codekansas

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
726
Submissions
216
Member since
Oct 19
AI research @ OpenAI

Fmr: YC W24, AI researcher at FAIR, Autopilot ML engineer at Tesla FSD

Personal website: https://ben.bolte.cc/

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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Humans learn differently from LLMs. LLMs already contain most of the information they need to be able to do PCB layout from reading the entire internet, but they need this kind of fast feedback loop to learn how to extract and use that information in the right way. Humans learn to act at the same time they learn knowledge.
Comment · 2 months ago
A somewhat unpopular opinion, but personally I don't mind being kind of absent in my kids' lives relative to others' expectations. I think there's been some expectation creep around parental involvement for high-achieving couples without much concrete evidence that it hurts long-term outcomes, assuming the child is otherwise healthy and well taken care of. There's also something to be said for leaning on grandparents and other support structures more heavily than a lot of people currently do.

One "superpower" from being married with kids is that your life becomes a lot more predictable. Like, having sex regularly and spending quality family time is probably a healthy part of a balanced, productive lifestyle, and is a good counterbalance to the stresses of a demanding career - it's nice not to always be thinking about how you're going to get laid, or in the event that you do become successful, whether or not your partner is just gold digging you or something. Although a lot of that depends on who you marry and making sure you're both doing good maintenance.

Comment · 3 months ago
It's basically trying to replicate OpenRouter, which works pretty well and has a lot of nice features to abstract away any single provider, such as failover, metering, autoswitching, etc. It's actually a really smart infrastructure abstraction.

I just wish this were solving an actual problem rather than being a fairly transparent attempt to say something approximating, "Hey VCs, OpenRouter just became a unicorn but I can basically vibe code it"

Calling it "Fable-level" feels intellectually lazy / dishonest, but then again, what do you expect when there's so much money on the table.

Comment · 3 months ago
Fable-level, yea, but can it run gstack?
Comment · 4 months ago
I've been thinking for a while that some part of the ebullience towards AI among the American decision-maker class is that it is a good way to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like super-intelligent AI will make up for not being able to build competitive cars and drones. It has the feeling of an easy-to-digest explanation but I'm worried that it's probably wrong.
Comment · 4 months ago
But they're bootstrapped and using their own money, not defrauding investors
Comment · 1 year ago
I suspect that these kinds of things will happen with or without my involvement. Assuming that they do, I would rather that a good open source option exists
Comment · 1 year ago
Oh I see. Yes, we're currently exploring a few different five finger hand options - we will choose whichever option provides the best value. I actually quite like the Inspire hands and we might be able to get a volume discount
Comment · 1 year ago
Really appreciate it :)
Comment · 1 year ago
I think we will just focus on making really great, low-cost hardware and a nice SDK, and let other people experiment with different approaches on the intelligence layer.
Comment · 1 year ago
Well, I believe the competition up until now has mostly been on hardware, but moving forward it will mostly be in software. I don't think we will be outcompeted by Unitree on software. And I hope to capitalize on our engagement with the open source community in a way that Unitree has not.
Comment · 1 year ago
We try to sell it for a fair price while still making money. Actually I think there will be comparably priced humanoids coming out from other companies soon
Comment · 1 year ago
I really do think that building through the open source community is the best way to compete with the big players, even without having a lot of capital. Of course, it doesn't mean we can't execute well, but I do think it's a good way to make a lot of progress without spending a lot of money.

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