"Not Even Wrong" Podcast
Investing in fundamentally new concepts and engineering practices with large impact.
Book discussion “I married a Communist” by Philip Roth. 1/3 Psyche of of 20th century America from innocent, natural law abiding youth (pre war) to ideology entrenched adolescence (post war) towards postmodern armageddon (current). In order to understand a society you must understand the demons it's fighting. Demon ideology. Nietzsche: “He who fights the monster might become one.” Arch of innocent belief in true purpose to ideological debauchery and eventually postmodern void of values. “The ultimate illusion is the illusion in ones own goodness.” Courage to formulate your own values and stand by them. Don’t fill void with external ideologies. “When before had betrayal been so de-stigmatized in this country?"
Physics, Energy and AI. Golden age of physics is if you put an energy constraint innovation accelerates. Current AI not sustainable. like steam coal engine going to Mars. New solutions come from physics. Solutions for energy production (fusion), renewable utilization (stranded assets) or more energy efficient compute (neuromorphic, optical, software/hardware co-design, quantum). Current compute transform electrons to information, release heat. Quantum is more energy efficient. Paper on energy and compute. Work on neuromorphic compute. Away from Von Neumann architecture.
The mystery of dark matter. Presentation by Fermi Lab. Dark matter similar to black body radiation problem with led Max Planck to kickstart quantum physics. New understanding of physics. Gravitational lensing and orbital behavior of planets show there is something. Detection. Direct or indirect. Theory. What is it? Contribution to elementary particle physics (how do particles behave?), cosmology (did dark matter shape the universe?) and astro physics (what’s out there?).
Edge AI conference Day 1. Edge AI is constrained by power. Get more tokens per dollar, flexibility., adaptability to new models, new data structures, new workloads and solutions. How much dedicated hardware vs. general hardware. Attacking Nvidia across stack. Interesting company SambaNova. Spatial dataflow model. Dedicated to transformer architecture. Tech good. Management talks a lot not saying much. Oracle types.
Woke is devouring the civil rights movement. Discussing Susan Neiman at Precht. Civil rights was about the universal respect for humans. Woke is tribalism. Grouping of people. Woke opposes enlightenment, which produced a universal approach towards respect for humanity. Like any other totalitarian movement, Woke must be fought with discourse and competitive alternatives.
We are running out of courage. In a speech from 1978 A. Solzhenitsyn says “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.” Lack of courage leads to polarization. Today’s Zeitgeist is anti-courage. Cowardice in politics, business and the arts. Silicon Valley used to be incubator of courage. Today, incubator of self obsessed profiteers like YC.
Modeling 3D images from RGB data.
Problem statement: Take in camera input and reconstruct the scene in 3D. Presentation by Angela Dai from TU Munich.
Use priors from CAD models. Three steps.
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Take RGB image
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Use image as prompt for diffusion model to better represent the image.
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New image used to align with CAD model to better represent geometry, depth..etc.
RGB-D to 3D alignment via CAD. This enables more training. Bootstrapping.
Human-object interaction. Object motion in conjunction with human motion. Object moves according to motion prediction of body part closest to object.
Fed. Woke. Fear. Essay on how reckless spending by the US government enabled by the Fed is the true source of fear. Capitalism is the system that strikes the fine balance between stick and carrot. Stick is work. Carrot is consumption. Fed spreads illusion of free money. Fosters entitlement which is nemesis of capitalism. Entitlement drives -isms such as socialism or wokeism. Eventually ends up in fear. We cannot let this happen.
Nvidia Earnings Call Q2 2024. New problem statement for AI. Inspired by “The Bitter Lesson.” by Richard Sutton. AGI = Data + Search. More data, more search, more solutions, larger markets. Nvidia Blackwell is optimizing for this problem statement. Tying Jensen’s comments with progress in science community. Sergey Levine presentation, off-line RL as method to optimize trajectory. First, collect as much data as possible about how to do stuff. That is action space. Then use offline RL to optimize trajectory. Francois Chollet has similar approach, focus on program search. Both goals = more flexible, more general AI. Adapt. Nvidia growth is driven by new problem statement in AI. Jensen keeps it simple. Street looks for complexity. Stupid.