Childhood nutrition, Dell Invests America, Amazon Leo, NASA finds life's building blocks, Levin on Lex Round 2 + The Thinking Game + Dose Fuel + Hearing Aids
Thanks, Packy, for the warm welcome (newbie here!). The Michael Levin interview was a real highlight.
It’s rare to see a scientist bridge the gap between hard biology and the philosophical questions of 'mind' so fearlessly. His idea of 'persuadability' across all systems adds a very optimistic layer to how we might relate to AI and nature in the future—not as dominators, but as collaborators in a larger 'cognitive light cone.'
Really appreciate you curating these kinds of deep dives amidst the tech news.
Absolutely- that was a great read and having been trying to better understand the AI infrastructure myself recently, the amount of detail he was able to find and share was incredible. Subscribed and hoping to see more posts in the future!
But imo it's *because* of that chip specific stuff that there's a gravity pulling the hyperscalers to expand both up into the chip layer and down into the model layer. Just as custom silicon gives cost advantage, optimizing the model layer to that custom silicon will provide cost advantages, leading to full vertical integration (and likely leaving models without custom silicon struggling to compete). And after that solidifies, the transition to horizontally spread throughout the app layer begins
It cannot be expressed enough how intelligent Mike Levin (and his whole lab / approach) is and just how important it probably is to the future of humanity. The collaborative and multi-disciplinary approach is leading to discoveries and work that is absolutely transformative. He's probably the closest thing we have to a modern Isaac Newton or Einstein or DaVinci, and I wish I was being hyperbolic.
His YouTube videos get like a mere hundred or maybe thousand views. We gotta find more ways to get him in the public sphere - you and Lex promoting is a win
I think that discovery means that when we do find alien life (probably microbes) on worlds around other stars, it's likely to not be so different from our sort of life. Maybe a few different amino acids, maybe not (we still don't know why life here is optimized for these particular ones).
Also, are these sugars and animo acids found showing any particular handedness? Life on Earth is quite picky, and chemistry gives about a 50/50 split. Is that what we see in the Bennu samples?
In re Zipline: it’s great to see someone write “malnutrition” instead of using the euphemism “food insecurity.” Think of what the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, could have done. Instead, Musk, Steve Davis, and the High-Tech Baby Luke Ferritor dismantled USAID, which, according to projections will kill 14 million people. An estimated one-third of these preventable deaths will be children. According to witnesses, Ferritor giggled at his keyboard as he dismantled USAID, setting in motion an administrative genocide unlike any the modern world has seen. Musk, too, found it funny, posting: “we could have gone to parties this weekend. Instead, we fed USAUD into the wood chipper.” Unbelievable sociopathology. Only Mao could surpass this via starvation, or Cambodia’s Pol Pot. Musk’s charity is a joke, a Potemkin prop. Along with holding the title of world’s richest man, Musk can lay claim to his induction into the royalty of world’s worst human beings.
Thanks, Packy, for the warm welcome (newbie here!). The Michael Levin interview was a real highlight.
It’s rare to see a scientist bridge the gap between hard biology and the philosophical questions of 'mind' so fearlessly. His idea of 'persuadability' across all systems adds a very optimistic layer to how we might relate to AI and nature in the future—not as dominators, but as collaborators in a larger 'cognitive light cone.'
Really appreciate you curating these kinds of deep dives amidst the tech news.
The TPU and Trainium announcements the past couple weeks were "oh shit" moments that sent me back to re-read your vertical integration series
Also just letting you know that I like the new Fuel for future Doses section!
Thanks Matthew. Let’s see what they yield in a few months / years.
But on TPU / Trainium, yes on vertical integration, but Mohit really nailed the chip specific stuff
Absolutely- that was a great read and having been trying to better understand the AI infrastructure myself recently, the amount of detail he was able to find and share was incredible. Subscribed and hoping to see more posts in the future!
But imo it's *because* of that chip specific stuff that there's a gravity pulling the hyperscalers to expand both up into the chip layer and down into the model layer. Just as custom silicon gives cost advantage, optimizing the model layer to that custom silicon will provide cost advantages, leading to full vertical integration (and likely leaving models without custom silicon struggling to compete). And after that solidifies, the transition to horizontally spread throughout the app layer begins
It cannot be expressed enough how intelligent Mike Levin (and his whole lab / approach) is and just how important it probably is to the future of humanity. The collaborative and multi-disciplinary approach is leading to discoveries and work that is absolutely transformative. He's probably the closest thing we have to a modern Isaac Newton or Einstein or DaVinci, and I wish I was being hyperbolic.
I agree!
His YouTube videos get like a mere hundred or maybe thousand views. We gotta find more ways to get him in the public sphere - you and Lex promoting is a win
X-files... "The truth is out there"...
I think that discovery means that when we do find alien life (probably microbes) on worlds around other stars, it's likely to not be so different from our sort of life. Maybe a few different amino acids, maybe not (we still don't know why life here is optimized for these particular ones).
Also, are these sugars and animo acids found showing any particular handedness? Life on Earth is quite picky, and chemistry gives about a 50/50 split. Is that what we see in the Bennu samples?
In re Zipline: it’s great to see someone write “malnutrition” instead of using the euphemism “food insecurity.” Think of what the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, could have done. Instead, Musk, Steve Davis, and the High-Tech Baby Luke Ferritor dismantled USAID, which, according to projections will kill 14 million people. An estimated one-third of these preventable deaths will be children. According to witnesses, Ferritor giggled at his keyboard as he dismantled USAID, setting in motion an administrative genocide unlike any the modern world has seen. Musk, too, found it funny, posting: “we could have gone to parties this weekend. Instead, we fed USAUD into the wood chipper.” Unbelievable sociopathology. Only Mao could surpass this via starvation, or Cambodia’s Pol Pot. Musk’s charity is a joke, a Potemkin prop. Along with holding the title of world’s richest man, Musk can lay claim to his induction into the royalty of world’s worst human beings.