Physicist. Biotech. Crazy ideas. Author of #Loonshots đ https://nitter.cf/t.co/Yp2Bq5yL6v
Washington, DC
Joined June 2011
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Just launched - the Loonshots videobook: mRNA, Pixar, Steve Jobs, DARPA, physics expts (shaking eggs, blowtorching ice), Pan Am, how the Allies won WWII, why the world speaks English. Plus how to innovate faster + better. In 51 minutes
litvideobooks.com/loonshots
Sometimes the champion of a new scientific theory is dismissed for years, written off as crazy, before the science is vindicated. Sometimes the same thing happens in a years-long battle for justice. @DMSabatini has now led both types of fights and won. First mTOR. And this week he was vindicated in his 5-year battle for justice against unprecedented personal attacks - as many in the Cambridge community who knew the real story hoped he would be. Congrats David and thanks to those who helped him along the way @IOCBPrague @BillAckman . Here's hoping this helps you get back to doing great science that can help millions of people.
A civil jury ruled in favor of ex-MIT scientist David Sabatini, who was accused by a younger colleague of inappropriate sexual conduct in his Cambridge research lab, and awarded him $6 million in damages. trib.al/s3v9VIX
Some history summary here at the FP a year ago from @SnoozyWeiss
thefp.com/p/can-david-sabatiâŚ
Safi Bahcall retweeted
Dario has written that we need to âpace the frontier,â and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric â market share, revenue growth, model capability â the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. Youâve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I donât see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone elseâs permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropicâs investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who arenât even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sandersâ âshut it all down.â China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, youâll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you donât, weâll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture â or an election-season psyop.
Nice video đ
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by @SafiBahcall . The book promises to provide practical insights into the mechanics of how crazy concepts can eventually reshape industries and change the world.
One of my favorite types of innovation, in both physics and business, comes from border-crossing: applying an idea from one field to solve a problem in a seemingly unrelated field. 1/N
Links:
From superconductivity to the Higgs boson (a.k.a the Anderson-Nambu-Goldstone-Higgs boson)
arxiv.org/abs/1207.6911 8/N
Early attention papers
direct.mit.edu/neco/article-âŚ
researchgate.net/publication⌠/END
Safi Bahcall retweeted
Two hundred and fifty years ago today, fifty-six men signed their own death warrants.
That is not a metaphor.
Putting your name to the Declaration of Independence was treason against the Crown.
The penalty for treason was the rope.
Every man who signed knew that if the revolution failed, his signature was the evidence that would hang him.
They signed anyway.
These were not desperate men with nothing to lose.
They were lawyers, merchants, planters, and physicians.
Men with land, money, families, and comfortable lives.
They had everything to lose, and they wrote their names down anyway, in ink, where the King could read every one.
Then the war came for them.
Richard Stockton of New Jersey was dragged from his home and thrown in a British prison.
He came out with his health broken and never truly recovered.
Carter Braxton of Virginia watched the British navy sweep his ships from the sea, and much of his fortune went with them.
John Hart was driven from the bedside of his dying wife.
His fields were burned, his mill destroyed, his children scattered into hiding.
He spent more than a year sleeping in forests and caves while soldiers hunted him.
He came home to a fresh grave and an empty house.
That was the cost.
Not a slogan. Not a parade. The actual price, paid by actual men, with their homes and their families and their names.
They closed that document with a single line.
They pledged to each other their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor.
And every one of them was asked to make good on all three.
Two hundred and fifty years later, we are still free because they were not afraid.
Happy Independence Day.
Spend it like it was expensive.
Because it was.
đŚ
đ¤ Made with AI
Don't fear the coming crash...
"The same 1929 crash that handed Germany Weimar handed America the New Deal, the GI Bill, and the suburbs. ... That is the American move: take the disruption everyone else fears and turn it into a golden age."
Wise words, well timed @vijaypande
Renaissance is the ultimate realization of the vision of America.
America has never been a finished country. It's the one that rebuilds itself every time the ground shifts, and comes out larger. The same 1929 crash that handed Germany Weimar handed America the New Deal, the GI Bill, and the suburbs. Same storm, opposite outcome, because we had the institutions and the broad ownership to climb out.
That is the American move: take the disruption everyone else fears and turn it into a golden age. Five times in history a new technology has broken a civilization's picture of what a human being is for, and the societies that rewrote it well got a renaissance. AI is that break now.
So a renaissance isn't a departure from the founders' vision. It's the fullest expression of it. Their real genius was building the answer before the crisis arrived, the institutions sitting ready on the shelf when the moment came.
Ours is the same work in a new age: put ownership of the new tools into many hands instead of a few, because the American promise was always broad property and never a court, and build a picture of a human life worth wanting that no machine can generate.
The crash is coming. America is the country built to meet it. Let's build the answer before it lands.
Safi Bahcall retweeted
I am a lifelong Democrat. I served in the White House for President Clinton, in the State Department for Madeleine Albright, and with the United Nations in Cambodia. I believe the most important role of any government is to protect the most vulnerable people in society and create an environment where everyone can realize their fullest potential. So it gives me no pleasure to have come to the following conclusion:
The American left, including the left wing of the Democratic Party, is currently embracing an orgy of virulent antisemitism.
Keep those exciting loonshots coming @davidasinclair
"You can always tell a leader by the arrows in his ass" (Judah Folkman)
Great historical overview from @vijaypande - each of the Renaissances Vijay describes was triggered by a society-changing loonshot, like the one we are living through now. Vijay is the guy to follow for the intersection of AI and life sciences
"Luck is the residue of design" - Branch Rickey
There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.
He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.
When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.
Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.
The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.
Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.
The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.
That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.