Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch • AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play.
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution • "Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere."
Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served • It's shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations and a blackboard
Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI? • “One robot now turns into many robots next year, but the number of ballerinas is the same.”
The sample efficiency black hole • "We see these AIs as a galaxy glittering with capabilities, but at their center, invisible to the naked eye, holding all the constellations together, is an unimaginably massive black hole of data."
Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time • "He begged to work for the regime that tortured him."
RLVR might be disproportionately bad at science • the verification loop for theories can be on the order of decades and centuries, and even then we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions
Notes on pretraining parallelisms and failed training runs.
The mistake of conflating intelligence and power • If this is your definition of intelligence is "the ability to achieve your goals across a wide variety of domains", then Stalin was the most intelligent person who ever lived.
What I've been thinking about this weekend - More open questions, intelligence vs power, the problem of verification in science, the parallel discovery of Darwinism • Hodge podge of things I was thinking about this weekend.
AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play.
www.dwarkesh.com
"Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere."
It's shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations and a blackboard
www.dwarkesh.com
“One robot now turns into many robots next year, but the number of ballerinas is the same.”
www.dwarkesh.com
"We see these AIs as a galaxy glittering with capabilities, but at their center, invisible to the naked eye, holding all the constellations together, is an unimaginably massive black hole of data."
"He begged to work for the regime that tortured him."
www.dwarkesh.com
the verification loop for theories can be on the order of decades and centuries, and even then we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions
If this is your definition of intelligence is "the ability to achieve your goals across a wide variety of domains", then Stalin was the most intelligent person who ever lived.
www.dwarkesh.com
Hodge podge of things I was thinking about this weekend.
