geoffschmidt

It's a tactic, the only the latest of many, to go after people who use Facebook to communicate without paying for ads (that is to say - without paying current auction prices for the attention of the recipients of their messages.)

There is a belief that there is going to be at least one more breakout success in startup AI labs - rather than OpenAI and Anthropic being the final word - and so investors want to own a part of whichever companies seem most likely to be that success. If you start from that premise and stack rank what company that might be, you could quite reasonably put TypeSafe toward the top of that list right now, based on the people at the company and the ability they've demonstrated to ship stuff that people care about and cut through the noise in a crowded space.

Also the situation isn't static. Investors know that the act of writing them a $870M check itself increases the chance that they'll be one of the winners, because that will attract more talent, customers, and funding to the company in a self-reinforcing cycle. And investors know that other investors know that, and that someone is going to write them that $870M check, so to some extent they're forced to think of the company as having already been successful at the fundraising and already having that momentum boost.

Only a small number of investors in the world can play the game at this level, because you have to smart enough to be right (often enough), and you have to be established enough to see the deals (be on every CEO's short list - because CEOs are only going to seriously pitch 5-10 VCs on a hot deal, if that). Otherwise you can't pull it off. Martin Casado and his team are among the few that can and I think their results reflect that.

But they have "learned to implement any of the algorithms we know that we have used to make strong chess engines". Ask Claude Code to write you a chess engine. Your objection is that they don't implement MCTS in the neurons themselves? Neither does a human, we use a C compiler when we want to play chess using MCTS.

That's a separate question from whether an LLM (unaided by a C complier) can learn to play chess as well as human (also unaided by a C compiler). Certainly humans can't become grandmasters only by reading chess transcripts on the web, and certainly humans require many "thinking tokens" during a game to play effectively. Do you know for sure that a transformer can't reach grandmaster level if it is allowed to learn by playing games (as humans do) and is given a sufficient number of thinking tokens during the game? It seems near certain that they could, if someone wanted to spend the money (and I don't see why anyone would.)

That wasn’t my takeaway from it at all. I think he’s quite precise in his definitions and the point he’s making about Rust, even if I found the prose a bit fatiguing due to the LLMisms.

Personally I think that the world needs more of your optimism. But what does your crystal ball say about energy costs and political stability?

It’s one thing to say that AI will help everyone create immersive games, but skyscrapers won’t be free unless energy is free. Do you also assume that AI will solve fusion?

What happens to the individuals who are not “strong” and how do they hold onto their remote work jobs? Why will the biomedical research technology you’re positing not be used to create biological weapons, or do you assume that AI also creates universal peace and harmony? If so, how does it do that while also preserving our ability to have our own ideas and disagree with each other?

If we want the great future you’re imagining, I think history teaches that we need to give at least as much attention to these questions as we do to making the technology work.

I think their work earns "theory" because it makes specific predictions both about how to make more effective prompt injection attacks and what activations you'd observe in the LLM during those attacks, and can also be plausibly extrapolated to suggest useful future research directions.

They were adopted by professionals long ago, and those highly tuned and validated proprietary models are going to kick the butt of the models that you have access to every day of the week.

Claude is already shockingly good at reverse engineering. Try it – it's really a step change. It has infinite patience which was always the limited resource in decompiling/deobfuscating most software.

And when you set them on fire, it lets the air and sunlight back out!

At 0:16 it looks like they're heating the board from below?