D-Squared Musings Week 27

Marc’s doing the rounds on many podcasts to talk about his recent piece on how AI will save the world. This interview with Lex is by far the best in my opinion. Specifically, I enjoyed their discussion on Marc’s approach to learning.

To my knowledge, this is the first interview George has down on his new company tinycorp, which is trying to democratize software development on GPUs. There’s a moment in this conversation that caught fire on AI Twitter where George casually explains the architecture of GPT-4, which OpenAI has attempted to keep secret. The surprise here is that the model is a 220B parameter 8-way mixture model, which means it’s not one massive model (traditionally assumed), but instead is 8 separate experts feeding into a final output.

I’ve spent a little time digging into Fusion this past week, which is based on the insight I’ve pulled from “Fossil Future”. Solar and wind will be useful, but continue our progress toward an energy-abundant future slowly removing fossil fuels we’ll need something more, that’s where Fision and Fusion come into play. Helion in the video above is one of the more discussed startups currently due to their alternative approach. Here’s a skeptical argument countering the above video. Here’s a good run down to what Fusion startups exist today.

I rarely get to see Eric out and about these days, so anytime I come across a new interview is an exciting moment. The interesting about this interview is he rarely discusses physics or economics, but instead culture, art, music, and travel. Good insight into how travel and diverse culture has shaped Eric’s perspective.

Chammath recently completed another interview, which was a long one. There’s an interesting point in the Q&A where someone asks about “pod shops”, which is something Chammath called out in the 2022 bestie awards. This took me down a rabbit this week of research pod shops, otherwise known as massive hedge funds. Specifically, I wanted to what type of work and life these people lived. It didn’t sound sustainable.

I’ve spent a good amount of time these past couple of weeks digging through three of Kapils books 1, 2, and 3. All of which were interesting in their own way. My main takeaway from much of my research into his mindset is that the key to ultimate freedom is freedom from the mind. Try to be mindless, not mindful, which in practical terms, is to dissociate oneself from the mind.