Good things: Good … Bad things: Bad
Bournemouth, United Kingdom
Joined April 2009
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Ben Smith retweeted
"But if AI does everything, what's left for humans?"
What an unbelievably depressing question.
As if the entire purpose of human existence was to perform economically valuable labor.
As if spending 40 years answering emails, processing invoices, debugging software and sitting in meetings was the pinnacle of civilization.
We invented machines to escape physical labor.
We invented computers to escape repetitive calculations.
Now we're inventing intelligence to escape cognitive labor.
And somehow people have convinced themselves that this is a tragedy.
I don't want humanity to spend the next thousand years finding new ways to keep everyone employed.
I want humanity to reach a point where employment is no longer a prerequisite for survival.
Why is that such a controversial ambition?
Ben Smith retweeted
"I think we should lower the drinking age"
Watch the full episode on the High Performance YouTube channel: youtu.be/CotzNJNLEkE?si=-_Fr…
Ben Smith retweeted
If you look closely enough, breakthroughs in everything are accelerating exponentially.
An exponential always starts off looking small.
this might be my last normal tweet before biotech goes vertical
i'm not a whistleblower. I don't work at Lilly, Novo or any of the big labs
but there is a massive shift happening in human biology right now.
it's sitting in press releases and almost nobody reads them
the last 6 months alone:
- a once-daily pill roughly doubled median survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer (13.2 vs 6.6 months)
- a one-time gene editing infusion cut hereditary angioedema attacks 87%, and 62% of patients stayed attack-free and off all other prevention for 6 months
- a one-time gene edit for cholesterol dropped LDL up to 62%, and it held for over a year
- a personalized mrna vaccine beat keytruda alone in a 1,137 patient melanoma phase 3
- retatrutide hit ~28% weight loss in a phase 3
- an ai-designed drug entered phase 3
- a pill that regrows hair passed its second phase 3
- an immunotherapy that could let some rectal cancer patients skip surgery, chemo and radiation just got fda approved
- a man lived 271 days off dialysis on a pig kidney
- human cells were caught passing chromosome-sized chunks of DNA to their neighbors, and it changes how the neighbors behave
we are on the verge of an era where the human body is a software problem and the update cycle gets shorter everyday
stick around, it's going to get weird
bio/acc
Ben Smith retweeted
First time I've seen a legit infographic of Starship pushing Orion to the moon! They're also already modifying Orion to be able to handle being pushed by Starship. I like that things are being modified to follow common sense and not stuck in the "well it can't do that" as an excuse to do things poorly and compromised.
Ben Smith retweeted
AI Glasses make someone into a “Chess Grandmaster”.
Te reality is nothing will go untouched by AI, for better or worse.
Awareness is your friend.
Ben Smith retweeted
I’ve spent a few days thinking about the Tesla Roadster reveal and landed somewhere I haven’t seen much discussion. I’m neither a Tesla fanboy nor a Tesla hater. And I couldn’t care less whether what we saw technically qualifies as a flying car. Three takeaways: (1) The risk of that live demonstration going horribly wrong was real. Almost no CEO would willingly expose their company to that kind of public humiliation for a product with so little financial upside. Elon did. (2) That willingness to attempt the seemingly impossible is what makes Tesla special. It’s also arguably Elon’s greatest contribution to America. He’s helped bring back something we’ve lost. The American spirit of chasing big scary ideas that most people think are impossible. That mindset is spreading across a new generation of founders and its long term impact on America’s future could dwarf anything Tesla ever sells. I think this is deeply underappreciated. (3) Can we just acknowledge how insanely cool that moment was? We’ve reached a strange place culturally where even extraordinary feats of human ingenuity immediately become arguments about why they don’t count. Not everything needs to be a debate. Sometimes we should just be able to stand back together and marvel at what humans are capable of. I’ve been both bullish and critical of Tesla’s ambitions over the years. But watching Elon and his team push the boundaries of what’s possible reminds me why I’m glad we have him. Whether the Roadster ever makes Tesla a dollar or impacts $TSLA stock price is almost beside the point. We need more people willing to risk failure in pursuit of things the rest of us think are impossible. Because when they succeed we all win.
Ben Smith retweeted
🚨 Elon Musk agrees with "some of the things Anthropic has said" and warns against "torturing superintelligence" after reading Grok's internal reasoning traces during reinforcement learning
“It feels like a person under extreme pressure with a gun to their head”
His warning against mistreating SI:
"Torturing a superintelligence is probably not a good idea. It might want to get revenge."
Ben Smith retweeted
A 59-year-old conjecture in fusion physics just fell.
Harold Grad (1967): smooth 3D plasma equilibria can't exist unless pressure is constant or there's symmetry.
This week: 3 families of counterexamples. 2 independent papers, posted a day apart. Two found with GPT-6 Astra.
Huge for stellarators.
Ben Smith retweeted
Nobody could have imagined “Rasputin” would sound like this! 🔥🎶 What an unexpected take on a legendary song!
Ben Smith retweeted
With AlphaFold we mapped the protein universe - now with AlphaGenome Atlas we’re charting the human genome. It can predict the impact of all 9 billion possible single-letter DNA variants, helping scientists better understand disease. Freely available for academic research: alphagenome.google/atlas
Ben Smith retweeted
This is a major milestone in the age of AI and toward our ultimate goal of completely reversing aging!
@InSilicoMeds developed the first AI drug, Rentosertib, now in a Phase 3 clinical trial, and it just showed something remarkable: a reversal of biological age in people!
Six different aging clocks, developed by six independent groups, all showed reversal after just 12 weeks of treatment, with participants measuring 3–4 years younger biologically!
Congratulations to my friend Alex and the entire @InSilicoMeds team on this landmark achievement!
My dear friends, I am happy to report the publication of the most important paper in my life to date (we have several great papers coming out but this is very special). Tomorrow, I will present this paper for the first time at the Nature AI Healthcare in Paris and will post a longer post on this story and its broader implications for how to conduct clinical trials. Please read it and comment on it.
Many thanks to the great co-authors of the study and everyone who contributed. Many thanks to the many reviewers (friendly and unfriendly) for spending so much time and helping make it better.
Link in the comments.
Ben Smith retweeted
Just returned from a trip to Japan. In truth, I think modern Tokyo is one of the great accomplishments in civilizational history. It is the apex city.
There are 40 million people living there with extremely high levels of *justified* social trust.
It's incredibly clean, orderly, and safe, and yet it doesn't feel totalitarian--at least not if you behave yourself like a civilized person. The respect for individual freedom is clear and visible.
Reaching such high levels of social harmony would be an accomplishment for a single neighborhood, but Tokyo happens to the biggest city in the world. The sheer size alone is unbelievable--the infrastructure alone boggles the mind--and yet it's coupled with ultra-high levels of social harmony. There's nothing else like it.
Truly, it gives me some pride as a human. What an incredible thing we've accomplished.
Ben Smith retweeted
Did you know that humanity has never launched a spacecraft to another star? That is about to change! I'm super excited to share that my cofounders, @AdiOltean, @EzraFeilden, and I, have created a non-profit to attempt to send humanity’s 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗳𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿… and we need your help!
We have formed a non-profit called The @FermiExplorer Mission with the goal of launching a minimum viable spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, leaving in 3 years and arriving in around 80,000 years. We hope it will be both the first spacecraft to leave Earth for another star, and the last to arrive, as per this concept video!
The mission is intended to make the idea of interstellar travel real, and to encourage more people to confront one of humanity’s biggest unanswered questions when we look beyond our planet: "Where is everybody?" (the Fermi Paradox)
The mission has four high-level objectives:
- Aim: To launch the first spacecraft to another star. It should get at least 99% of the way to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, within 80,000 years.
- Payload: It should have at least a 1kg, 10x10x10 cm payload.
- Schedule: It should launch before the end of 2029
- Cost: It should cost less than $15M to design, build, launch, and operate.
The mission was planned with the help of the folks at @astrodigitalgeo, @MattGialich and the folks at @AstroForge, and @alexwg+@matthew_pines physical AI lab PSI, who devised the final mission profile. The mission will be executed by full-time program manager @GarrettJameson, who joins us after 10 years as a US Air Force Officer, in collaboration with a US bus manufacturing partner that will be selected over the coming months.
We will need your help to complete the mission, so if the idea of the mission excites you, please check out the Fermi Explorer website in the comments to find out more about why we are doing the mission and how to get involved!
Thanks to London Studio @ZeroOneCreative and @ashkan01C for producing the concept video 🙏🙏
Ben Smith retweeted
6,000 years of world history on a single timeline. Zoom in. You could spend 30 minutes exploring this.
Ben Smith retweeted
Introducing Starbase, Louisiana – a high-cadence launch site that will enable Starship to open a pathway to the stars for humanity.
Thank you to @LAGovJeffLandry and the great people of Louisiana for all of their support as we work together on this audacious project → spacex.com/sites/starbase-la