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Sunday, January 05, 2025

5: Sam Altman



We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible, and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history. ......... These years have been the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful, and—particularly for the last two—unpleasant years of my life so far. ......... Getting fired in public with no warning kicked off a really crazy few hours, and a pretty crazy few days. The “fog of war” was the strangest part. None of us were able to get satisfactory answers about what had happened, or why. ........ I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity. ............ The last two years have been like a decade at a normal company. When any company grows and evolves so fast, interests naturally diverge. And when any company in an important industry is in the lead, lots of people attack it for all sorts of reasons, especially when they are trying to compete with it. .......... when we started we had no idea we would have to build a product company; we thought we were just going to do great research. ......... We also had no idea we would need such a crazy amount of capital. There are new things we have to go build now that we didn’t understand a few years ago, and there will be new things in the future we can barely imagine now. ............ We believe in the importance of being world leaders on safety and alignment research, and in guiding that research with feedback from real world applications. ........... We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes. ............. We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else.

Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

....... Ron Conway and Brian Chesky went so far above and beyond the call of duty that I’m not even sure how to describe it. I’ve of course heard stories about Ron’s ability and tenaciousness for years and I’ve spent a lot of time with Brian over the past couple of years getting a huge amount of help and advice. .......... They used their vast networks for everything needed and were able to navigate many complex situations. .......... I thought I knew what it looked like to support a founder and a company, and in some small sense I did. But I have never before seen, or even heard of, anything like what these guys did, and now I get more fully why they have the legendary status they do. They are different and both fully deserve their genuinely unique reputations, but they are similar in their remarkable ability to move mountains and help, and in their unwavering commitment in times of need. ............ I look forward to paying it forward.

Sam Altman Interview On Nov. 30, 2022, traffic to OpenAI’s website peaked at a number a little north of zero. It was a startup so small and sleepy that the owners didn’t bother tracking their web traffic. It was a quiet day, the last the company would ever know. Within two months, OpenAI was being pounded by more than 100 million visitors trying, and freaking out about, ChatGPT. .......... his relentless pursuit of artificial general intelligence—the still-theoretical next phase of AI, in which machines will be capable of performing any intellectual task a human can do. ........... Conservatively, I would say there were 20 founding dinners that year [2015], and then one ends up being entered into the canon, and everyone talks about that. The most important one to me personally was Ilya 1 and I at the Counter in Mountain View [California]. Just the two of us. ........... 2012 comes along. Ilya and others do AlexNet. 2 I keep watching the progress, and I’m like, “Man, deep learning seems real. Also, it seems like it scales. That’s a big, big deal. Someone should do something.” ............. It’s impossible to overstate how nonmainstream AGI was in 2014. People were afraid to talk to me, because I was saying I wanted to start an AGI effort. It was, like, cancelable. It could ruin your career. But a lot of people said there’s one person you really gotta talk to, and that was Ilya. So I stalked Ilya at a conference, got him in the hallway, and we talked. .............. The pitch was just come build AGI. ........ I cannot overstate how heretical it was at the time to say we’re gonna build AGI. So you filter out 99% of the world, and you only get the really talented, original thinkers. .......... if you’re building, like, the 10,000th photo-sharing app? Really hard to recruit talent. ........... Convince me no one else is doing it, and appeal to a small, really talented set? You can get them all. And they all wanna work together. So we had what at the time sounded like an audacious or maybe outlandish pitch, and it pushed away all of the senior experts in the field, and we got the ragtag, young, talented people who are good to start with. .............. People used to joke in those days that the only thing I would do was walk into a meeting and say, “Scale it up!” Which is not true, but that was kind of the thrust of that time period. ........... The rest of the company was like, “Why are you making us launch this? It’s a bad decision. It’s not ready.” I don't make a lot of “we’re gonna do this thing” decisions, but this was one of them. ............... And that started off a mad scramble to get a lot of compute 7—which we did not have at the time—because we had launched this with no business model or thoughts for a business model. I remember a meeting that December where I sort of said, “I’ll consider any idea for how we’re going to pay for this, but we can’t go on.” And there were some truly horrible ideas—and no good ones. So we just said, “Fine, we’re just gonna try a subscription, and we’ll figure it out later.” That just stuck. We launched with GPT-3.5, and we knew we had GPT-4 [coming] ............... It’s very unusual to have been a VC first and have had a pretty long VC career and then run a company. .............. And I knew I was both overwhelmed with gratitude and, like, “F---, I’m gonna get strapped to a rocket ship, and my life is gonna be totally different and not that fun.” I had a lot of gallows humor about it. My husband 8 tells funny stories from that period of how I would come home, and he’d be like, “This is so great!” And I was like, “This is just really bad. It’s bad for you, too. You just don’t realize it yet, but it’s really bad.” ................. It complicated my ability to live my life. But in the company, you can be a well-known CEO or not, people are just like, “Where’s my f---ing GPUs?” .............. come with me to the research meeting right after this, and you will see nothing but disrespect. Which is great. .............. that year was such an insane blur, from November of 2022 to November of 2023, I barely remember it. It literally felt like we built out an entire company from almost scratch in 12 months, and we did it in crazy public. One of my learnings, looking back, is everybody says they’re not going to screw up the relative ranking of important versus urgent, 9 and everybody gets tricked by urgent. So I would say the first moment when I was coldly staring at reality in the face—that this was not going to work—was about 12:05 p.m. on whatever that Friday afternoon was. ................ so they fired me at noon on a Friday. A bunch of other people quit Friday night. By late Friday night I was like, “We’re just going to go start a new AGI effort.” Later Friday night, some of the executive team was like, “Um, we think we might get this undone. Chill out, just wait.” .................. Saturday morning, two of the board members called and wanted to talk about me coming back. I was initially just supermad and said no. And then I was like, “OK, fine.” I really care about [OpenAI]. But I was like, “Only if the whole board quits.” I wish I had taken a different tack than that, but at the time it felt like a just thing to ask for. ............. There was this whole thing of, like, “Sam didn’t even tell the board that he was gonna launch ChatGPT.” ......... But what is true is I definitely was not like, “We’re gonna launch this thing that is gonna be a huge deal.” ............. It’s a crazy year, right? It’s a company that’s moving a million miles an hour in a lot of different ways. ............ But then very quickly it was over, and I had a complete mess on my hands. And it got worse every day. It was like another government investigation, another old board member leaking fake news to the press. And all those people that I feel like really f---ed me and f---ed the company were gone, and now I had to clean up their mess. .............. Once everything was cleared up, it was all fine, but in the first few days no one knew anything. And so I’d be walking down the hall, and [people] would avert their eyes. It was like I had a terminal cancer diagnosis. There was sympathy, empathy, but [no one] was sure what to say. ................ we do a three-hour executive team meeting on Mondays ............. yesterday and today, six one-on-ones with engineers. I’m going to the research meeting right after this. Tomorrow is a day where there’s a couple of big partnership meetings and a lot of compute meetings. .............. There’s five meetings on building up compute. I have three product brainstorm meetings tomorrow, and I’ve got a big dinner with a major hardware partner after. .......... A few things that are weekly rhythms, and then it’s mostly whatever comes up. ............ I’m not a big inspirational email writer, but lots of one-on-one, small-group meetings and then a lot of stuff over Slack. .............. I’m a big Slack user. You can get a lot of data in the muck. I mean, there’s nothing that’s as good as being in a meeting with a small research team for depth. But for breadth, man, you can get a lot that way. ............ You’ve put research in a different building from the rest of the company, a couple of miles away. .............. Research will still have its own area. Protecting the core of research is really critical to what we do. .............. Usually you get a very good product company and a very bad research lab. We’re very fortunate that the little product company we bolted on is the fastest-growing tech company maybe ever—certainly in a long time. But that could easily subsume the magic of research, and I do not intend to let that happen. .........................

when an AI system can do what very skilled humans in important jobs can do—I’d call that AGI.

.......... Can it start as a computer program and decide it wants to become a doctor? Can it do what the best people in the field can do or the 98th percentile? How autonomous is it? I don’t have deep, precise answers there yet, but if you could hire an AI as a remote employee to be a great software engineer, I think a lot of people would say, “OK, that’s AGI-ish.” .................... when I think about superintelligence, the key thing to me is, can this system rapidly increase the rate of scientific discovery that happens on planet Earth? ................. it was clear people were trying to use ChatGPT for search a lot, and that actually wasn’t something that we had in mind when we first launched it. ....................... since we’ve launched search in ChatGPT, I almost don’t use Google anymore. ........ Many people who work at OpenAI get really heartwarming emails when people are like, “I was sick for years, no doctor told me what I had. I finally put all my symptoms and test results into ChatGPT—it said I had this rare disease. I went to a doctor, and they gave me this thing, and I’m totally cured.” ............ Long term, as you think about a system that really just has incredible capability, there’s risks that are probably hard to precisely imagine and model. But I can simultaneously think that these risks are real and also believe that the only way to appropriately address them is to ship product and learn. .................. three potential roadblocks to progress: scaling the models, chip scarcity and energy scarcity .......... I think 2025 will be an incredible year. ............. He’s the president of the United States. I support any president. .......... The question was, will he abuse his political power of being co-president, or whatever he calls himself now, to mess with a business competitor? I don’t think he’ll do that. I genuinely don’t. May turn out to be proven wrong. ........... for all of the stories—people talk about how he berates people and blows up and whatever, I hadn’t experienced that. ............ The thing I really deeply agree with the president on is, it is wild how difficult it has become to build things in the United States. Power plants, data centers, any of that kind of stuff. I understand how bureaucratic cruft builds up, but it’s not helpful to the country in general. It’s particularly not helpful when you think about what needs to happen for the US to lead AI. And the US really needs to lead AI.

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Thursday, January 02, 2025

2: Love

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2: Manmohan Singh

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2: Lions

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2: Perplexity

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Wednesday, January 01, 2025

1: Bajirao Mastani

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Earth To Earth Rocketry + Hyperloop



Elon Musk's Earth to Earth transportation project via SpaceX's Starship is an ambitious concept aimed at revolutionizing long-distance travel on Earth. Here's a breakdown:

Key Features of the Project:

  1. Transportation Model:

    • Starship rockets would launch passengers into suborbital flight.
    • The rocket would travel parallel to the Earth's surface at extreme speeds.
    • It would land on floating platforms near major urban centers.

  2. Travel Times:

    • The system promises remarkably short travel durations.
    • Example: New York to London in approximately 29 minutes.

  3. Cost Efficiency:

    • Musk envisions ticket prices being comparable to an economy-class airline ticket.
    • This accessibility could democratize high-speed global travel.

  4. Technology:

    • Leverages the Starship rocket's reusability and high payload capabilities.
    • Uses vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) technology for efficiency and adaptability.

  5. Infrastructure:

    • Requires floating launch and landing platforms positioned near coastal cities.
    • Infrastructure development would be critical for the system's scalability.

Challenges and Considerations:

  • Safety and Regulation:

    • Ensuring passenger safety in high-speed rocket travel.
    • Navigating international airspace and space regulations.

  • Environmental Impact:

    • Addressing carbon emissions or implementing greener propulsion technologies.

  • Cost Feasibility:

    • Achieving economy-class pricing while covering development and operational costs.

  • Public Acceptance:

    • Overcoming potential passenger hesitancy regarding rocket travel.

If successful, the Earth to Earth system could drastically alter global travel, making intercontinental commutes faster than ever and reshaping the way we think about distance and time.





Earth to Earth Rocket Transportation and Hyperloop: A Perfect Duo for Future Travel

In recent years, technological advancements have redefined the boundaries of human transportation. Elon Musk’s SpaceX Earth to Earth rocket transportation project is one such groundbreaking concept, promising to revolutionize global travel by cutting travel times to under an hour. Imagine flying from New York to London in just 29 minutes. While the idea is futuristic and awe-inspiring, pairing it with another of Musk’s visionary projects, the Hyperloop, could create a seamless transportation network that connects the entire planet.

Here’s why Earth to Earth rocket transportation should go hand in hand with the Hyperloop.

The Case for a Unified System

1. Bridging Gaps Between Speed and Accessibility

The Earth to Earth rocket system offers unparalleled speed for long-distance travel, but accessibility remains a challenge. Rockets will likely land on floating platforms near coastal cities, requiring additional transportation for inland destinations.

This is where the Hyperloop comes in. With its ultra-high-speed pods traveling through vacuum tubes, the Hyperloop could efficiently connect major inland cities to rocket launch pads. Passengers could hop off a rocket and board a Hyperloop pod, seamlessly traveling to their final destination without delays or interruptions.

2. Addressing the Urban Congestion Problem

Major cities worldwide are already grappling with overburdened transportation systems. Integrating Hyperloop networks with rocket transportation can alleviate this pressure by offering a direct, high-speed alternative for intercity travel. For example, a traveler arriving in Los Angeles via rocket could take the Hyperloop to San Francisco in less than an hour, bypassing congested airports and highways.

3. Synergy of Technologies

Both systems share a focus on efficiency, sustainability, and cutting-edge engineering:

  • Earth to Earth Rockets: Leverage reusable rockets and vertical takeoff/landing technology.
  • Hyperloop: Utilizes magnetic levitation and near-vacuum tubes for energy-efficient travel.

Together, these technologies can create a global travel ecosystem that’s not just fast but also environmentally conscious.

Environmental and Economic Benefits

1. Reducing Carbon Footprints

Rocket launches are often criticized for their environmental impact. However, integrating the Hyperloop could reduce the need for short-haul flights, which are some of the most polluting segments of air travel. By combining the strengths of these systems, we can minimize emissions and promote a greener future.

2. Boosting Global Economies

Faster travel means enhanced connectivity between economic hubs. Pairing Earth to Earth rockets with Hyperloop networks would:

  • Open up new trade routes.
  • Enable rapid business travel.
  • Increase tourism by making even the most remote destinations accessible within hours.

Challenges and Opportunities

Challenges

  • Infrastructure Development: Building Hyperloop networks and floating rocket platforms near major cities requires significant investment and coordination.
  • Regulatory Hurdles: International cooperation will be essential to navigate airspace and transportation regulations.
  • Public Adoption: Educating the public about the safety and benefits of these systems will be crucial for widespread acceptance.

Opportunities

  • Job Creation: Large-scale infrastructure projects will generate employment across various sectors.
  • Technological Advancement: Pushing the boundaries of physics and engineering will spur innovation in other industries.
  • Global Unity: A truly interconnected world fosters collaboration and cultural exchange.

A Vision of the Future

Picture this: You leave your home in a small inland city, board a Hyperloop pod, and arrive at a coastal rocket terminal within minutes. From there, you take an Earth to Earth rocket to another continent, where another Hyperloop pod whisks you to your final destination. What once took 12 hours by plane now takes less than two hours in total.

Combining Earth to Earth rocket transportation with the Hyperloop isn’t just a possibility; it’s a necessity for creating a future where speed, accessibility, and sustainability coexist. Together, these technologies can bring the world closer than ever before—not just geographically, but culturally and economically.

The future of travel isn’t just about getting from point A to point B. It’s about creating a seamless, efficient, and sustainable journey. By integrating Earth to Earth rockets with the Hyperloop, we can achieve just that.






Earth to Earth Rocket Transportation: A Better Use Case for SpaceX and Space Tech Startups Than Mars

For years, the prospect of colonizing Mars has dominated the ambitions of space tech companies, with SpaceX leading the charge. While the vision of establishing a human presence on the Red Planet is inspiring, the case for Earth-based applications of rocket technology is far more compelling—and immediate. Among these, Earth to Earth rocket transportation and low-orbit, low-cost satellite internet stand out as transformative technologies with the potential to reshape life on our home planet.

Here’s why Earth to Earth transportation and satellite internet are stronger use cases for space tech than Mars colonization.

The Power of Earth to Earth Rocket Transportation

1. Revolutionizing Global Travel

Earth to Earth rocket transportation promises to shrink the world like never before. Imagine flying from New York to Tokyo in under an hour. This would make intercontinental travel as convenient as a domestic flight, eliminating the barriers of time zones and long-haul flights.

Such a system would:

  • Enable rapid business travel, facilitating global collaboration.
  • Make far-off destinations accessible, boosting tourism and cultural exchange.
  • Redefine supply chains by enabling faster movement of goods.

2. Immediate Market Demand

Unlike the hypothetical market for Mars colonization, Earth to Earth transportation addresses an existing and robust demand for faster, more efficient travel. The global aviation industry—valued at over $800 billion—could be disrupted and enhanced by the introduction of rocket-based travel.

3. Economic Viability

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has claimed that Earth to Earth rocket travel could be priced similarly to economy airline tickets. If achieved, this price point would democratize access to high-speed global travel, creating a massive market and ensuring high utilization of the technology.

The Case for Low-Orbit, Low-Cost Satellite Internet

1. Global Connectivity

SpaceX’s Starlink project has already begun to demonstrate the transformative power of low-orbit satellites for providing high-speed internet. With thousands of satellites in orbit, Starlink can bring connectivity to:

  • Rural and remote areas currently underserved by traditional broadband.
  • Developing countries, bridging the digital divide.
  • Disaster zones, where terrestrial infrastructure is often destroyed.

2. Enabling the Digital Economy

Reliable, high-speed internet is the backbone of the modern economy. By making it universally accessible, low-orbit satellite networks can:

  • Support remote work and education.
  • Accelerate the adoption of digital services in emerging markets.
  • Enhance the capabilities of connected technologies like IoT and autonomous vehicles.

3. A Rapidly Growing Market

The global satellite internet market is projected to reach $53 billion by 2030. With its head start, SpaceX is well-positioned to dominate this space, creating a steady revenue stream to fund further innovation.

Why Mars Falls Short

1. Delayed ROI

While Mars colonization is a bold vision, it’s a long-term endeavor with significant scientific, technological, and financial hurdles. Establishing even a small, self-sustaining colony on Mars could take decades, with no guarantee of economic return.

2. Niche Appeal

Mars colonization appeals primarily to space enthusiasts and futurists. By contrast, Earth to Earth transportation and satellite internet have broad, immediate appeal, addressing needs that affect billions of people.

3. Planetary Priorities

Investing in Earth-based applications of space technology allows us to solve pressing global challenges. From bridging connectivity gaps to reducing travel times, these innovations improve life on Earth while also laying the groundwork for future interplanetary exploration.

A Vision for the Future

By focusing on Earth to Earth rocket transportation and low-cost satellite internet, SpaceX and other space tech startups can achieve transformative change within our lifetime. These technologies have the potential to:

  • Shrink travel times and connect people like never before.
  • Make the internet accessible to every corner of the planet.
  • Generate the revenue needed to fund humanity’s long-term space ambitions, including Mars colonization.

Mars may be humanity’s long-term goal, but the technologies developed for Earth today can make that dream a reality tomorrow. In the meantime, let’s focus on making the most of these innovations here at home.



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2025

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Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Happy New Year 2025

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31: China

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