Books
Working on the new Gann, the new Attia, and the Beast. The Beast has lingered so long I’ve put myself on a regime to finish both it and the planned companion, Books of Jacob by mid year. Twenty pages a day of 17th century lurianic kabbalism and messianic movements. No excuses.
Articles
Probably the biggest story in AI this week was Geoffrey Hinton leaving Google. Hinton is one of the grandfathers of modern AI research and the success of the LLMs we’re seeing now it largely thanks to him and the cohort around him (Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, is a former student of Hinton). Now, he’s concerned that the arms race between the tech companies means we’re movign too fast with a dangerous technology. I’m not sure I’m convinced, but he’s definitely worth listening to.
As I’ve said before, we’ve moved on from the holy shit these things are amazing hot takes articles that were a dime a dozen right after GPT4 launched into the deeper more serious articles about what it all means. Two big ones in that vein are out now from the New York. Both take the temperature of the discussion down a notch. The always readable Jaron Lanier is questioning the way we think about these new models in his article “There Is No Ai” and Cal Newport asked “What Kind of Mind Does ChatGPT Have?”.
It’s worth noting that both these guys are computer scientists, but neither of them is an AI researcher. They sit in the interesting position of being able to understand the underlying design, but the distance of not doing this work as their day job. Both articles are very much worth reading. And if that isn’t enough AI for you, the great David Epstein did a long form interview with Newport where they dig in even further.Dwarkesh Patel, the host of the great podcast Lunar Society has a really excellent essay out with his thoughts on reading Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biographies. To my shame, I’ve never read these. I keep telling myself I’m waiting for Caro to finish the project, but I need to admit that’s largely an excuse. This piece is great, and another example of why Patel is one of the inspirations for this substack — dude just started doing shit and now he’s having a real impact, including getting me finally dig into the Johnson books.
Podcasts and Videos
The always inspiring Kevin Kelly (of Wired fame) has a new book out and is making the podcast rounds. His interview with Tyler Cowen on Conversations with Tyler is a banger. Inspiring me to try to do even more and lean in to my own eccentric interests. Don’t be the best, be the only.
I’m thinking a lot lately about the different between our digital lives and our actual, physical, lives and how much more challenging and rewarding the physical can be — it’s cooler to build a canoe than a website. This has been inspiring to double down on physical pursuits, exercise, hand crafts, and cooking. Trying to master the omelette lead me to this delightful station run by a French chef, Alex. Lots of good stuff here on the science of cooking. You ever tried to make a French omelette? So hard, so fun.