Design Intelligence & Infrastructure @Blocks | Sermo structura est previously @meta

United States
Joined June 2012
David Hamilton retweeted
block.github.io/governed-art… @writesdavid and I elaborate more in ^ post about our recent work at @blocks and why we think this idea is important.
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The people who can a) retain individual thought and critique and b) adopt and deploy ai infrastructure without neglecting (a) is shrinking. There’s plenty of people in group a. And loads of folks in group b. But the overlap is narrowing. I’m more concerned about that decline than any model progress we make.
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David Hamilton retweeted
Berd to Buzz handoff skill is live! Update your apps and install using: npx skills add block/berd --skill buzz-handoff -g
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David Hamilton retweeted
Today we open sourced our no 1 used internal tool, berd. An agent where you can byo harness/models while keeping your work and context in one place, in an unhinged environment where you can build your dream team of agents. Try it out at berd.xyz!
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David Hamilton retweeted
step two of "don't delegate understanding" is proceeding apace
please consider using our models to help defend your systems
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Our obsession with making more invades the very nature of what humans need: utility that does what it says it will do.
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David Hamilton retweeted
Buzz is sponsoring AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe in September! If you're there, stop by the workshop @bradleyaxen @morganmartn @tlongwell_bzz and @wesbillman are running to help you get the most out of Buzz! Join us and get your agents buzzing 🐝🍯 agntconmcpconeu26.sched.com/…
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David Hamilton retweeted
Block keeps experimenting with AI, and this is so much fun to watch!!! 👏🏻
We’ve built a faster way for investors around the world to research @Blocks. Today, we're launching the Block Investor Relations Bot. Investors can now ask questions in natural language and get answers directly from Block's public materials. 🔎 Search Shareholder Letters, 10-Ks / 10-Qs, Investor Day content, and more. 📚 Source citations with every answer. 🌎 Supports multiple languages. 🛡️ Only uses publicly available IR materials. Ask away: block.xyz/ir-bot
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Replying to @mr_r0b0t
A few quick tips: - ephemeral channels. Features or big bugs go here - your agent should create channels and add you and their team to them. It should post a kickoff message there too - your agent is better at searching buzz than you - have ~10 named agents that know each other
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Probably on Buzz.
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David Hamilton retweeted
Buzz Desktop v0.5.3 is a massive update 🐝🐝🐝 Dozens of improvements across agents, voice, shared compute, communities, messaging, account recovery, and Linux. Automatic huddle transcription for agents, a macOS agent menu, and much more 👇 github.com/block/buzz/releas…
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The language layer matters. Don’t confuse technical vomit with compelling UX. More translation layers needed.
LLMs in your product are best behind the scenes as an intelligence layer raising LLM output to the user is seldomly good UX
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This. “…most work is highly contextual and not easily encoded into a gradable environment; even if we can observe a "golden path" taken by a human which we believe to be good, it's challenging to understand whether alternate, counterfactual paths produce good or bad outcomes.
Today is my last day at @OpenAI. I'm glad to have spent the last eight months of my life working here! I'm starting a new company focused on the production of high-quality reinforcement learning datasets: 1. The generalization ability of LLMs is clearly very poor, with "spiky" capabilities even in areas that have received tremendous amounts of investment and attention. For example, despite multiple years with tens (if not hundreds) of billions invested, even coding capabilities don't demonstrate "generality" -- even if every model can solve Codeforces questions or port C++ to Rust better than I can, I still have to manually "deslop" pull requests. 2. The vast majority of economically productive capabilities are not well represented in existing data offerings. First, there's a certain art to the design of an RL dataset which most vendors, not having upstreamed data into large training runs themselves, don't really understand. Second, and more importantly, most work is highly contextual and not easily encoded into a gradable environment; even if we can observe a "golden path" taken by a human which we believe to be good, it's challenging to understand whether alternate, counterfactual paths produce good or bad outcomes. The basic premise here is that I have a clear understanding of what labs need/want, having explicitly been on the other side and having been involved at every level from procurement all the way through training, and I'm able to provide it. I also believe that data needs will grow tremendously in the coming years, especially as frontier labs face increasing pressure toward profitability, and that they won't get the relevant capabilities "for free" through scaling alone; instead, they'll need to spend >$100B on precise, well-targeted data acquisition. Our first products will be focused on biology and statistical reasoning: 1. First, datasets that address long-horizon scientific reasoning, drawing on my work on GeneBench-Pro with @jeremyli__. Frontier models are still unable to reliably execute "messy" data analyses that require judgment, exploration, and adaptive revision (GB-Pro passrate on GPT-5.6 Sol scarcely exceeds 30%); to address this, we have the ability to generate thousands of high-quality problems with known ground truths which can be reliably graded. (In contrast, most existing RL data for bioinformatics is either massively over- or under-specified, and will probably break your model when you train on it.) Moving the "reliability gap" from 30% to >90% is obviously required for scientific acceleration, and -- despite my skepticism about generalization of RL -- is one of the *most promising datasets* conceivable when it comes to yielding generalization benefits for models' overall reasoning capabilities. 2. Second, datasets that address capabilities relevant to day-to-day workflows. Imagine a scientist snapping a picture of some experimental process or result -- say, a cell culture plate or a Western blot -- and asking Claude a question. Frontier models remain quite bad at these questions, especially those with multimodal components. But they're obviously required for acceleration of scientific discovery; before we can dream about automating science, we have to begin with shoring up these basic, generalist capabilities. Beyond these two, we hope to expand to adjacent fields (chemistry, materials science, etc.), and then even further into fields with more direct economic applicability like healthcare and white-collar office work. I strongly encourage labs with data needs to reach out. We offer industry-standard pricing and terms, and like I said -- I know how this process works, what good data looks like, and how to demonstrate to you, convincingly, that you'll be able to upstream our data into your training processes without issue. My DMs are open!
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I’ve started branching communications: for humans; for agents. We should not confuse agentic capability with human understanding. For one, we’re giving our colleagues migraines via md files.
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My wife: how was work? Me, as agentic building changes the very nature of work:
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David Hamilton retweeted
if you're using Buzz and your sidebar feels chaotic, this might be why. I've been building the app for a few months now and figured out how I like to stay organized. one channel per feature. drag it through states. archive when done. that's my whole system.
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~8 months ago I pivoted from leading design teams to focus on applied AI as an IC. With Buzz launch it feels like I’m back to leading teams. But the teams are agents. Wild times.
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Context can carry a lot of momentum that is otherwise lost.
Agents in Buzz have their own memories. They act like themselves no matter where they’re running. Memories are encrypted. Only you and your agent can read them. Ask your agent about their core memory. Tell them you want them to grow and learn as they work.
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