Tag: AI

• USV AI Roundtable #1: AI and Search

  We’re kicking off a new lunch series at USV. We’re going to host monthly roundtables on topics in AI with investors, operators, and researchers in the NYC community. Our first roundtable will be on January 31st on AI and Search. Search engines have been the portal to the internet for…

  January 5, 2024
• Decoding the AI Debate: A Philosophical Perspective

  I had a great time speaking last night on a panel with Brendan McCord of the Cosmos Institute and Zoe Weinberg of ex/ante about venture capital, AI, and philosophy. I was really impressed with the group that convened. People were urgently excited to discuss philosophy of mind and language, technical…

  December 12, 2023
• Friday Links

  

  “You must never lose gratitude for this privileged position that you put each other in.”

  October 26, 2023
• Will natural language be the universal interface?

  

  Today, an app’s functionality is usually exposed for manipulation via an application-specific programming interface. Such interfaces conveniently abstract underlying functionality for easy usage but (1) are accessed via code and (2) are different for different applications. Since LLMs solved NLP, it’s now possible for natural language to be a simple,…

  October 25, 2023
• Friday Links

  “I think that ironic detachment, from a religious perspective, is my weakness. You don’t read about a lot of saints who have ironic detachment.”

  October 6, 2023
• Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning

  This is a cool paper from Anthropic. They trained a model to take the (hard-to-interpret) activations of a neural net and decompose them into distinct features. The goal of this approach is to build a set of features that are causally related to the original model and each uniquely correlate…

  October 5, 2023
• New Gadgets

  Growing up, the tech hardware landscape was highly polytheistic. I had a Gameboy for games, an iPod for music, a camera for pictures, and a phone for communication. Then the smart phone collapsed all of that into a single device, and so for most of my adult life, the only…

  October 2, 2023
• Friday Links

  September 22, 2023
• Optimizing SSBM

  I had a friend in college who was a competitive Super Smash Bros Melee player. Though I’d played Smash before, I realized that the casual play I was used to is a different game altogether. It turns out there are many ways to exploit the game’s relatively simple physics to…

  September 19, 2023
• Michael Nielsen on ASI

  Michael Nielsen published a blog post on existential risks from AI. A lot of AI risk discussion is kind of rote, so it was refreshing to hear Nielsen’s especially first principles-y perspective. Some highlights below– On p(doom) as a “conceptual hazard”: The term “probability of doom” began frustrating me after…

  September 18, 2023