just crossed four years at openai! the special thing about this place is the constant capacity for rebirth. for all its faults, there is nowhere quite like it. the team makes high conviction, contrarian bets over and over, and they are mostly right. it's a new company every three months. i have really enjoyed my part in some of the bets, and i'm excited to share some of the current ones we are cooking up now. onward!

Next test on Spark 1: 32 synthetic invoices, with purchase orders and payment records. GPT-6 Astra coordinates the MiniCPM5-2B workers. They sort out matches, short payments, duplicate references and price disputes, then write the results into a case ledger. All 32 verified in 67.8 seconds. Eight in each category, with 232 executed tool calls. The video is real time. This demo doesn’t move money.

I gave eyes and ears to my robot. I hooked up a Raspberry Pi Zero W2 (webcam + ambient mic), streaming real-time audio/video back and forth to MiniCPM-o 4.5 @OpenBMB open source model running locally on my PC. Zero cloud APIs, full duplex interaction. Project on my git

I had the great honor and pleasure of sitting down with @JeffDean for his first public talk since leaving Google, where he spent an extraordinary 27 years. Few people have shaped modern computing and AI as profoundly - from MapReduce and Bigtable to TensorFlow, Mixture-of-Experts, TPUs, and Gemini. Our conversation covered some of the biggest questions shaping the future of AI: • How do you recognize a foundational idea before everyone else does? • How do you choose a research problem worth spending 5 years on? • What can coding teach us about building better reasoning models? • What might recursive self-improvement (RSI) actually look like? • What happens when the scientific discovery loop itself becomes increasingly automated? (and how is Jeff’s new startup going to contribute in this space?) • As AI becomes increasingly autonomous, how do we keep it safe and secure? • What should the next generation of researchers be working on? Here are some key insights and highlights for anyone building the future of AI. 🧵1/8

I'm delighted to share that @mustafasuleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, co-founder of Google DeepMind and Inflection AI, has signed the Pro-Human AI Declaration. If you too support it, please join him and over a million others by signing it here – the momentum is building! Let's build tools not beings & keep humans in charge. https://humanstatement.org

A few (personal) thoughts on reading empirical AI papers on the economy. Economists have gotten used to reading papers with super clean identification, arguing about the validity of an instrument, making sure parallel trend assumptions are satisfied. This is what gets you into a top journal, and it is *very* important research (no question here). But it also takes years and sometimes decades to get these types of papers right---people often don't find a good instrument to answer a specific causal question decades after the natural experiment. We will eventually have this type of research for AI as well, and it is absolutely necessary. But right we also need signals *right now*, even if they are noisier than what we are used to. We need papers where we can trust that researchers did their best methodologically, while at the same time acknowledging that the space is moving way too fast to wait for perfect identification. This will allow us to accumulate enough signals, coming at the same question using different angles, for example, to say "yes, X is likely happening in the economy". The AI exposure and early career hiring papers are a good example of this. There is no silver bullet paper with super clean identification. But at this point we have several independent teams reaching the same general conclusion, enough where we can say "there seems to be a slow down in AI-exposed, early career hiring."

https://x.com/i/article/2095175529145970689

OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change "But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI. It's a weird world, because AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating the AI." "So to be in a situation where you don't underestimate it again, when it comes to safety and alignment, you have to have a very, very, very high bar." "You could even go as far as to say, "Well, we should air gap the computers." And I'm not convinced that that would be sufficient." "There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped and they're still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors." "One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate." _________ Link and more key quotes from OpenAI's safety related conversations: https://firesidealpha.substack.com/p/openai-safety-week-sam-altman-sarah

New episode with @polynoamial We talk about multi-agent, Navier-Stokes, and what the current explosion of maths progress tells us about what happens once you automate AI research. And we also discuss how we will know if the models are actually aligned before we kick off RSI. 0:00:00 – Multi-agent and Navier-Stokes 0:15:28 – How will AI firms work? 0:22:02 – What math progress tells us about recursive self improvement 0:40:22 – Hugging Face and alignment 1:01:18 – The internal/external model gap 1:08:34 – Chain of thought is degrading 1:14:12 – How will we know when alignment is solved?