World Labs co-founders Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall, and a16z's Martin Casado on Atlas, a world model for spatial intelligence: LLMs are built on next token prediction. Video models are built on next frame prediction. Atlas is built on new view prediction, and it's the first model to unify pixel generation and pixel reconstruction, two problems computer vision has kept in separate tracks for half a century. The practical result is a 50 to 100x reduction in what it takes to digitally capture a 3D representation of a space. Previously, you needed 100 to 300 photos of a single room. Atlas can work from just three. In this conversation, they get into the slow motion shot from The Matrix that took hundreds of cameras and now takes three iPhones, the overnight Slack message that made them bet the company in five seconds, why robotics is bottlenecked on data rather than chips, and the case that new view prediction is AI-complete. 00:00 Intro 01:50 The Matrix slow motion scene now takes three iPhones 02:48 Why new view prediction is the primitive 07:10 Unifying generation and reconstruction 11:15 Gaussian splats became the bottleneck 14:17 Dense capture used to mean 300 photos 17:30 Why reconstruction needs generation to fill the gaps 18:44 The LLM lesson image models missed 23:39 The video that made them go all in 28:04 3D design is 95% revisions 30:50 The problem in robotics is data, not chips 32:48 Why a robot policy can't be trained like an image model 34:44 When the simulator becomes the planner 36:45 Frozen time required footage full of movement 40:57 Why new view prediction is AI-complete 42:43 Nature gave animals eyes but not trees YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn1QDDBnTA0 @drfeifei @jcjohnss @BenMildenhall @theworldlabs @martin_casado

We spent >20B tokens throwing @openai's Astra at every AI Engineering task we could think of, beyond cute Blender demos and fun games. https://latent.space/p/astra Here's everything Astra can do, and do so at <$6 an hour (serious): - choose and train models - label data (both helping you label and then using your labels for active learning) - keep pipelines saturated - instrument and read logs - deploy and debug entire systems in one shot - fan out and command and eval subagents (including agents running other models) - keep coherence over billions of tokens of a single agent thread. more to come on @swyx's coverage of the Fable- and Astra-class of 2026!

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

Grok @Bot has made a few simple yet powerful technical decisions that I believe make it easy and enjoyable to use. 1. The best UI is none at all. The product interface is dramatically simpler than alternatives without sacrificing functionality. How is this possible? It's one of the first products designed for current frontier model capabilities and has a UI restrained enough to remain easy to use as models improve exponentially. Everyone knows how to text. 2. A thin harness for the client, a thick harness for the server. You might have noticed the app feels very fluid to use, even for a beta product. This is primarily because of everything we didn't have to build. The app harness is essentially a single tool to send messages between the client and server. The complexity moves to the server, where you can still use the coding agent harness with specialized tools as needed. This helps make the UI fast and responsive on desktop and mobile. 3. An always-on computer. Most coding agents and assistants today start fresh with every question you ask. Some of these sessions are on your local machine and others happen in the cloud. We believe strongly that cloud is the future, which is why it's the only option. Further, rather than spinning up virtual machines for every conversation, your bots connect to their own computer. This means you can still run agents on the bot's persistent filesystem. It's closer to what programmers have been doing by using Tailscale from their phones to connect to a remote computer and run an agent TUI. You get those capabilities without the hassle. 4. Your bots can use the browser. Coding agents have shown that most work on a computer can be expressed and run as code. You can ask for a task in natural language and the agent will decide to write a script to complete it. This is amazing, but there's still many tasks which can't be completed without logging into a website and clicking around the browser. Models and harnesses are now good enough to reliably handle this. The combination of writing code and using browsers means you can automate almost any task on a computer. Further, you can ask Grok Bot to record you doing the task, and then turn it into something repeatable.

🚢 Marin 535B-A23B started training this week! As usual, the whole process is open. Voyage plan: pretraining (80%) + midtraining (20%) on 18.75T tokens on 11 x GB200 NVL72 for ~3 months (2.7e24 FLOPs). Post-training will follow. Before kicking off the run, we trained a 4-rung scaling ladder from 1.6B-A61M (48B tokens) to 27.7B-A1.2B (926B tokens) to debug issues, and to make a forecast of our hero run. This is by far our biggest run, so definitely expecting the unexpected.

An excellent history of scaling laws from @jietang. In 2020, we explored the limits of sparsity in Switch Transformers by routing each token to only 1 out of 2048 experts (in retrospect, a bold choice). The model had fewer than 3B activated parameters, but 1.6T total parameters (comparable to today's frontier models). The 1.6T model achieved better C4 perplexities than the T5 models using far less compute, set a new SOTA on TriviaQA, but was dumb as bricks on reasoning tasks like SuperGLUE. The lesson was that the optimal tokens-per-parameter ratio is highly task-dependent. Or as @NShazeer had already intuited: FLOPs were intelligence; parameters were knowledge!

Sholto, thank you for setting the record straight. Larger issue is that multiple very serious people in Silicon Valley have heard some variation of this and believe it to be true. And the reason it is believable to so many is that it is consistent with Dario’s public messaging and what he outlined in the essay you shared: this technology *might* be dangerous for humans in multiple ways, could lead to extreme concentration of economic power (as outlined in the essay) and therefore needs to be regulated thoughtfully. I agree with the potential risks and I believe Dario makes all of these arguments in good faith. 
As discussed on the pod, if one agrees that AI *might* be dangerous, there are two ways to address this potential risk. Either concentrate it in the hands of a chosen few companies and politicians via regulation or distribute it widely. Essentially boils down to whether one believes AI is too dangerous to concentrate or too dangerous to distribute. There are reasonable arguments on both sides, but I profoundly agree with Zuckerberg’s statement that: “The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.” And as Dario says in the aforementioned essay, “some may object that we can simply keep AIs in check with a balance of power between many AI systems, as we do with humans.” I believe this is the best path forward: I want as many AIs as possible to maximize the odds that one shares my own particular values. And as Dario notes, no human has ever been able to take over the world. At this point, I think safe to say that Dario has lost the argument. His messaging has failed to result in his preferred regulatory path. The fact that the only solution to the recent incident where an unreleased advanced OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face was an open-source model likely ended any chance of strict near-term regulation. Essentially every major company other than Anthropic has signed Jensen’s letter. However, Dario’s messaging has been massively helpful to efforts to ban datacenters here in America. I suspect we will see anti-datacenter advocacy groups runnings ads using clips of Dario warning about how dangerous AI could be for humans. His good faith efforts in favor of regulation are now increasing the odds that AI will not be beneficial for Americans and humans everywhere. I believe that there is a reasonable chance AI might help us cure most forms of disease such that we have extended lifespans and can enjoy these long lives in an abundant Star Trek like future. That is the future that I want and I think Dario is decreasing the odds of that future at this point. He is about to be the CEO of one of the most important public companies in the world and given that the pro-regulatory effort has failed (at least for now), I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry. And if I am wrong and we do need to regulate this technology, he will be a more effective advocate for this in the future having been open-minded to the alternative. And for the sake of clarity and as I outlined on the pod, I think Anthropic has deep competitive advantages and is an amazing company. Ironically, the main risk I saw to Anthropic a few months ago was nationalization as a result of Dario’s own rhetoric and behavior.