Clamo, clamatis, omnes clamamus pro glace lactis == tweets, retweets and likes do not always imply endorsement. ☮️🤟🍦
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Joined November 2014
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- Following1K
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Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
Typical autocratic mentality. Big bosses to decide the fate of the small as they wish. No patience for democracy & compromise, just give us one person to pressure and bribe! It’s one reason Trump hates Ukraine, Europe, and Canada—they speak of national interests and negotiation.
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
Next week, for the first time in human history, a human-made object will reach a distance of one light-day from Earth.
We're inviting the world to celebrate Voyager 1's major milestone with us. science.nasa.gov/mission/voy…
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
[read about what’s happening with AI]
ME: Wow we’re actually legit fucked this is so bad.
[go outside]
ME: Wait those people are all acting like nothing unusual is happening. Maybe I was just in a paranoid bubble? Yeah it must be that. Phew.
[read more about what’s happening with AI]
ME: Wait no we ARE fucked. Shit. It’s all those people outside who are in a delusional bubble.
[go outside]
ME: Wait...
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
It feels like removing a dagger from my leg.
Headache. Dysphoria. Flatness. Hearing phantom iPhone dings in my sleep.
Days 1-3 were more of a rush. I felt light and free.
On day 4, the withdrawals began. I've never had to kick something like this before.
Screens are a legit addiction.
I'm curious to see if the month 6 PET scan shows enhanced metabolism in regions that improve in drug addicts who quit like the thalamus, frontal cortex, and striatum (reward circuit).
There are no PET studies of people quitting screens, so Dr. Eber and I are breaking new ground.
Image attached is baseline PET (F18 tracer). That's one of a few scans I'm tracking.
Day 6/365
Sent from my screenless phone
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
Introducing Higgsfield Miracle.
Our latest proprietary post-production technology vectorizes any video into layers for localized, pixel-level editing in real time, with world knowledge built in. Every frame holds the image depth needed for cinema-grade post-production.
Now in private beta with select testers. Coming soon to Higgsfield MCP.
Set up Higgsfield MCP in Claude to be the first to try it.
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
no. the trick he's missing is that you need both. the understanding, AND an LLM that understands the understanding of a JEPA and can translate it to human-understood language.
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
We (you and I) are all hierarchical collections of simple, decentralised, local, thermodynamic self-replicators.
So was COVID. Or the Spanish Flu.
I see "biology" as a special case; and I think in understanding these systems we will better understand ourselves/life
9/14
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
L'eau courante est une catastrophe. Avant, il fallait marcher jusqu'au puits pour chercher de l'eau. Au moins, on faisait de l'exercice.
Absurde? C'est pourtant le type de raisonnement qu'on entend aujourd'hui à propos de l'intelligence artificielle.
L'IA nous dispense de certains efforts intellectuels? Mais ces efforts nous permettaient de développer notre intelligence! Elle nous évite de passer des heures à chercher des informations? Mais cette recherche était formatrice! Elle nous aide à écrire? Mais écrire soi-même permet de structurer sa pensée!
Tout cela est vrai. Mais le raisonnement est trompeur.
Je propose de l'appeler le sophisme de l'effort perdu. Il consiste à reprocher à une technologie de supprimer les bénéfices secondaires d'un effort devenu inutile grâce à elle.
À ce compte-là, il faudrait renoncer à la machine à laver, qui nous prive d'exercice physique, à la calculatrice, qui nous dispense du calcul mental, et même à l'écriture, qui nous évite de tout mémoriser.
Et pourquoi s'arrêter là? Retournons dans les cavernes. La vie y était difficile, mais quelle formidable école de débrouillardise, de résistance physique et d'ingéniosité! Et aussi quelle ambiance chaleureuse avec les gens proches les uns des autres!
Le sophisme de l'effort perdu repose sur une confusion entre l'objectif d'une activité et les bénéfices collatéraux des moyens employés pour l'atteindre.
Bien sûr, ces bénéfices peuvent être précieux. L'effort intellectuel est nécessaire pour apprendre à penser. Mais faut-il pour autant préserver toutes les tâches intellectuelles pénibles sous prétexte qu'elles nous font réfléchir?
La vraie question n'est pas de savoir comment conserver les efforts que la technologie nous épargne, mais comment préserver les capacités auxquelles nous tenons sans avoir à conserver ces efforts.
Après tout, nous n'avons pas renoncé à l'exercice physique avec l'arrivée de l'eau courante. Nous avons inventé le sport.
Avec l'IA, le défi est du même ordre: il ne s'agit pas de défendre les détours, mais de trouver de nouvelles façons de développer ce qu'ils nous apportaient.
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
Our robots built this in the city of Almere: curved walls, different types of bricks and bonds, indented text.
Real world deployment, insane complexity, 100% of every brick done by our robots, with another 15 houses to come in the coming weeks.
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
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
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
>Guy makes brain surgery robit
>803 people follow
The future is coming faster than anyone realizes.
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
La mejor explicación de todo lo que falló ayer.
Una cadena de errores en el sistema.
Lo comparto con fines educativos porque me ha parecido muy interesante.
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
“Dear Italian students, who today take to the streets carrying flags with the hammer and sickle and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ‘CCCP’,” began an open letter in Italian by Lithuanian expat Neringa Budryt.
“I would like to ask you a question: do you truly know what the symbols you carry represent? And do you know what would have happened to many of you had you openly demonstrated in countries living under the oppression of communist regimes?
Let me tell you something. It is easy to display a red flag when, for you, communism is merely an abstract idea of equality, social justice, and rebellion against the system. It is easy to wear a T-shirt with "CCCP" on it when you have never experienced the reality of a communist regime.
We come from that part of Europe where communism was not a T-shirt, a symbol of rebellion, or a romanticized notion of equality. It was the system in which we lived—a system we never chose.
We know the history of Soviet repression, Stalinist purges, the Gulags, and mass deportations. Above all, we know the word "Siberia"—a place to which thousands of innocent people were forcibly deported, simply for thinking differently.
In Siberia—amidst freezing cold, starvation, and forced labor—many lost their lives; those who survived carried the scars of that experience forever. Entire families were torn apart, and generations were denied the chance to live freely in their own homeland.
In the countries of the Soviet bloc, censorship, political police, surveillance, and the suppression of dissent drastically curtailed individual freedoms.
We grew up in a system where state control permeated even our daily lives. At school, we were required to wear the red necktie of the "Pioneers." We were monitored; they tracked where we went and even whether we attended church. Even faith—a choice that should belong to an individual’s own conscience—could become a cause for suspicion.
We used to celebrate Christmas with our windows blacked out, to ensure no one would see us and report us. Because it was forbidden—just like so many other things: jeans, rock music, and all the symbols of a Western lifestyle. My mother returned from a Soviet labor camp. And do you know what happened to her? She was barred from continuing her education because she had been labeled an enemy of communism.
Under a communist regime, you could not protest. You risked arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, persecution—and, in certain historical contexts, even death. In the Soviet Union and other communist regimes, political dissent could cost you your freedom and your life.
Demonstrations independent of the authorities were not a guaranteed right; they were often suppressed by force.
That is why it strikes me to see young Italians proudly displaying the hammer and sickle—symbols associated with regimes that persecuted and imprisoned millions of people.
Today, you are free to take to the streets, shout against the government, criticize institutions, and wave your flags precisely because you live in a democracy that grants you these freedoms. Under an authoritarian regime of that kind, protesting against those in power could have landed you in prison.
This is not about denying the existence of social injustices, inequalities, or the right to fight for a better world. You are free to take to the streets to demand a more just society—but you should not idealize a system that denied so many people the very things you are free to exercise today: the right to choose, to believe, to speak, and to dissent. Before wearing a T-shirt with "CCCP" on it, listen to those who experienced that world. Talk to the deportees and their descendants; read the accounts of those who endured the gulags and forced exile to Siberia. Learn what it meant to be stripped of your freedom, your home, your loved ones—and even any prospect of a normal life—simply because of your background or your beliefs.
Before waving the hammer and sickle, please, study history thoroughly.”
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
A molecular model that only reports the connections no single paper could have seen
Most research builds one link at a time, a protein to a pathway, a pathway to a symptom, and each study stays inside the field that funded it.
This one holds every published link as a graph and goes looking for paths that cross fields nobody reads together:
> Link: 40 years of findings become edges, each dated and sourced
> Walk: it traverses paths of three and four hops across different literatures
> Surface: only paths where no two edges come from the same research group
• What crossing fields turns up
> A metabolic enzyme tied to a neurological symptom through two unrelated papers
> A drug side effect explained by a pathway described in agriculture research
> Two diseases sharing a mechanism neither field had reason to compare
• Why nobody found these by reading
> A four-hop path spans four journals nobody subscribes to at once
> Each individual edge is unremarkable, the path is the finding
> Specialisation is what makes the gap, not laziness
• How it avoids inventing connections
> Every hop names the paper and the year it held true
> A path with one expired edge is shown broken, not completed
> It proposes the experiment that would test the path, or drops it
One full traversal across the corpus runs in under three minutes.
And the part that broke my brain:
Two labs published halves of the same mechanism eleven years apart.
Neither cited the other, and nothing in either field would ever have connected them.
Same literature. One version can only see what someone already assembled.
The discovery was never in a new experiment.
It was sitting between papers nobody read together ↓
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
Never seen a more flagrant and violent breach of privacy in my life, and probably never will. Doubtful that a privacy violation will ever even be able to compare to the scale of this evil and deliberate attack.
Samsung should be eviscerated for this. Criminal charges please
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
This is the most serious 48 hours in cybersecurity history.
"Black October" they're calling it
It seems every *hour* there's a new incident, that in a typical year, would be one of the biggest incidents of the *entire year*
SUMMARY OF THE LAST 48 HOURS:
YEAR-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical year, these would be among the biggest incidents of the year):
1. PHP2Shell: a hole in the software behind ~70% of websites. Governments took sites offline.
2. eMudhra: the master keys that prove websites are real were cracked. One was the number 4.
3. California: data on every public school student since 2023 stolen, including disability status
4. Railway: hackers stole customers' secret keys from a hosting platform used by millions of developers
5. Zeabur: 321,810 accounts breached. The company is shutting down.
6. LiteLLM: an AI tool downloaded 3.4 million times a day was poisoned with a password stealer
7. GitLab: a 10-out-of-10 severity hole in every version since 2014
8. Cairn: criminals used an AI hacking tool to break into 100+ companies
9. Ahold Delhaize: hackers knocked the owner of Food Lion and Stop & Shop offline
10. Onamae: malware planted on up to 26,739 customer servers in Japan
MONTH-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical month, these would be among the biggest incidents):
11. Signal: a bug could leave your mic and camera on after you hang up
12. NGINX: 3 critical holes in software running ~1/3 of websites
13. HTTP/3: a single connection can crash 7 of the 10 web server types tested
14. Plex: hackers breaking into home media servers
15. SafePay ransomware: FBI warns it has hit 600+ critical infrastructure organizations
16. Palo Alto: ransomware gangs breaking in through company firewalls
17. Bullhorn: platform used by 10,000+ companies knocked offline
18. Medi-Cal: 970,000 patients' data stolen
19. WordPress: hackers stole a plugin maker's keys and used them to plant backdoors on websites
20. AOMEI: backup software's update server handed out a backdoor
21. Meta Muse: Meta's AI agent exposed users' personal and business secrets
22. Tor: 333 relays hijacked to steal logins
23. TiDB Cloud: database company's cloud breached
Also serious:
24. State Bank of India: India's biggest bank confirms a data breach
25. OVHcloud: hackers slipped a password stealer into a cloud company's official tool
26. Siemens: a software hole being used to spread malware
27. North Korea: state hackers launch a new attack campaign on South Korea
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
> thousands of agents
> ~40,000 scientific papers read
> 32 minutes
> found new potential mechanisms worth investigating for Parkinson-like neurodegenerative diseases
work that would have taken human researchers months to a year, done in just 32 minutes
i genuinely don't think people understand what is coming for biotech
GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration?
DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in making cholesterol. GPT-Rosalind suggested a possible explanation: cholesterol may not be reaching where neurons need it.
That gives scientists a specific mechanism to test and, if confirmed, a direction for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative disorders.
With @perturbai_tx and @scrippsresearch, a team of thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents worked in parallel, connecting gene-expression results from millions of mouse brain cells with scientific literature in just 32 minutes. We’re now expanding this collaboration to identify new drug targets.
openai.com/index/scaling-ai-…
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
Asked Claude fable 5.5 for an animated film about the next 150 years of humanity.
One prompt. It wrote the script, animated every frame in code, and composed the score.
4 minutes, from math teachers protesting calculators in 1986 to a kid in 2176 who finds fusion boring.
Alejandro Santacreu retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.