Tag: AI
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The Top Three AGI-Proof Careers and What They Reveal About Our Humanity and The Future
I’m very interested in what society looks like if we achieve AGI but don’t end up in a totally unrecognizable utopia/dystopia. One question is what work will be meaningful in such a world. A lot of what we do today will be rendered irrelevant, but I’ve developed some conviction that…
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You Can Just Program Biology
The Information Age was a consequence of two developments: the ability to work with information programmatically and the democratization of that capability. We are now entering a similar period in biology. We can now program life itself with the ever cheaper tools of synthetic biology. We believe this era of…
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Collaborative Intelligence
Humans are not simple creatures. Although we like to present ourselves as coherent wholes to the outside world, on the inside, we’re divided. Marvin Minsky argues in The Society of Mind that minds are composed of smaller agents, each with specialized roles and drives. Inside Out similarly imagines the mind…
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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…
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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…
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Vertically Integrated and AI-First
Crossposted from the USV blog A new pattern is emerging that we are excited about at USV: entrepreneurs are upgrading physical industries with an AI-first and vertically integrated approach. Instead of selling software to industry incumbents, startups are increasingly deciding to use their technical know-how to compete head-on. We think…
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Synchronous Digital Experiences
Synchronous digital experiences feel underrated. As life continues to move increasingly online, they’re our best path to sustained opportunities for collective effervescence. The baseline argument for their power is the appeal of watching sports. I’m not a big sports fan, and even I feel the magic of watching the Super…
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Underrated Internet Communities
What are the most underrated internet communities today? The rationalists and effective altruists were underrated in the 2000s and 2010s. I stumbled on lesswrong in high school (through reddit) and got a kick out of the quirky perspective over there. It felt interestingly orthogonal to debates I was exposed to…
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AI and Art Demo Night
I recently published a post on the USV blog about AI and art. I’ve been reflecting on how intimately connected technology and art are. The art we make is mediated by the tools at our disposal, and the visions technologists pursue are often downstream of the stories artists tell. Since…
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AI Aesthetics
(Crossposted from the USV blog) The word “technology” comes from the Greek word techne, which refers to an art or skill or practice. Plato writes a lot about the concept, often making reference to artists such as flute players as canonical examples of those engaged in a techne. Though today…
Matthew Mandel 