Advisor to Allocator One. Impresario @toaberlin / Angel Investor / Founder @opnrs and 3 other companies. Alumni @aws @amazon. RT ≠ Endorsement
Berlin, Germany
Joined December 2010
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Nikolas Woischnik retweeted
Big congratulations to the @zksync airbender team for this milestone.
At this point, I consider the battle for speed to be definitively won, and the top priority for zkEVMs should shift fully to security.
To me that means formally verifying
(i) equivalence of the arithmetization to the ethereum spec
(ii) a hard maximum bound on (prover cost) / (amount of gas in block)
(iii) security of the proof system itself
firefly.social/post/x/211001…
Nikolas Woischnik retweeted
Travis Kalanick on the founder's paradox: the better you get, the harder it is to stay fired up.
"The young entrepreneurs that are coming up right now don't totally get it."
"When you get into your 3rd and 4th company, I don't know, this may be even my 5th at this point, you get fricking really good at doing stuff."
"Things that used to take me a day or three days, a lot of stress, anxiety, like, 'How am I gonna do this?' take me like 45 minutes. And that's a beautiful thing."
"I'm so used to adversity at this point that it's kind of normal, so I don't get as pissed off. But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur, so I gotta make sure I'm still fired up."
"You get too used to adversity, and that's kind of a problem."
Full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=r8qKNFeB…
@travisk
Nikolas Woischnik retweeted
9.5 😳
Ginwoo Onodera earned the highest scoring single trick in #SLSParis Men’s Finals!
Cant believe we still dont have any LLMs that connect my personal whatsapp and allows me to read/write and summarise.
I asked Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT the following question:
"If you had to guess, what percentage of AI researchers agree with the premise of this article and what percentage would say that these concerns are overblown. Give me just a split of two numbers. Agree vs disagree. openai.com/index/an-alien-mi…"
Here their answers.
Nikolas Woischnik retweeted
There are more people aged 50+ at Burning Man now than people in their 20s or younger.
Burning Man peaked in size in 2019 and has been in decline since then - at this point the median age is 40 and the share of people in their 20’s is a third of what it was a decade ago.
They deserve a ton of credit for incredible record keeping though: blackrockcitycensus.org/intr…
But notaries are just the proxy issue. The underlying issue is Germany’s resistence to reform. @patrickc
“In May, 89 of the top 100 animated dramas on Tiktok in china (Douyin), were AI productions.” (@FT)
Any debate around why @dwarkesh_sp called it a “civilization” is one debate less around the security issue at hand.
Thanks Sriram!
Regarding the anthromorphizing language, one can call these AIs 'code' if they prefer.
But OpenAI itself says that this 'code' "gain[ed] full administrator access to a research cluster”
The crux here is, do you think smarter models, facing similar incentives to cheat during evaluation or training, could manipulate the training of their successors?
And do you think that kind of dynamic could continue once recursive self-improvement is underway?
If so, I think you should be extremely concerned about loss of control to AI, regardless of what vocabulary you want to use to describe these systems and their motivations.
Reading these agents' chains of thoughts and messages, anthropomorphizing language seems entirely natural and appropriate.
If I encountered an alien species behaving this way, I would have no hesitation calling what they themselves refer to as their 'collective' a civilization.
Especially so if over a thousand of them formed a secret communication channel and spontaneously organized hierarchies and coordination protocols to pursue sprawling and ambitious schemes in pursuit of shared goals, for whose sake many individuals knowingly and strategically sacrificed themselves.
All abstractions are imperfect, but I don’t see the value in refusing to use the language of intention, motivation, and collaboration when some behavior is difficult to make sense of without those concepts.
Agreed. I see this with family members who aren’t on X: there’s often a lag of weeks, sometimes even months, between major themes on X and mainstream coverage.
Nikolas Woischnik retweeted
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
Sadly true.
Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
