Ken Liu @kyliu99 on how modern explanations to questions like "why do we dream?", "why do I love this person?", "why are we here?" explain everything while explaining nothing at all. Science can explain mechanism. It can't explain meaning. Stories create meaning. Modern states ask citizens to die for them all the time - for the sake of a story. Humans will die for a story. It's the only thing humans have ever willingly died for.

I know so many people looking for a technical co-founder right now I never hear technical people looking for non-technical co-founders lol Technical skills are still the bottleneck

My father

Whoever is running SFO should be running SF

Just dropped a new episode with the one & only Roon @tszzl 🔥. 🎙️Why @theallinpod shouldn’t be running Twitter. We talk @elonmusk, secret AI projects, china, happiness, + everything else on our minds these days. Full episode: piped.video/Q3BHaCfHRjc

“I’m critical of AI safety folks who paint a very sci-fi-esq world ending scenario and talk about how we have to invest a lot of resources into preventing this, but if you look at what they’re doing day to day, it’s not really different from what capability researchers do, like train language models & computer simulations… I would feel bad if it was donated by nonprofit money.” - @ericjang11 on the relationship between the EA community & AI safety world

In honor of @tszzl’s @tbpn appearance - resurfacing one of my all-time favorite interviews ❤️

If you've built a successful startup in Europe, you can do anything. It seems much harder to fundraise, no one believes in you, and overall more miserable.

NEW episode of @TomorrowTalk_ with Eric Jang @ericjang11 (VP of AI @1x_tech and author of AI is Good for You)! We talk AI as it relates to the labor force, our political systems, love & companionship, policy, ideologies & more .. Eric's breadth + depth of knowledge is amazing. 0:00 - Highlights 2:53 - Intro 3:32 - The outdated political system & AI's applications for campaigns 7:55 - Debating ideas with AI "champions" 9:20 - How Meta's VR Quest headset could be a humanoid robot, data engines for AI 13:20 - Building genuine AI companionship 18:26 - AI chatbots as sparring partners and improving peoples' social capabilities 20:45 - Can we achieve AGI through online, text-only data? Or do we need a data engine such as VR, robots, or cars? 24:20 - How to acquire and label "truth" for LLMs? 30:00 - How far are we from AGI? How do you define AGI? 32:20 - Should we be modeling AI systems after biology and replicating nature-inspired architectures? 36:00 - Confronting workforce disruption of humanoid robots, 1X's approach 39:00 - Lump of labor fallacy, 10X-ing workforces 40:10 - Security risks of humanoid robots, high leverage technology = risk 42:35 - Engineering hardware to mimic the human body, lack of robotics parts 46:04 - Why is now the right time to invest and build in general purpose robots? 48:25 - Visualizing a post-AGI future of abundance 52:27 - What will our relationship to robots look like and which hierarchies will exist? How to engineer an equality dynamic? 55:50 - The academia vs start-up landscape in AI and why some researches are going back to academia 59:54 - Criticisms of the effective altruist and AI safety communities 1:04:20 - Good policies and models for regulation, issues with regulation today

Just dropped a new episode with Sahil Lavingia @shl! 🎙️What an Isaac Asimov future looks like We talk growing @gumroad to $100m, today’s AI ecosystem, finding a business idea, how he thinks about this app, @balajis, + more

Barbenheimer, Taylor Swift, and viral memes really make me question the appeal of hyper personalized content. Maybe half the fun is the cultural conversation and communities that popular and widely consumed content creates?

Moving to San Francisco in a few weeks! Looking for a place to live & a car to rent Message me if you have any leads❤️

Guillermo @rauchg on the future of the web - generative user interfaces, a highly personalized and adaptive web, unbundling Google, and more - A pre-hackathon conversation at the @agihouse_org

I’m relaunching my podcast this Thursday! Conversations about the mind, the machine, and the meaning of it all - how we think, create, love, and live as intelligence (natural and artificial) continues to unfold. I couldn’t be more grateful and excited to go all in on this 💙

Congratulations to @BenLamm and @colossal on announcing the successful de-extinction of the dire wolf. Wild. Two years ago, I interviewed Ben—he pushed founders to go bigger, and challenged investors to back the moonshots. It feels like the future is arriving.

The person who seems most out of place in a given room is usually the most interesting

Grimes’ @Grimezsz ability to create and exist in technical & creative circles + embrace tools that most artists have banned is one of the many reasons she’s so cool. “We both see it as culture” - @daoudaleonard (Grimes’ manager & founder of @createtriniti) speaks on their shared desire to champion emergent technologies and why the divide between these communities exist.

“The thing that allowed me to outgrow my pretty humble beginnings was this idea of I published all my work online. I open sourced it and a hyperlink  that pointed you to my work spoke louder than anything that I could claim I was good at or any resume.  I didn't go to Stanford or MIT. All I had was my open source contributions and curriculum and the products that I created that were one hyperlink away from you experiencing them.” - Guillermo @rauchg on how growing up in Argentina influenced his approach to building @vercel 🇦🇷 Recorded at the @agihouse_org in Hillsborough, California

Happy Monday from me and my Waymo

25 and feeling so grateful to be on this weird and beautiful journey of life

Having worked at YC & OpenAI, @maddiehalla is still a big believer of YC’s advice of ship and launch quickly. “In the science space, I take that to mean parallel path as much as you can. We don’t have enough time to move at the pace of academic research. It means mirroring the need for strong science & robust protocols + what can we do in parallel to go to market quickly and get user feedback quickly.” Full episode of @TomorrowTalk_ link in bio 💛 follow for best insights of each episode

Got an Oura ring on Thursday and I can already feel myself getting less fun

A must watch for anyone interested in the future of software engineering. @shl Sahil shares his insights🔥👇

Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo on why he resigned from @OpenAI and lost trust in its leadership. We also talk about: ▪️ whether building AGI first or safely matters more ▪️ how OpenAI’s rationalizations have shifted ▪️ what @Anthropic is doing differently

Twitter is Club Penguin for adults

Today is the first time I’ve ever been invited to a club in San Francisco, and it’s for a party celebrating GPT-4. You’ve got to love the Bay.

. @shl thoughts on: -why OpenAI’s product releases are like Apples’ in 2010s -which AI companies are most interesting -how to approach finding an idea + solving your own problems -internal AI tools sahil is building at @gumroad

I still think about these

Is everything still computer

2 years ago, miss you @Stanford

.@RichardMCNgo on why birth rates will probably keep falling: - Birth rates are falling because marriage rates are falling. - AI could either distract us from relationships or help mediate them. - If the future economy is dominated by social + emotional labor, it may skew female - dating gets harder when women outpace men in status.

Belgrade, Serbia 📍⚔️

“Many things in AI have been inspired by biology… but in the last decade of deep learning progress, the vast majority of contributions have come from people who did not adhere to this, but more like how do I push as much as data as fast as possible onto my GPU?” - @ericjang11 on why nature-inspired architectures are probably not the path to AGI

More insight into early days at @OpenAI, on tomorrow talk pod❤️

Saw Oppenheimer last night - Isidor Isaac Rabi was my grandmothers cousin, and my favorite character. ❤️

Sunday

I think schools should spend slightly less time imparting information and more time teaching students different frameworks for thinking, how to form thoughtful opinions and how to approach decision making

Facebook took over Sun Microsystem's campus Google took over Silicon Graphic's campus Apple took over Hewlett Packard's campus … Today’s FAANG built on yesterday’s (literally)

Celsius feels like the first energy drink that I see women drink (including me), mostly due to their branding. I think theres a huge opportunity to do that with beer.

Finding love in your 20s feels like bumper cars

— is the new delve

📈“There’s a perfect correlation between top tier founders and how transparent someone is about how a financing process is going” Delian @zebulgar believes the best founders are also the most transparent/ lays out the power of mentorship in the valley 🎧 @TomorrowTalk_

New episode out with one & only @eladgil. I truly learned so much from this conversation, full episode in bio. Take a listen!

60% of the time when I ask a founder how they got the name for their startup, they say: do you want the real story or the fake story? The real story is usually a result of psychedelics or that it sounded cool

Excited to moderate some exciting AI conversations at  Vercel Ship '24! @vercel Join me in NYC on May 23 and connect with the ecosystem building the web's best products centered on scale, reliability, and speed. Tickets here: vercel.fyi/ship-speaker

I’m starting a group chat. That is where the good stuff seems to happen. I would like it to be very open and free. Spice welcome. Comment or dm if you would like to be included. Females only⚠️

I'm going to host a debate on the pod between an AI risk expert and an AI accelerationist - who do you want to hear from?

I think the most uncomfortable part of working in an office every day is that you have to wear shoes for 10 hours straight. Lets normalize just socks in the office

Carl Jung believed humans had shadow selves. @RichardMCNgo believes AIs have shadows too. Train a model in one direction, and you may teach it how to rebel in the opposite.

Can we bring Americana back into mainstream culture & fashion

Lightning questions w/ @zebulgar on @TomorrowTalk_ 1. Favorite account? 2. What important truth do very few people agree with you on? 3. Do you believe in Aliens? 4. 1 thing you’ve changed you mind on in last 5 years? 5. If you could spend 1 year in any year in history?

Podz🎧🎙️🪩🦓

What does it really take to build a trustworthy AI companion? One that won’t manipulate you. One that understands you more deeply with every minute spent. One that you can rely on across model updates and providers. @hume_ai’s Alan Cowen gives one of the most thoughtful answers I’ve heard at @vercel ‘24.

My dm’s are full of people looking for co-founders. I’ll do my best to help you find that special someone… to build a generational company with. Fill out this form: forms.gle/wLVV33RWitBKBEeo6

Today I’m reflecting on the fact that my grandma had 2 kids by the time she was my age, and I can’t keep a plant alive

I think the ability to have a hyper-realistic conversation with yourself in VR (using a trained model and visual of you) will be wild and will help people have better relationships with themselves

I’m grateful to be an early “other” in such an incredible team🖤. @FactoryAI

I’ve been trying to convince my friends who work in tv to create an anti-black mirror. They think that negativity sells but I think there’s a way to do it well.

Everyone is in Japan right now

Your twenties feel like an endless choose your own adventure

Npc streaming trend makes sense. Humans have been fascinated with contortionists since 1000 BC China. Rather than manipulating the physical body to achieve inhuman flexibility/ strength - they manipulate human qualities and master repetition. Blurring line between human and robot is what capitavates us today.

On October 7th, my mom happened to be in Israel and I was with one of my close friends who served in the IDF for 4 years whose entire family was in Israel. While my mom was in a bomb shelter and my friend was hearing about friends who were missing, both of them felt scared, and then immediately went to begin posting on Instagram about what was happening. Not because they were in an effort to manipulate anybody, not because they were virtue signaling, but because 99% of people are not going to do their own homework on the issue and, instead, develop their opinions based off of a few posts. So, I find it valid that groups would put effort into coordinating a unified effort, when "posting” is probably not the natural forte of tech people. Considering that there are actors in Hamas creating propaganda videos, this is a warranted approach. On the anti-Israel side, there is an equally coordinated effort and I would be more curious to read an article that, instead, explores both sides of the information war. I’ve created several new TikTok profiles lately to better understand what a fresh algorithm pushes forward, and both times, there was an anti-Israel post in the first 8 videos - I don't think this is necessarily top-down from TikTok but more a result of the huge difference in populations and which videos are popular. So people who want Israel to continue to exist have to be thoughtful to amplify their voice, because jews make up 0.2% of the world population. I understand the issue with firing based on beliefs but most of this article seems to demonize the concept of a community based off of similar beliefs working towards those, painting it as some corrupt conspiracy. Are you not in any groupchats which share articles, ideas, or encourage action? During these dark days, group chats have given me a sense of community.

It’s PhD dropout season

Maybe Twitch streamers like Kai Cenat finally make Asia-style livestream shopping a thing in the U.S

Looking for a digital artist who can make custom NFTs for a special, ongoing project💎… DM me or tag below 💛

Fell down a Hacker News rabbit hole from 2017 - it’s a good reminder of how powerful 7 years can be in tech. These claims seems unbelievably out of date.

24 today. Very grateful for everything I’ve learned and lived so far. Growing up!

Recording intros will be the end of me

I am planning an episode about AI companions: designing artificial emotional intimacy, replicating power dynamics, love, loneliness. It could be bad, but it could be great for society. I don't have an agenda, I'm just curious. Who should I speak to?

Ben believes the smartest minds need to go for big ideas. Incredible episode w/ @federallamm!! We talk de-extinction + artificial wombs, the future of genetics, working w Colossal co-founder @geochurch, & moonshot thinking🔭 piped.video/hwUlA074W2Q

If there was a human on earth today that was secretly an AGI-run humanoid, who is it

New episode out with Bryan Johnson! @bryan_johnson He’s received so much media attention over the past year, I wanted to dive deeper into the philosophy behind his life and mission post Braintree Venmo & Kernal. Many debates and rebuttals were had:). Take a listen!

I’m so proud of my brother @twofriendsmusic, a Stanford engineer who took the rode less traveled after graduation. The hardest worker I know …full circle moment 7 years later for an LA kid performing @coachella 🌅🫶

Accelerate 🌊 Tokyo, Japan 📍 An amazing conference, had so much fun moderating conversations with this special group of founders. Justin Waldron @jtwald, co-founder @zynga @playco Tiffany Zhong @tzhongg @nospaceapp Markus Fuhrmann, co-founder @deliveryherocom @GROPYUS Noriyuki @noriyuki_kojima, co-founder @kotoba_tech Hikari Senju, founder @omneky Rachel Blank, Founder @AllaraHealth Vinay Menda, Founder @blankstreet Yurt Yakubchyk, Founder Tilly Therapy, lifehouse Hosted by @HOFCapital & @DigitalGarage

An unbelievable team working on the hard problems. @extropic The future is bright thanks to @GillVerd @trevormccrt1 & team🫡

Straw score 10/10

Sat down with @alexatallah last year and asked him why he started @opensea. Now that it’s the largest NFT marketplace worth $13.3 B, it seems obvious. But in 2017, it was just a few subtle signs and the rising popularity of @cryptokitties that signaled to him what was ahead.

Into the void 🛰️🔭

Best birthday present from @_grace_lily 💜💜💜 @AstroGirls_NFT 🛸🪐🧚‍♀️ & actually my first time minting an NFT

I read this Joan Didion essay once a month. It reframes what self respect really is - something internal based off of self discipline and honesty with self versus how others view you. Some of my favorite excerpts below - ————- There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs. Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. vogue.com/article/joan-didio…

🗽

Come back to the dark side

Brand new episode w/ @mattkrisiloff & guest host @tszzl🔥 🎙️His early days on founding team @OpenAI They talk turning stem cells into human eggs, longevity, AI’s role in biotech, & helping scientists start companies I loved putting this one together: piped.video/A_wTZc_07D4

Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. – Jerzy Gregorek

Marc watches (clips of) Tomorrow Talk‼️

The first video ever published to YouTube - “Me at the zoo” April 23rd, 2005 by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim A piece of internet history 🔒

“ Governments are your shareholders for life. If you do well in life, they own 50% of you. If governments think long term, they should invest in creating more people because that's more taxpayers. I think it's almost selfish for governments to do this. there's a lot of things that can be done that make a lot of sense when you analyze them over 50 years, even though they're hard to understand for 3 years. “ - @martinvars on @TomorrowTalk_ Examples of what governments could do to fix declining birth rates: -Custodian votes to parents on behalf of children -Free childcare (France has a program called La Crèche, and highest birth rate in Europe) -Subsidizing IVF & egg freezing (Israel does this)

The og AI robot

Except - I think as a company scales, the job of a ceo becomes way less about building and a lot more people problems/investor facing/directional decisions - I think it makes sense to have someone willing and ready to do that well. I think both have value but it seems really hard to build something great, iterate and ship, in early days without great technical talent and understanding at the helm. Obviously this varies depending on what the startup is building.

Tech deserves a reality show

It’s hard to produce unique thoughts if you flood yourself with opinionated content

Full episode with @bryan_johnson at: YouTube: piped.video/PJl3VZHzXk8 Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0sC… @TomorrowTalk_ 💛

My friends from @cerebral_valley are in New York! We’re hosting a coworking day at @HOFCapital tomorrow. Rsvp - partiful.com/e/1GSVS48TnaEU8…

Every podcast I record, my brain unconsciously picks one word that I say about 100 times. Editing a new episode right now, I seem to have chosen “fundamental”. Sorry in advance.

“If people want AI girlfriends, they have to be able to reject you” - @ericjang11 on the need & challenge of replicating equality in relationships with artificial companions 💟 LOVE in the time of AI 💟 @TomorrowTalk_

What are the coolest technologies being worked on today? One would definitely be In-vitro gametogenesis: turning stem cells into human eggs. @Conception CEO @mattkrisiloff breaks it down for us. 🧬

I hate the feeling of knowing that my parents and me are (probably) a generation too early to really benefit from longevity and aging research

. @eladgil on investing in AI, past technology waves, & incumbents vs startups! Ep #12 of @TomorrowTalk_