Husband & dad (x2), rugged individualist, co-founder/CEO @SpiralDB, project chair @vortexdotdev. @PalantirTech 2013-22.
New York, NY
Joined May 2009
- Tweets582
- Following1.8K
- Followers639
- Likes36.6K
Will Manning retweeted
People have expected that RSI would magnify small leads and mean one lab runs away with it all. That may happen, but the frontier AI race also has a built in self-stabilizing dynamic that pushes the other way.
If you build a spectacular model, you sell out and may have to canibalization all your training and research compute to stay afloat and keep your customers from rioting, as well as needing to direct a lot of your efforts to inference efficiency on the existing model. So your next model’s quality may suffer a lot.
If you release a really bad model, no one uses it, and you have a ton of unneeded inference compute, and can scale faster and experiment more for your next model runs, which can mean a much better model.
Or, in meme form: Big compute builds strong models. Strong models lead to little compute. Little compute leads to weak models. Weak models lead to big compute.
Will Manning retweeted
It’s kinda crazy to me that we melt sand down, clean it to 99.99999% purity, literal wizards have to draw it slowly into an ingot, we cut it, inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it, and when you run electric current through it you can do basic arithmetic, which when you do enough of it can do any math on the planet, and which describes reality well enough that we can teach it the ontological meaning of words and their distance from each other on a high-dimensional space, and if you ask, it can tell you what word comes next and that apparently is powerful enough that if you do it a hundred billion times it’s the smartest thing to ever exist
oh yeah and we use this primarily for email
Will Manning retweeted
Apollo should never represent the upper limit of what @NASA can achieve. It should be a standard we continuously strive to exceed.
We’re bringing that intensity, discipline, and engineering ownership back to this agency. Great nations do not remain great by being caretakers of history, but by continuously making history.
Will Manning retweeted
I built bbtree, the foundation of databases and filesystems, and the fastest concurrent btree.
Code: github.com/XiangpengHao/bbtr…
Blog post & demo: bbtree.xiangpeng.systems/
Will Manning retweeted
The only way out is through.
They're calling it the Bugpocalypse. LLMs are being used to find long-hidden cracks in the software infrastructure, and it's happening at a furious rate. 3% of all compromises in computing history happened in the last week, claims one source? I believe it.
There are people saying public access to the frontier models ought to be locked out, or heavily guardrailed, over this. The problem with that idea can be summed up in one sentence: when lockpicks are outlawed, only outlaws will have lockpicks.
The lockpicks will be Chinese open-weight models, if nothing else. There's no way to stop those from becoming ubiquitous.
There are two futures in front of us. One in which only the bad guys have lockpicks, and security holes go undiscovered until they're exploited. Another in which everybody has lockpicks and is aggressively red-teaming their own software so it gets fixed before the holes are exploited.
The corpus of human code is huge but finite. The number of defects in it has to be finite too. We can fix those defects now; we have a million friendly robots to do it with.
The only way out is through.
Will Manning retweeted
we're holding an intervention on Tuesday at 10AM PT
Data quality is the ultimate compute multiplier.
Curated data matched our largest baseline with 6x less compute. A 12B-A1.4B model beat 30B-A3B on a fifth of the pretraining compute.
Live Tuesday 10am PT with @hurrycane @lukemerrick_ @josh_wills: events.datologyai.com/curati…
Will Manning retweeted
.@CarnegieMellon Appoints Database Professor @pateljm as Dean and Vice President of CMU Miami db.cs.cmu.edu/2026/10/carneg…
Will Manning retweeted
hey.
we know you're busy remediating php2shell.
when you're done, we have some content for you <3
spiraldb.com/blog/duckdb-and…
Will Manning retweeted
Claude, plz rewrite wordpress in rust. Yes all the plugins too. No I don't just mean the source code, I mean like, go replace everybody's wordpress install.
You don't have access, well funny thing...
Will Manning retweeted
It’s going to be a long winter for every security team out there. Be nice to them.
Will Manning retweeted
Ah yes “water companies”, businesses notorious for their pricing power and high margins
Will Manning retweeted
do not let yourself be reduced to the status of audience at a magic show, uncomprehendingly clapping as machine intelligence creates parcels of astounding knowledge. all of this is for us, to be understood by us, to sate our own curiosities. it's all really happening
fast, distributed determinism is hard. really cool work from our friends at @datologyai!
(also... integrates with @vortexdotdev 👀)
At @datologyai we run thousands of data experiments. Two things keep biting us:
- Same run on 16 vs 8 GPUs → different evals
- Every pipeline change → re-materialize the dataset
Introducing Zephon, the data loader we built to process data on the fly, deterministically. 🧵
