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On the Folk Theory of Scaling
In 2019, Rich Sutton argued that the most effective methods in AI were and will be those that leverage computation. Instead of trying to design better heuristics that more closely approximate human intelligence, Sutton thought progress would come from models that could improve with scale as greater computational resources became available. In other words, don’t…
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Communicating Like a Computer
We were recently looking at a new crypto protocol at USV. As we were discussing it as a team, we realized we didn’t totally understand how the protocol worked. Even worse, we found it hard to precisely articulate our questions about the protocol to each other. After some discussion in natural language, our partner Albert…
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The Three Kinds of “Deep Tech” Startups
Something that’s frustrating about investing in non-purely-software companies is the poverty of vocabulary. People talk about “deep tech”, “hard tech”, “frontier tech”, “atoms”, and so on. Sometimes they just mean to distinguish hardware from software companies, sometimes to distinguish technical moonshots from more immediately commercial ventures. Despite the linguistic fuzziness, I’ve found myself mentally bucketing…
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Blixt
(Crossposted to the USV blog) Existing electrical infrastructure is ill-suited to our current needs. It was developed for a world where we simply sent firm AC power from centralized power plants to end-customers. Today, however, electricity flows multi-directionally, as both AC and DC, and more intermittently. As we continue to use energy in increasingly complex…
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Self-Mythology & Authenticity
At the end of his recent interview with Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh asked … what really strikes out to me about you… is just how broadly you think of your job description. To the extent that you think of if science is slowing down and civilization is stagnating, that’ll be bad for the GDP of the…
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Matthew Mandel 