AI as the killer of open source. Open source software is great because it means you don't have to write everything yourself from scratch. Saves a lot of time. For humans, that is. AIs, however, can write an entire new framework from scratch in a few hours, so this doesn't matter so much. The cost of open source is that every attacker knows the code they want to attack, and they will eventually find exploits. Even in the language itself (e.g. php). The same logic applies to languages as to frameworks. We use Python because it is easy for humans. There is no need to use Python from an AI perspective. Just write a new language with the capabilities you need for a given service and use that. It will have no public code, so there is nothing to learn exploits for. In fact, maybe you should write your own operating system too. The general solution to these attacks is to avoid all open source code entirely. Ironic, because open source code gave birth to AI. It's the more general version of StackOverflow leading to AI leading to no StackOverflow.

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

This is exactly my experience! AI gives you a whole team of mathematicians, a whole team of physicists, a whole team of programmers, a whole team of engineers… Humanity just improved itself in its research and understanding capabilities. If you don’t want that, then you are simply not a researcher.

Mad to think this is how the engine of a WWll German tank was started up back in the day.

String theory is what happens when an intelligent system is starved of sensory input and starts hallucinating. Intelligence needs grounding. For this reason, intelligence is practically never the bottleneck to solving impactful problems. The bottleneck is iterated contact with reality.

I've been prototyping an automated peer review project. With current models you get human level peer review for about $0.10 of tokens. For $5 you can rederive every result, check every statistical inference, and audit every paper cited in both directions. There are about 100m papers in the scientific corpus. Most are not important. Many are sloppy. For structural reasons it's essentially impossible to change published work, even to correct a typo. For $500m today you can thoroughly audit every paper ever written. Every p-hacked result, every plagiarist, every fabrication, every citation club, everything. I don't have $500m so instead I build a tree, focusing on the 1% of papers that carry 99% of the signal, doing a cheap first pass looking for obvious problems. I can find 90% of the nonsense for a few hundred dollars of tokens. Any guesses where the biggest surprises will be found?

If your fundamentals are weak, everything you build on top feels harder, takes longer, and becomes more fragile than it should – and this puts an artificial ceiling on how high you can climb.

Am I the only one a little freaked out by the fact that our neat little lower bounds, nlog(n) in this case, are just slightly wrong. The sublime beauty of math is looking like a weak approximation resulting from our limited human faculties.

OpenAI have proven that matrix multiplication can be done in O(n^2.25) operations, which is a massive improvement. It is especially concerning because these AIs themselves run on matrix algebra. The previous record was O(n^2.37), which had barely moved from O(n^2.4) in 1990. OpenAI blew it away. But... it is a nonconstructive proof. No algorithm was found, only a proof that it must exist.

OpenAI is downplaying this for PR reasons. If you’re a mathematician, you must feel like a nuclear bomb hit, and you’re at ground zero. Reasoning models are two years-old. In that time they went from incapable of basic arithmetic to solving problems humans couldn’t solve for decades. Math is only the beginning. AI will revolutionize the entirety of the human scientific endeavor. Most of us don’t appreciate what that means. What a time to be alive!