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After 5½ years, yesterday marked my last day at Meta.
For those who may not know, I joined via the acquisition of my previous company, where we set out to build a continuously-updating 3D model of the world, enabling devices to understand where they are and what’s around them.
Together with @hulahuub, we believed a unified frame of reference was key to unlocking the next generation of spatial computing applications, from augmented reality to robotics. While we may have been early, it's clear the Cambrian explosion is now beginning—driven by general-purpose AI and a growing network of context-rich sensors.
At Meta, we continued that mission with LiveMaps: a visually, semantically, and physically predictive model of the world, collaboratively built by the devices that use it. It’s a bold vision led by @rapideRobot, and I’ve been incredibly lucky to work alongside him, @mingfeiy, @jajuengel, and the broader Surreal team in Reality Labs Research.
Despite a rocky start (we joined in Jan 2020 👀), I’m proud of the impact we had—kickstarting the @meta_aria academic program, and leading open science efforts to accelerate AI and ML research.
I’m especially proud of our work on the Aria Synthetic Environments and Aria Digital Twin datasets, which pushed the envelope for digital twin research and highlighted the importance of both real and simulated data for Spatial AI. Our team’s work on SceneScript demonstrated the first method for auto-regressively predicting the structure of an environment using end-to-end learning—recently extended by SpatialLM: github.com/manycore-research…
Last year, my family and I relocated to Redmond, Seattle, to spend time closer to Reality Labs Research HQ. While there, I had the chance to tick off a career ambition: delivering a “Mother of All Demos” to MZ and the board. This demo will stand among the defining breakthroughs in human-computer interaction and I’m bullish to watch how the company will execute over the next decade.
As for what’s next, my wife and I recently had our second child, and I’m taking some time to reset back in London—recalibrate my sensors, defrag my hard drive. As a colleague put it: “The grass is always greenest where you water it.” I’m looking forward to doing exactly that here in Europe— taking some time to spend with family and reflecting on the next big thing.
If you're a founder, researcher, or operator working at the edge, please ping me a message, I’d love to connect.
LFG! 🚀🇬🇧💪
That might have overtaken the Google Glass skydive in my ranking of most ambitious tech demos ever.
A truly awesome feat of engineering.
Edward Miller retweeted
welcome to the 9th annual @stateofai report!
ai building better ai, world models, physical ai, geopolitics, cyber defense and 12-month predictions.
read it at stateof(dot)ai or watch my editor’s cut here.
a few of this year’s biggest findings follow:
Edward Miller retweeted
The friction test ⚡️
🧩Our IsaacSim / Omniverse plug-in automatically find the assets you need in your marso library and even builds out test sutites
@nvidiaomniverse
#isaacsim #omniverse #physicalai #simready
Good to see @alexandr_wang carrying on Yann's tradition of keeping Meta’s comms team on their toes.
.@Muse might actually be the closest instantiation of the metaverse we've seen to-date.
🔥
Edward Miller retweeted
Join us over some drinks and food. We'll explore these questions and ask what the autonomous knowledge economy should look like before its defaults are chosen for us. We’ll be joined by Kush Madlani (CTO, Wexler.ai), @TweetEdMiller (founder, ex-Meta Reality Labs Research), and additional guests.
How will knowledge be valued, traded, and trusted, when the participants are AI agents?
That's the question we're putting in the room at the next Frontiers Night, in London next Wednesday, with @sotalikesfuture
Read more below and join us!
sotaletters.substack.com/p/f…
📣 In London later this month, I'm organizing an event on "Autonomous Knowledge Economy", where we'll exploring themes around agentic information discovery.
Who else should be in the room?
Excellent commitment to the bit
A DEVELOPER WALKED ON STAGE DRESSED AS A 1973 ENGINEER AND "PREDICTED" THE FUTURE OF PROGRAMMING. THE TWIST: EVERYTHING HE DESCRIBED WAS ALREADY INVENTED 40 YEARS EARLIER AND WE STILL REFUSE TO USE IT.
32 minutes from Bret Victor, doing the most quietly savage talk on our entire industry.
-> The idea that lands: we write code as step-by-step text instructions and call that "Just how programming is". He shows four better ways -- all discovered in the 60s and 70s, all abandoned.
Manipulate the data directly instead of typing blind code. Tell the machine your goal instead of every tiny step. We saw all this, then walked away.
Why? The moment you're sure you know what programming is, you stop seeing anything better. That certainty is the cage.
And now AI is dragging us back to exactly what he begged for -- you describe the goal in plain words, the machine works out the how. The future he mourned is arriving anyway.
You thought text files were just how code works. This is the talk that shows it was a choice, and maybe the wrong one.
Watch this one. It'll ruin how you see your job ↓
The Polaroid ad with the tagline "Jump in water before data centres drink it up" is cute, but amplifies a falsehood when rational discussion in UK about AI risks/opportunities is critical
open.substack.com/pub/rowlan…
Since March I've been running a research circle in London called FRONTIERS, backed by ARIA (the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency).
One challenge we faced: how does a group of researchers build knowledge together, not in parallel?
So I built Babel. 🧵
Two asks:
📣 Researchers in causal inference, forecasting, behavioural science, graphical models, or agent networks, these are the questions our circle exists for. I'd love to hear from you.
📣 Building at this intersection, or just curious? Let's talk.
More on the group: frontiers.net
We're pushing the limits of knowledge and epistemology: causal reasoning, forecasting, and the behaviour of human and agent networks.
/end 🧵
