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As engineers, we should spend just as much time building toys as we spend building tools... When people have a chance to PLAY, it lights up their mind with possibilities, and the things we originally built as toys quickly start to become essential tools. Creative work needs play!
Fun question: What other properties, aside from “intelligence,” are riding alongside intelligence in the big, global, multidimensional blind-watchmaker hill-climbing trajectory we’re currently ascending?
What a thrilling paper! The most inventive thing I’ve seen in a while!
Can an LM, starting from random init (!!), learn to generate all of its pretraining data?
Introducing Self-Play Pretraining with Zero Data. Two models start from random initialization: a generator proposes programs for a universal Turing machine and a learner trains on their outputs. We never train on any real data, but see predictable scaling on natural datasets: zero-shot val loss on images, text, audio, and melodies decreases predictably with self-play compute. And the learner develops in-context learning capabilities.
A fun proof-of-concept, co-led with @AdityaCowsik and @KfirDolev and co-authors @gbruno_dl, @ANourya @noahdgoodman, and @YoavLevine.
We ARE the fucking frontier!
I’m sorry but America did not spend 250 years turning “what’s over there?” into the most powerful civilization on earth just to finally arrive at the most consequential technological frontier in generations and decide actually we’re scared of frontiers now. We ARE the fucking frontier. We cross oceans. We build railroads across continents. We split atoms. We put men on the moon. We turn sand into computers and computers into a global nervous system.
Of COURSE AI is terrifying. The frontier is SUPPOSED to scare the shit out of you. That’s how you know you have, in fact, located the fucking frontier.
The answer is not recklessness, but it sure as fuck isn’t paralysis either. America’s comparative advantage is an unusually high national tolerance for ambitious weirdos staring at impossible things and saying “Yeah... I think I can build it.” That trait is rarer than oil, harder to manufacture than semiconductors, and responsible for a frankly preposterous amount of the modern world.
And you absolutely will not fucking regulate it out of us.
Today, I'm delighted to announce the launch of my new app duiduidui!
After studying Chinese for the last few years, this is my take on what an awesome language-learning app looks like.
If you're studying with a teacher, you can share your detailed progress, so that your teacher can see your study habits, and help you make progress...
Benji Smith retweeted
My full response to Ted Chiang’s Atlantic essay on AI consciousness is up. In short, he’s a brilliant novelist doing bad philosophy of mind — conceptual confusions, appeals to vibes, and claims out of proportion to evidence. Link in comments!
So how does this play out now?
Is someone going to tell all those foreign nationals working for frontier AI companies to pack it up and leave?
Presumably, they’ll go overseas and use their skills to… continue building frontier AI.
Benji Smith retweeted
The sheer scale of a trillion dollars can be hard to comprehend. Let me put it in perspective. You would be able to buy 42 miles of high speed rail in California with that much money.

















