Friday Fodder #20
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Google came out with new models this week, upending OpenAI’s keep-the-spotlight-on-me 12 days of AI and proving to the rest of the world that yes, in fact, they do still have a remarkably deep bench of engineering talent that can do amazing stuff when they aren’t in their own way. Like this Logan Kilpatrick guy, where did he come from? Aside from the obvious answer (OpenAI defector) apparently he’s somehow invested hundreds of thousands many times in startups. New theory: anyone working in AI first took a detour in crypto and Fartcoin to load up their pockets for angel investing and GPU rentals.
Google’s Veo2 video model blows Sora away. Gemini 2.0 is built for agents. Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking reasons like o1 and has transparency. The API there is for “Thoughts”. Also - 2.0 Flash Thinking? You gotta love these version naming schemes, that’s about as good as ChatGPT 4o (not zero, natch) Mini. I miss the old days of semantic versioning.
In other news, Elon killed a Congressional funding bill and made it smaller and then it got rejected. Bitcoin hit $107k. And drones try to invade and take over New Jersey of all places. But we promise this is really not a simulation. Reality is undefeated!
On to the reading!
Timely
No LLMs are not scheming - Rohit ruminates on the fact that we blew right by the Turing test and barely even noticed. More specifically, he looks at the idea of an “entity” - as in “she thinks, he thinks” - and urges us to cast away the very natural anthropomorphizing we all do with LLMs. Maybe they “think”, but they’re not like us at all.
You Are Your Family’s Content Creator - On a more practical note, a friendly reminder that we parents control our environment and that of our children. Even better, an excellent framework for how to think about that environment, courtesy of a 17th century writer: “three grand essentials of happiness: something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for.”
What’s next for ASML? - ASML has a monopoly on the lithography machines that TSMC uses to make all of the advanced chips that Nvidia, AMD, Apple and anyone else churn out. But the Dutch company flies under the radar much more than their downstream compatriots. A brief look at the company itself and the next step in their product line.
Mainstream is now fringe and fringe is mainstream - I used to think I was a relatively well-informed and cool older millennial. Then I read this article. I knew ZERO of the people he is talking about here, and I had the same reaction. Kai Cenat? Jynxzi? Zackrawrr?
Gezuntite.
This gave me Revolt of the Public vibes.. the rules have changed and trust and reputation mean different things today. Ted Gioia continues to be one of the most prescient voices on culture.A few of the things we’re excited about in crypto (2025) - One common criticism of crypto is that there aren’t really any good use cases where you couldn’t just use fiat currency. Except for store of value for Bitcoin (maybe). And stablecoins (kinda). One of the more interesting and overlooked attributes of Polymarket is that it is crypto-native. The future of prediction markets is one of a few interesting things to look out for 2025. My favorite: AI agents that can transact.
World’s oldest known wild bird lays egg at 74 - Over in the science corner is this heartwarming story. She’s more than twice the average age for her species and still going strong. The prolific mother Grizzly 399 was killed just a couple of months ago, so it’s great to see more natural advanced maternal age mothering. Doesn’t look a day over 20.
Timeless
A style of men’s clothing that will never go out of style and why I think that’s cool. - Alright, look. Stop laughing. My everyday style may still be Casual Retro Jock Athleisure (TM) but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate this. I’m slowly warming up to the Ivy style. Might be past time.
How Empathy Makes Us Cruel and Crazy - A brilliant take on how following the emotive path can lead us all astray. One of the more insidious characteristics of “woke” is the belief that the stronger an emotion is felt, the more standing that perspective should have.
The Unbearable Slowness Of Being - One of the best academic paper titles I’ve seen in awhile. In a world of massive parallelism, have you ever wondered why we can only think one thing at a time? Our senses operate much faster, but our brain’s bandwidth seems remarkably slow. This also has dire consequences to the upside of Neuralink.
Books
The Hundred Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury - Many have said that China has an entirely different set of cultural norms that are hard to understand in America. This was the first book that helped me make sense of the differences. Pillsbury dives into texts thousands of years old that remain a blueprint for Chinese leaders and explains how they think about time, advantages, and winning.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!