"Not Even Wrong" Podcast
Investing in fundamentally new concepts and engineering practices with large impact.
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High Frequency Power Electronics. Juan Rivas, Stanford. Make smaller, more powerful power converters. High frequency power converters facilitate wireless charging. Cybercab requires wireless charing. Possible in principle. Requires investment in infrastructure and scaling supply chain. Wide Band Gap materials. Higher frequency converters, smaller devices, higher efficiency, more power per area. Solve heat dissipation.
Impact of Trump and DOGE on Bond-market. Goal of Department of Government Efficiency goals: 1/3 Reduce number of departments and agencies. 2/3 Make remaining government more efficient. 3/3 Reduce regulatory overreach. Impact on bonds: Lower inflation, lower interest rates, steeper yield curve. Impact on equities positive because of strong real growth. Inflation is monetary and government overreach always creates inflation. Reducing the government reduces inflation and frees up capital and entrepreneurial spirits. Good for economy.
Reinforcement learning. Presentations by David Silver and Sergey Levine. Silver created Alpha Zero. How to get out of LLM valley. Superhuman intelligence requires RL because only try and error at scale can outperform humans. Importance of validation. Math as example. Importance of meta RL, system to learn update rule. Sergey focus on data and off-line RL to scale deep RL. Deep RL is when parameters determining update are learned in neural net. Key to process is data collection RT-X. Bring diverse dataset to labs and train comprehensive robot model.
Physics based hand dexterity planning in robotics. Albert Wu, Stanford.
From paper: How to grasp stuff that is not graspable? Map grasp space. Determine position of robot arm. Trajectory. Grasp. Contact state graph. Regions of possible contacts . Use score function to determine which ones are interesting. Tesla Space Video on AI war. Important video. Why is Musk all in on AI? Because it’s the technological frontier of a generation. Key is transfer learning from driving to robotics. FSD + Grok = Real world AI. Tesla only company that is fully integrated.
Three asks from Trump for Goldilocks future. Amongst the euphoria after Trump’s landslide we believe it’s best to focus on three key issues to assure success and prosperity. 1/3 Reduce government spending to balanced budget. 2/3 Cut the deep state and reinstate mission driven institutions that serve the public (not themselves). 3/3 Abolish censorship. As a consequence we expect lower interest rates, strong real economic growth and asset appreciation.
❤️ Book discussion “The Whole Story” by John Mackey. 1/3 Wealth creation builds on unique entrepreneurial qualities (Zero to One). Relentless focus on people. Lower cost, increase value. Every business in essence is defined by cost structure (Innovator’s Dilemma). 2/3 Leadership is key. 3/3 Infinite game. Human creativity, fun, play, excellence, accountability and seeking objective truth. (Beginning of Infinity).
Robotics Foundation Models. Sergey Levine, Berkley ViNT. Foundation model for navigation, paper we ask the question: what is required of a foundation model for mobile robotics? RTX. Collect data, format and apply to different embodiments. In this paper Sergey discusses cross body learning. Positive transfer across navigation and manipulation? Strong case for Tesla transfer learning from driving to Optimus. Dhruv Shah PhD thesis on cross embodied robot learning. End to end learning. Two problems. Transition function and position function. Where am I and how do I get to the next waypoint. Graph network.
Election impact on markets and portfolio. If you want to go to Mars, fix earth first. Democrats win impact on markets neutral to positive. Trump very positive. Main issues are deficits, regulatory overreach and law-fare. Democrats stand for status quo. Inflationary growth. Nominal appreciation of assets. Trump increases likelihood of very good outcome for equities and business. Impact on portfolio. Democrats win, short-term negative, midterm positive. Expected more buy-cott than boycott. Trump win extremely positive midterm. Longterm could be more tricky.
Hitchhikers with credit cards. The case for a better US. Reduce deep state and unelected bureaucrats' misappropriation of power. Democratic party is resembling Soviet Union. Divide and conquer and spend on other people’s backs. Economic growth in US is anemic because most of it is based on borrowed government spending. This must stop. We have all ingredients for positive future. Strong technological innovation, sound property rights, sound legal system, entrepreneurial culture and strong for liberty.
Discussing essay “Don’t punish Musk for doing magic!”. Promethean paradox. Technology is good but stirs fears. Why did Zeus punish Prometheus? Because he showed humanity the magic of technology without installing responsibility. Faust, Heisenberg, Gödel show that science cannot be about truth finding. Popper solves paradox. Instead of seeking truth, improve. Science is a feature, not a bug. Science must be embedded holistically in society. “Don’t just calculate and shut up. Calculate and communicate.”
Programmable atom arrays for quantum computation. Mikhail Lukin, Harward.
Quantum Systems exhibit interference and entanglement. Take advantage of those properties for computation and simulation.
Rydberg state atoms. Optical tweezers. Efficient manipulation of atom arrays. Create logic qubits out of physical qubits. Quantum Error Correction (QEC). Efficient, low overhead. Clifford and non-Clifford circuits.
Nanometer scale compute technology. Subhasish Mitra, Stanford. Manifesto for a new semiconductor infrastructure: Moonshot: A Virtual Model of the World. Requires: nanometer scale components, logic and memory integration, advanced packaging, interconnects, photonics and electrons, new chip architectures, AI algorithms. N3EXT project,collaboration for next generation compute infrastructure. Transistors based Carbon Nanotubes. Key advantage of CNT is large current with little activation voltage. Probabilistic compute still requires deterministic hardware - validation.
Prometheus and the original sin of Science. Inspired by a talk about the “Narrative of Decline”. Science and Technology drive unease and narrative of decline (“the past was better”). Inspired by a talk about Tolkien (Lord Of the Rings). Dichotomy of Hope and Despair. Solution is to build institutions that incorporate technological progress as endogenous.
Tesla Earnings Q3 2024. Positive on multiple dimensions. Showing traction on key products for future. FSD, Cybercab, Cybertruck, Semi, Energy Storage. Key drivers of higher margins: FSD adoption, Cybertruck gross margin and higher ZEV credits. Tesla is solving person transpiration with autonomous electric cars. Lower cost per mile, higher value.
Analyzing batteries with super X-ray machine. Johanna Nelson Weker, SLAC. Synchrotron-based X-rays can probe battery chemistries across many relevant length scales (from atomistic to millimeter). Fast charging. Better, lower cost, less rare earth chemistries. Higher energy density, higher performance. What causes degradation of batteries? Make the degradation visible. Iteration. Advantages of Synchotron X-Ray. 1/2 High energy, high resolution. 2/2 Fine tuning for different scales.
Johanna also works on improving X-Ray technology. Also, developed a software kit to analyze tomography data. Simulation.
AI and physics simulation. Prith Banerjee - ANSYS. How to simulate physics? Traditional - differential equations with variables. Variables are fixed and determine the evolution of system. New - learned method, where parameters (not variables) are learned from observation. Build data pipeline and compute architecture to train massive amounts of data and large models. Evaluate models. Entrepreneurial guts like Musk necessary to invest enough to solve real world AI problems.
Using Influence Functions and component analysis to predict model behavior and optimize across models. Andrew Ilyas, Stanford.. Determine which version of the model and which data is optimal. Influence function paper. Impact of a training point on a prediction. What would happen if we did not have this training point? Andrew’s Phd thesis. Also, Paper on “How do changes to model components collectively change individual model predictions?”
Book Discussion: Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. Russia during civil war and Bolshevik revolution.
“We are children, not sons.” - Rewrite history. “Revolutions replace one set of limitations with another and the rest bows to the new limitations.”“The new spring brings fig tree without trees.” “What was conceived as ideal and lofty turned into material and coarse.” “Revolutions are like watching the grass grow.” “If the beast in men could be tamed with whips and lockups, then the lion tamer would be the highest. But that’s not what is going on. The beast is being tamed by music and beauty and self sacrifice.”“Lenin dreamt up something new. But this wasn’t the kind of new that is dreamt up in academic circles. It’s the new that comes out of necessity and it’s the kind of new that produces darkness and ends up in tears.”New leviathan replaces old leviathan. Lenin adjusted his ideology to daily needs to keep power. US revolution was based on values of the US constitution. Spiritual underpinning. Covid was coup d'état and Woke its ideology. No spiritual underpinning, i.e. people change their values as they go. Misguided revolutions like Bolshevism and today’s Wokeism lead to mediocrity, which is signal that revolution is misguided. Liberty is a concept that promotes excellence. We have the most wealth and best technologies in human history. We can give our sons and daughters a better future.
Reaction to ZDF report on self driving cars. Biased. Misleading. Allegedly Mercedes is more ahead in self driving than Tesla. Wrong. Mercedes self drive system is not autonomous. It depends on permanent GPS connectivity. Mercedes system only works under certain conditions. Tesla is autonomous, works under any circumstance.
Discussing the role of common people in Rome. Inspired by a presentation by Federico Santangelo at Stanford. Roman Law is the mother of all inclusive institutions. See Narrow Corridor. When law breaks, power of people breaks. Roman Empire becomes extractive. Law turns into “Jurisprudence”, interpreted by an elite, and thus by nature become more extractive (benefiting the elite).
❤️ Sound money is the mother of all inclusive institutions. Fiat money is not inclusive because it allows an elite to extract value. Societies break down when inclusive institutions become extractive.
Solving energy with material science.
Wide Band-gap semiconductors for EV technology. Srabanti Chowdhury, Stanford
Paper on Wide Band-gap research. SiC, GAN. Ultra Wide band-gap like diamond.
Wider band-gap enables higher voltage. .Paper on power electronic trends in EV industry. 1/5 Efficiency. Because of higher switching frequency DC is converted much faster to AC. 2/5 Higher Temperatures. 3/5 Compact designs. 4/5 Higher inverter frequency means more energy density. 5/5 Higher voltage architectures, allow for faster charging and less energy loss.
Paper discussion. MEMS for edge sensing and compute. Humanoid Robot learning.
1/2 Advantage of using MEMS as computers by integrating sensing and computing into a single physical layer. This new computing paradigm has been shown to perform sensing and classification tasks simultaneously with near-zero latency and extremely low power. Paper. “Logic gates such as AND, NAND etc. have been realized using a single MEMS device.” 2/2 Paper on Humanoid Robot Learning. 3D diffusion. Take an image and generate sequences. Then learn.Imitation learning based on teleoperation. Whole body teleoperation using Apple Vision Pro.
❤️ Nobel Prize in Economics. James A. Robinson et all. “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity”. Discussing James Robinson. “What makes nations fail”? “The narrow corridor”. Extractive vs. inclusive institutions. Property rights, patent law are inclusive - they benefit every member of society. Extractive is when one side gets more at the expense of others (licenses, affirmative action). Narrow corridor explains how successful government keeps society and leviathan in check. Both extremes are dangerous, straddling fine line is what enables successful society. Purpose of economics is to study what increases the likelihood of good outcomes for members of society. Political anomie when checks and balances don’t work.
We. Robot Part 2. Profitable business is the meme of technology. Cybercab, Cybertruck Optimus targeting meme status through low cost, high value business. Profitable is low total cost of ownership with revenue more than resources consumed. Technology enables affordability and affordability enables technology. Loop. Wright’s law, Moore’s law. Scaling laws. Knowledge proliferates through memes. Technology proliferates through profitable business.. Waymo outdated technology vs. Tesla Cybercab. Waymo is to Cybercab what yahoo was to google.
Thoughts on We. Robot event. Tesla. Burbank, 10.10. 1/3 Tesla as a stock depends on belief, optimism and hope. Wealth is created that way. But not good for Wall Street types. Reason for volatility. Forces of wealth creation depend on ingenuity not excel spreadsheets. 2/3 Most important news from event was expectation of unsupervised FSD by 2025. U.FSD is going to cross the chasm of adoption. FSD native products such as sending your car to pick up friend from airport. Parking. 3/3 Event was extremely creative and inspirational. Future depicted on a movie set.
Avatar Creation with Generative AI
Haomiao Jiang (Roblox). Avatars from prompts and/or images. Main problem 2D to 3D. Haomiao PhD with Brian Wandell, paper. Vision systems consist of three things. 1. Physics. 2. Sensors. 3. Image processing algorithm. Image processing pipeline. The pipeline is the set of algorithms, that convert the sensor data into a rendered image. Data set for 2D to 3D. Simulation. Paper on eg3D. How can gen AI turn 2D into 3D images. Sensors help. How can 2D to 3D enhance robotics. 3D vision could be a big help in robotics planning.
"The Novel as Practice of Consciousness" Locke and Defoe, Revisited. Esther Yu, Philosophy and English Literature.
Individual consciousness is an invention of English poets in the 17th century. Answer to political necessity to create a new sovereign. That’s why you need arms to defend it. Because it’s not natural. Liberty, individualism are intellectual artifacts that proliferated in England and later in USA. As it turns out, it also worked for wealth creation. Chinese philosophy had similar cross roads. Lao Tzu, live in harmony with nature. Confucius, rules, hierarchies and rituals. Individuals must find harmony within the context of rules. Confucius more convenient for emperors. England faced the Nietzsche problem “Gott ist tot”.
They opted for individualism as new sovereign. Driven by personal senses and brain. Form your own opinion.
Statistical techniques to guarantee accuracy in AI predictions? John Cherian, Statistics. Paper.
Validity guarantees for LLM outputs. Problem with LLMs is that output is stochastic. That’s why they have hallucinations. How do you guarantee that output is accurate not? Conditional coverage guarantee. Means not just overall but also applies to subgroups. Marginal means overall. 800 pound gorilla is; what is the ground truth? Procedural solutions. Iteratively evaluate yourself. Like Textgrad or LLMonkeys. Reasoning. Automatic eval.
Shunyu Yao, PhD defense. Discussing his PhD. 1. Language agents. 2. Tree of thought. 3. Cognitive architecture for language agents, Coala. ReAct, verbal reasoning and actions interleaved. Tree of Though, reason evaluating tree, deciding which branch to follow. How do you decide which tree to follow? RL with verbal rewards. Is it a partial reward game or space reward game? Change internal state of model, have it act based on internal adjustment of weights, not external. Agenitc models require benchmarks and evals. Large Language Monkeys (Mirhoseini) - similar idea. Key is to have automated evaluation for LLM calls, make sure what it chooses to execute is correct and consistent with the task. For example:
Elijah Millgram, Philosophy Seminar. Personal identity. Selves are intellectual artifacts (creation of human thought); they facilitate our reasoning as they change over time. In his essay about the book (table of contents) Life Hack with a Future, Milligram writes: “The idea that we construe ourselves as selves as a way of enabling, in the first place, inferences. The self changes when you hit inconsistency. Fixing it means changing your inference structure and thus your self. Problem: In a society with specialization, how can you conduct inference when you don’t have knowledge? ZKP. In human reasoning ZKP is called instinct.
TEXterity: Tactile Extrinsic deXterity, PhD defense by Sangwoon Kim. Paper: Problem: “We study the problem of precisely controlling in-hand sliding regrasps by pushing against an external surface, i.e. extrinsic dexterity, supervised only by robot proprioception and tactile sensing.” What does Texterity even mean? Simultaneous pose estimation of object and object relative to environment with tactile and proprioception sensors.
From knowledge economy to creation. The future of work is creation. Inspired by presentation by Prof. Lam. Bloom's pyramid of intelligence. Creation is accelerated evolution. Agency. Peter Thiel, David Deutsch. Work and creation will become just work. Create in many different dimensions, like tech, science, moral, ethics, economics, etc. Understanding is explaining knowledge. Creation is adding new knowledge. Who decides what new knowledge is? Use crypto to decide what is and what isn’t. We might not know how to program creation. But we understand what environment fosters creation. Ideas like US constitution. Liberty fosters creation. Liberty is the absence of coercion. Freedom is consequence of liberty.
Saurabh Gupta : Robot Learning by Understanding Egocentric Videos.
How to scale up robot learning via observing egocentric videos and learning from them?
1/4 Affordance maps to move an agent. Learning object affordances with masked model. 2/4 Hands are useful but also limiting. Train model without hands by in painting, so hand disappears. 3/4 Vides are 2D, now can we turn it into 3D. Construct hand pose estimation in 3D using videos. 4/4 Avoid off policy compound errors. Use diffusion models to augment videos with more scenarios.
Reaction to Vivek Ramaswamy on Lex Fridman. First principle thinking in politics. Align US government with clear mission based on US constitution. Solution to three of the most pressing problems of Western democracies. 1/3 Drain the swamp. Realign government with mission. 2/3 When making decisions about what to do always go back to first principles, “US Constitution”. 3/3 Reduce trillion dollar deficits. Fire all non-mission critical government agencies. Vivek’s politics would lead to a massive boost for growth and wealth creation. New political class, mission focused and productive, not rent seeking.
Physics lectures Stanford 9/25. Optical Atomic Clock. Shimon Kolkowitz, UC Berkeley. Precision time measurement with optical atomic clock. Multiple Atoms -> errors cancel out. This paper is about using multiple atomic arrays to increase precision and performance of clock. Atomic recoil and precision. James Thompson, JILA. Precisely measuring the energy states of individual atoms has been a challenge for physicists due to atomic recoil. Cavity shows how atomic recoil was dampened by atoms exchanging energy states. Inertial navigation using atom interferometer gyroscope. Tomoya Sato, Tokyo Tech. Laser splits atom wave and they recombine. Difference in interference offers information about rotation and angular momentum.
Podcast Reaction Lanz & Precht, Ausgabe 159. Einstürzende Altbauten. Is government debt a good or bad thing? Words. Schuld vs. debt. Three problems with government financed industrial policy. 1/4 Mortgaging future generations without them having a say in allocation. 2/4 Calculation problem 3/4 Debt is drug,”I used to do a little, but a little won’t do, so I started doing more and more”. Debt always turns into Keynesian nightmare. Keynes is not even wrong. His ideas are nonsense. Justify politicians wasting money. 4/4 Debt for redistribution is double whammy. Mortgage future generations and don’t even invest.
Physics seminar quantum optics. Cheng Chin, U. Chicago. Quantum simulation. See presentation. Difference between simulation and computation. One is physics, other is math. Quantum working, most think it’s not.
Quantum Commotion not working, many think it does. Quantum simulation -> Spin. Quantum Computation -> Qubit. Quantum Simulation in Cosmology, Sakharov Oscillations, Kibble mechanism, Inflation. Create a low entropy, grounded quantum state like BEC. In this work Chin et. all construct a two dimensional BCE array to study simulations in 2D.
Akira Furusawa, University of Tokyo
Quantum Teleportation with optical Quantum Computers. Manipulate light with Amplitude, time and frequency modulation. Transform light as if quantum algorithm, like Hadamard Gate etc.
Stanford PhD lectures. 9/23/24
Omer Reingold. Algorithmic fairness. Fair = envy free. Design algorithms for fair allocation of scarce resources? But, what is fair? What is envy? Fairness = pareto optimality. If you can change something without making anybody worse off, you are not fair. John Rawls. Kant. Relative preference design, not absolute. You vote on relative preferences and ML designs a pareto optimal solution. Ideas: Proof of work with peer review. Azalia Mirhoseini. Scaling Intelligence Lab. Scaling inference with agentic system. Automate unit tests. Automating Chip design. Large Language Monkeys. Produce many prompts and answers and use RL to optimize solution. Similar to Sergey Levine’s talk.
Book discussion “Smoke and Ashes” by Amitav Ghosh. Starts inspiring by telling story of Opium trade through the lens of South East Asia. Unfortunately, turns into reverse bigotry and a list of post colonial complaints. Not constructive. It’s important to raise issues but falling back into reverse bigotry and reverse racism is regress. The optimum trade is a shady corner of colonial Britain. Lot’s of wrongs happened and it’s a good story. But it must be told from the perspective of the author’s host country which stands for liberty and opportunity for everybody - including him - not as a one sided bashing of historical contexts.
Michael Saylor on investing and Bitcoin. Teaches you about finance and investing more than any MBA. Key argument is global asset allocation will move towards BItcoin. Better store of value. The virus of rationality takes over when money is constrained.
See history through objects, not (just) human action. Inspired by Gregory Aldrete and Amitav Gosh. Roman empire driven by olive oil processing. Opium and Tea dominate Asian history. What would historians find about us? What objects define our time. Objects that define our investment strategy? Software defined car. Etherloop..AI Training and inference. How to organize a disruptor? Organize around learning. Etherloop. Unboxed production. Software defined car. Robots. Iterate around technologies.
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.