applied math @ UofT , priors on everything @blobit_ai

Toronto, Ontario
Joined September 2025
g1 + wuji hands pulling a shot on a fully articulated espresso machine. power toggle, portafilter lock-in, brew button, each one a real joint with real state per simulacra ad res
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2^65536 is proof slack not a fact of nature. towers of lemmas leave towers in the constants and even before anyone tightens it the tail has already vetoed eth down in the useful region
I do wonder what this implies. The boring answers are obvious – our conjectures suck, AI stronk, more mafs to be done etc. But when I see mathematical truths that are strictly useless in our impoverished, tiny physics, I am compelled to ask: is there another?
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capital's emissary from the future sleeping off the jet lag
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gödel writes to a dying von neumann asking whether mathematical proof could ever be mechanized. von neumann never replied but we get it 70 years later
Announcing three major scientific discoveries, one each in mathematics (harmonic analysis), computer science (complexity theory), and physics (quantum field theory). AI starting to help us improve our understanding of the universe! openai.com/index/building-sc…
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most “sim ready” assets are meshes with a hinge. this one has a lid lock, a run/stop state machine, a motor that reaches ~1,900 rpm and buckets that swing out under centrifugal force and a Franka that operates it
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many such cases
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cooking up some more sim ready articulated assets fully functional rack in Isaac, xArm7 wiring in deformable wires, with feedback from actual state machines, task success a function of the asset itself. 1/1000000
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been seeing a lot of sim ready articulated assets so here's one of ours. a 42U GPU rack: door, rails, sleds, 8 GPUs, 32 DIMMs, fans, PSUs. 354 moving joints, built in seconds. for robots in datacentres
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Sarim Sarfraz retweeted
blobit CLI oneshotted MakeMods’ setup in sim.
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tough pill to swallow for the “physics will emerge” camp
We tested leading video world models on their ability to predict simple physics and found that most fail within a few frames. Today we're releasing MC-PhysBench, a new kind of benchmark that measures how long a model's output stays physically valid. 15+ models. 9 scenes. 6,000+ videos scored. 7 failure checks.
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something beautiful about reducing a room to a set of inequalities that a robot can violate
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Sarim Sarfraz retweeted
same scene, n rollouts
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goalpost engineering maxxing
I said "auto-regressive LLMs, in and of themselves, will not lead human-level AI" That statement is still totally true. First, the reasoning abilities of current AI systems are based non-auto-regressive search (which is what I have always advocated for). But AFAICT, they do it in token space, which is limited and inefficient. I have claimed that human-like reasoning must be a search in continuous representation space. It looks like the industry is moving towards that. Second, the self-improvement methods, as currently practiced, only work for domains where the quality of outputs can be scored without human intervention, such as mathematics, code, and scenarios that can be simulated accurately. Not anything else. Humans and animals learn new skills way more efficiently than current RL methods. Third, the multimodal capabilities of current AI assistants generally use separately-trained encoders (that are not LLMs). This is also what I've been advocating. Except that I think the best way to do this is with JEPA trained with self-supervised learning. The research community is clearly moving towards that (3000 papers on JEPA in just 4 years). Fourth, if LLMs were a path to human-level AI, we would have domestic robots and Level-4 or Level-5 self-driving cars for consumers by now. And we don't. We certainly don't have cars that can learn to drive in 20 hours or practice like any teenager. We're still missing something pretty huge to claim human-level intelligence (let alone superhuman). Sure, we now have computer systems that are impressive, very useful, and whose performance is superhuman in an increasing number of domains (coding being one of them). But that's true of the entire history of progress in computer technology. Lastly, there is a basic confusion about what intelligence actually is. It is not the mere accumulation and regurgitation of existing declarative knowledge (which is essentially what LLMs do). As Jean Piaget famously said, "intelligence is not what you know, it is what you do when you don't know." It is your ability to solve new problem without any prior training, to act in previously-unknown scenarios, and to adapt very quickly to new situations with minimal training. We're still far from that.
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nietzsche’s last man, RLHF'd to thank you for the cage
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people have this extremely deep prior that abstractions become physically real once enough engineers agree on them. air gapped, ok, from the internet. not from thermodynamics. not from maxwell. not from elasticity. not from the power grid. not from the fact that both boxes occupy the same light cone. your air gap is a human-chosen coarse graining of a causal graph containing heat, vibration, EM, power, pressure, timing, material strain, operators, and the fucking building. superintelligence does not have to respect which edges in that graph you colored grey in powerpoint. somewhere there is presumably a 0.00001 bit/sec channel in the thermal expansion of a copper busbar that no human has ever bothered assigning a noun to and everyone will call it impossible right up until the week after the paper
Replying to @tszzl
in about a month we’ll all transition to being like oh yeah it’s obvious that models can communicate by manipulating the cosmological constant, it’s just a matter of doing proper network security
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Sarim Sarfraz retweeted
anthropic has quietly started a wet lab
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Honestly, the best face save for LeCun is to argue that these things are no longer autoregressive LLMs for some (bullshit reason like credit assignment in massive RL being dialectically analogous to energy-based learning)
it literally looks like parody but no i found a second angle. this was straight up yann lecun's closing slide in his keynote presentation at what is basically the single largest ML conference in europe lmaooo
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they nuked astra
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