Nando de Freitas

💯 text diffusion is the future 🚀

There was a time when @nvidia and @Google weren't into AI. There was a time when the big cloud providers didn't have GPUs. There was a time before GPUs and deep learning, and AI, ... During that time professors and students created the foundation of the AI we have today.

It is morally wrong for some of the billion and trillion dollar AI companies that we enabled and helped build over the last two decades to (1) enforce 6 and 12 month garden leaves on the scientists we trained for them, and (2) choose not to fund education efforts like @DeepIndaba and @Khipu_AI

This is truly inspirational! We called it neural nets, machine learning, deep learning, AI, SI over the decades, but it was always the same idea: artificial neural nets are remarkable at learning to solve problems from data

It is a wonderful thing for AI to become superhuman at mathematical proofs. It will be even more wonderful to see AI taking advantage of such knowledge to advance our understanding of the universe and to solve some of our biggest problems, including healthcare and energy. It was hard for Kasparov with chess, for Lee Sedol with Go, and now for several mathematicians to accept AI’s superiority. I feel sad for many mathematicians and worry about the students. It is hard when the thing you dedicated your life to is taken over by a machine. Not easy to accept in the short term, even if it is a good thing in the end. I spent my life writing AI papers, and that too will be done far more effectively by machines soon. I feel awe, some emptiness, and I rejoice at the fact that it was all meaningful because someone had to create the initial training data, and because we now have more powerful tools to start solving problems that impact everyone. These developments are amazing, energising and exciting, but it is also important to acknowledge that they create anxiety (meaning, finances, social impact) and a lot of uncertainty.

Frankly 1 year noncompetes and garden leaves in AI are the dumbest affront on British science and engineering EVER since Isaac Newton. 🇬🇧 https://freetostartandscale.uk

Really proud of the achievements of the MAI speech team I hired when there. Microsoft is once again the leader in speech. I have no doubt they will go far beyond this. I’ll continue rooting for them and MAI. They’re exceptional.

“The BBC acts in the public interest, serving all audiences through impartial, high-quality, and distinctive output that informs, educates, and entertains”. So dear @BBCPolitics how about you give it a break to reporting AI doom stories, and for once start living by your mission. We need sovereign AI in the UK for many good, noble and existential reasons. The issue is not that the BBC reports on the potential dangers of AI. The issue is it doesn’t talk about its many benefits: better healthcare, improved security, new tools for artists, new job creation, empowerment - everyone can now code and has access to all the general knowledge in the world, advances in STEM, and so much more the public doesn’t know about, precisely because it’s not reported by the BBC. For example, this was huge news yesterday, but the BBC stayed silent. http://freetostartandscale.uk https://x.com/ft/status/2104791865924977141?s=46&t=PA673f8hyVd2kcl4Kgrwig https://x.com/ninadschick/status/2104985742086906074?s=46&t=PA673f8hyVd2kcl4Kgrwig

I attended my first talk by Geoffrey Hinton in 1997 at the Royal Society — It was utterly inspiring. He is as inspiring today as he was back then. I highly recommend this thoughtful and funny interview with him. https://youtu.be/l6ZcFa8pybE?is=3bcCJKS8FiMlaro8 via @YouTube

Freedom is the greatest act of love. Then, why are 🇺🇸 Big Tech bosses in London preventing people from being free to start new companies in the UK 🇬🇧 by enforcing long noncompetes, sending threatening letters that bring young families to tears, and coercive 6-12 month garden leaves? We need our freedom back. Our sovereignty depends on this. http://freetostartandscale.uk

When a movie heartthrob becomes an AI nerd! — The evolution of who does or talks about AI has been far bigger than any of the technical changes. Ben Affleck on AI ... https://youtu.be/MzXEWrT3Ld8?is=-S1bZWhMvx-YnpXE via @YouTube

A nice presentation by @paveltyletski on Diffusion Gemma: 4x faster text generation. I think that text diffusion will not only be 4x faster and 10x more energy efficient, but eventually it will also be of higher quality, and supersede autoregressive LLMs. https://youtu.be/3n5RN7i8h2Y?si=YkYzZJuNnae_6ChD via @YouTube