Newsletters
All the Live and Learn Newsletters
Fifth Starship Flight, Machines of Loving Grace and Firefly Video | Live and Learn #53
> Do something that makes you feel more creative, more alive, more human. Something that sets your brain on fire. Something that you love doing more than anything else in the world. Something that no one can do just like you. Something that can’t be playbooked...
Meta is Winning, AlphaChip, NotebookLM, and More | Live and Learn #52
> After thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it...
OpenAI o1, Carpentopod and Diatom Art | Live and Learn #51
> I believe that we're now entering a phase in startup history when building a $1m ARR business with a 5 people team is going to be not just possible, but _easy_. **An environment of low defensibility and high consensus produces a fragmentation of entrepreneurship**...
Diffusion Models as Game Engines, 100M Context Windows and AlphaProteo | Live and Learn #50
> The solar panel is wizardry manifest. It literally prints energy from free shit that falls out of the sky. – Ben James - [(source)](https://climate. benjames. io/solar-off-grid/) [**100M Context Window** by Magic](https://magic. dev/blog/100m-token-context-windows)...
An AI Scientist, Meta's Sapiens, and Grok 2 | Live and Learn #49
> I am, day in and day out, a skeptic of all claims. Whenever someone tells me “[new technology] is going to change the world, ” my general response is indifference. – Nicholas Carlini - [(source)](https://nicholas. carlini. com/writing/2024/how-i-use-ai...
More advanced Robotics, Neuralink Podcast and SAM 2 | Live and Learn #48
> When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance. – Paul Graham - [(source)](https://paulgraham. com/taste. html) [**The Unicorn Project** by Gene Kim](/booknotes/the-unicorn-project)...
Llama 3.1, Interactive Avatars and Mathematical AI | Live and Learn #47
> A system being unpredictable doesn't mean that it is enchanted, and magical explanations for things aren't really explanations. – Robert Sapolsky - [(source)](https://www. goodreads...
Text to 3D, Robot TeleVision, and Neuralink Livestream | Live and Learn #46
> In life, it’s often not what you know, but who you know that opens the most doors. Bruce Booth - [(source)](https://lifescivc. com/2024/07/a-molecular-biologists-advice-for-life/) [**Joscha Bach Synthetic Consciousness Talk** by CCC](https://m. youtube. com/watch...
SSI Inc, Situational Awareness, and Runway Gen3 | Live and Learn #45
> Just as the human world is a society of selves, your body is a society of cells. – Kasra - [(source)](https://www. bitsofwonder. co/p/a-revolution-in-biology) [**Genomes by Design** by Arc Institute](https://arcinstitute. org/news/blog/bridge)...
More Video Models, WWDC and Computex | Live and Learn #44
> Our techno-capital machine is a thermodynamic mechanism that systematically hunts for and then maximally exploits the cheapest energy it can find. – Casey Handmer - [(source)](https://caseyhandmer. wordpress...
Microsoft Build, AWS Summit and the Mind of LLMs | Live and Learn #43
> We no longer have to settle for log cabins when we can build skyscrapers. – Packy McCormick - [(source)](https://www. notboring. co/p/better-tools-bigger-companies) [**Mapping the Mind of LLMs** by Anthropic](https://www. anthropic. com/news/mapping-mind-language-model)...
Google IO, GPT4-o and AlphaFold 3 | Live and Learn #42
> When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. – Paul Graham - [(source)](https://paulgraham. com/superlinear. html) [**GPT-o announcement** by OpenAI](https://m. youtube. com/playlist...
Astribot, Simulon, and Reversible Computation | Live and Learn #41
> There are no natural resources. There are only natural raw materials. It is human creativity that transforms raw materials into resources through technological innovations. – Robert Zubrin – [(source)](https://quillette...
Starbase Update, Llama 3 and Faster Data Transfers | Live and Learn #40
> When you have no home, the whole world is your home. Be a nomadic minimalist to break dependencies on stuff. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived by carrying nothing, then finding or making what they needed. This quote is from Derek Sievers’s book "How to Live"...
Stable Audio 2, Terraform Industries and Bigger Chips | Live and Learn #39
> The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. – Daniel J. Boorstin [**Terraform Industries** by S3](https://www. youtube. com/watch? v=NngCHTImH1g)...
Nvidia GTC, Devin, and Neuralink | Live and Learn #38
> Our bias is that technological progress is good, actually. – Packy McKormick – [(source)](https://www. notboring. co/p/techno-optimistic-media) [**Devin** by Cognition](https://www. youtube. com/watch? v=fjHtjT7GO1c)...
Google's Genie, LLMs at home, and OS-Copilot | Live and Learn #37
> The only moments we end up fully enjoying are the ones which are so obviously Good that the evaluation hum shuts off. We get wrenched out of our assessment and forced into presence. – Nat Eliason - [(source)](https://blog. nateliason...
Open AI’s Sora, AI Sound Effects, and Gemini 1.5 | Live and Learn #36
> The programming language of the future is called human. – Jensen Huang - [(source)](https://www. youtube. com/watch? v=ytZcvwZxkrg) [**Sora** by OpenAI](https://openai. com/sora). Finally, OpenAI has released its take on text-to-video generation...
Robust Robotics, 3D Manipulation, and the Rise of Spatial Computing | Live and Learn #35
> We believe that if we make both intelligence and energy “too cheap to meter”, the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils. Pencils are actually quite technologically complex and difficult to manufacture...
Alpha Geometry, Morpheus 1 and AI Dubs | Live and Learn #34
> I’ve tried blanketing myself in books. Eventually they saturate my mind; the soggy attention not letting in one more grain of sugar; one more grain of someone else’s thoughts. Other peoples’ thoughts are a kind of sedative—they’ve already done the hard work of thinking them...
Robotics, Rabbit R1, and the Beginning of the Post-Truth Era | Live and Learn #33
> Exceptional people working together is the closest thing we have to a philosopher’s stone. Great teams are akin to true alchemy—creating something from nothing. Fight for them. It’s always worth it. – Alex Wang - [(source)](https://alexw. substack...
FunSearch, DeWave, and Music FX | Live and Learn #32
> A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine. ” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe...
GNoME, Quantum Computing, and Google's Gemini | Live and Learn #31
> The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces...
AI Video Generation, ChipNeMo, and Real-Time Image Generation | Live and Learn #30
> Purpose turns impediments to happiness into *sources* of happiness — because meaning is our greatest driver of long-term joy. – Nik Göke - [(source)](https://nik...
OpenAI Dev Day, Github Universe and Sam Altman leaving OpenAI | Live and Learn #29
Frankly, it has been a little overwhelming. The pace of development and the direction everything is going feels insane. People are building magical tools, right *now* and everything seems in constant flux. And still, the things now are only a glimpse of what is yet to come...
Talking Robots, Futurehouse and the Role of Computation & AI in Biotech | Live and Learn #28
> Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten...
Adobe Max, The Techno Optimist Manifesto and Nvidia's Eureka | Live and Learn #27
> We trade freedom not for safety but for the *illusion* of safety. – Packy McCormick - [(source)](https://www. notboring. co/p/riskophilia? publication_id=10025&post_id=138027499) [**Eureka: Using GPTs to train Robots** by Nvidia](https://blogs. nvidia...
Metaverse Interviews, GPT Improvements and Meta Connect | Live and Learn #26
> You will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world then of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it. – James Somers – [(source)](https://jsomers...
DALL·E 3, AlphaMissense and Improvements to Google Bard | Live and Learn #25
> It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn...
Fury AI Drones, ASML manufacturing, and Seamless Translation | Live and Learn #24
I know this edition is way way way too late, but I was traveling the last few weeks and didn't find the time to publish on my usual bi-weekly schedule. On the flip side, this one has a lot more content than usual because I didn't stop gathering links over that time 😌...
Brain2Music, Biosecurity Risks, and FlyWire: A Connectome of a Fruit Fly Brain | Live and Learn #23
> The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough. – Ralph Waldo Emerson [**AudioCraft** by Meta](https://ai. meta. com/blog/audiocraft-musicgen-audiogen-encodec-generative-ai-audio/)...
Room Temperature Superconductors, Llama2 and Single Photon Cameras | Live and Learn #22
> On our indeterminately long journey between now and death, we try our best to not wake up terrified every day of just how finite life is. – Nat Eliason - [(source)](https://blog. nateliason. com/p/church-of-science) [**Room-Temperature-Superconductors**](https://arxiv...
The AI Dilemma, RoboCat and How to do Great Work | Live and Learn #21
> While superintelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade. — OpenAI - [(source)](https://openai. com/blog/introducing-superalignment) [**The A. I. Dilemma** by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin](https://www. youtube. com/watch? v=xoVJKj8lcNQ)...
Joi, ChemCrow and the Economic Potential of Generative AI | Live and Learn #20
> What AI *could be* – A way to make everything we care about better. – Marc Andreessen - [(source)](https://pmarca. substack. com/p/why-ai-will-save-the-world) [**LLMs with chemistry tools** by Andres M. Bran et al. ](https://arxiv. org/pdf/2304. 05376...
Nvidia Keynote, MusicLM, and Apple's Vision Pro | Live and Learn #19
> My definition of magic: competence so much more advanced than yours, with such alien mental models that you cannot predict the outcomes of the model at all. – Autotranslucence - [(source)](https://autotranslucence...
Mind Reading, Senatorial Hearings and AI Image Editing | Live and Learn #18
In this edition: AI can read people's minds now, it can also smell, and help to edit pictures in magical ways, while at the same time is still not able to handle some very simple questions such as: What is the fastest marine mammal...
100k Token Contexts, AI Tutors and Google/IO | Live and Learn #17
AI is moving at an ever-accelerating pace and this becomes more and more evident the more I read about it. There are way over 100 tabs bookmarked that I haven’t read yet, and soon I will bookmark the next 100. And this to me is insane...
Software², Superabundant Intelligence, and MiniGPT | Live and Learn #16
> The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. — Thomas Nagel - [(source – Mind and Cosmos)](https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos) [**MiniGPT** by Vision CAIR](https://github...
Planning for AGI, Code that Fixes Itself and SAM | Live and Learn #15
> If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter. – Eliezer Yudkowsky - [(source)](https://time...
GPT-plugins, signs of AGI, and an Open Letter | Live and Learn #14
> Sometimes it's weird to remember that we're all effectively competing to hit the right keys on our keyboards in the right order and that if we do it for long enough we can buy a house. – Nik Milanovic – [(source)](https://twitter...
Computational Languages, GPT-4 and Midjourney v5 | Live and Learn #13
> I'm a person who's only satisfied if I feel I'm being productive. I like figuring things out. I like making things. And I want to do as much of that as I can. – Stephen Wolfram - [(source)](https://writings. stephenwolfram...
AI video animation, Sidney and Why Coding Won’t Exist Anymore | Live and Learn #12
> If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality. – Balaji Srinivasan - [(source)](https://balajis. com/the-purpose-of-technology/? utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#:~:text=5%20MIN%20READ-...
Blurry JPGs, the Meaning Crisis, and Spectrograms | Live and Learn #11
> Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance. – Epicurus [**ChatGPT is a Blurry JPG of the Web** by Ted Chiang](https://www. newyorker. com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web)...
Zeroth Principle Thinking, Simulators, and Joscha Bach | Live and Learn #10
> Happiness is the result of being able to derive enjoyment from watching squirrels. It's not the result of understanding how the universe works. – Joscha Bach [**Optimism Shapes Reality** by Alexander Wang](https://alexw. substack. com/p/optimism-shapes-reality)...
Biotechnology, Democratizing AI and Spinoza | Live and Learn #9
> Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity...
Computational Selves, MinDVis and AI takeoff | Live and Learn #8
> I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. – Eric Schmidt - (source: [How Google Works](https://www. goodreads. com/book/show/23158207-how-google-works)) [**The Computational Boundary of a “Self”** by Michael Levin](https://www. frontiersin. org/articles/10...
3D in the Browser, Neurons in a Petri Dish, and the Beauty of Splines | Live and Learn #7
> An artist writes for the same reason Da Vinci swang his brush: to capture the essence of life. – Nik Göke When you work and you forget how time passes, that's when you know that you are working on the right thing. I've been forgetting time a lot lately...
ChatGPT, Neuralink, and Advice Against Procrastination | Live and Learn #6
> Worship the time you have. Spend time on being weird because that means you’re being yourself. Be kind to those who disagree with your weirdness. – Tim Denning - [(source)](https://timdenning...
Richard Feynman; Ambition and How Sound Works | Live and Learn #5
> When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are *merely* a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror. – Richard Feynman - [source](https://www...
Collision Detection, Synthetic Biology and AI | Live and Learn #4
> The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. — Sam Altman [Indistractable by Nir Eyal](/booknotes/indistractable). Not a great read to be honest. . . A branch book...
Creativity, AlphaTensor and Motivation | Live and Learn #3
> The history and the future of humanity can be seen as just the aggregate of all the individual life stories evolving through time. — Ray Dalio (in [Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order](https://www. amazon. com/dp/1982160276)) [Creativity Inc...
Clippy, Resetting the Loop and Complexity | Live and Learn #2
> We live in an era where nearly the entire sum of human knowledge is available at our fingertips, and yet people are blissfully unaware of the unique ideas and challenges that are pushing our understanding forward. — Algorithm Archive - [source](https://www. algorithm-archive...
Sketchplanations, AI and Armageddon | Live and Learn #1
And yup, this is kinda like an ongoing [/needlestack](/needlestack)). So here we go: [Navalmanack - Naval Ravikant](/booknotes/navalmanack) [Morning Meditation](/posts/morning-meditation) A post about enjoying the beauty of early autumn mornings in Berlin...