market work
And repeal Prop 13 that puts new buyers at a disadvantage
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Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
It’s progressive to support having enough housing, at all income levels. It’s not progressive to stop housing. Low density zoning near transit is not progressive. It’s exclusionary. #SB827 allows more people to live by transit. It’s a progressive approach. eastbayexpress.com/oakland/youre-…
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Shantanu Bhalerao retweetledi
"35% of people who bought a home last year said they made an offer without first seeing the home in person" #inventoryshortage redfin.com/blog/2018/02/s…
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@ragnarisapirate As a bay area resident, I see this craziness all around. $2M would buy an apartment building with great yields elsewhere. Instead they plunked on a house in non walkable, boring Sunnyvale
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@JBierne @RussianBear $GAIA sold their yoga mat biz last year. They're focusing only on streaming video on yoga / spirituality
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