IT'S HAPPENING

AI edition

In January 2021, I wrote about our path to General-Purpose Robots.

How The Hell Do We Create General-Purpose Robots?

It described a path that relied on large models and, importantly, a physics simulation engine. A few days ago, a group of researchers from universities and private companies across the US, China, and the UK released such a simulation engine called Genesis. Look at some of the simulations below - I believe this fully unlocks general purpose robotics, and we will have it working imminently.

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In March 2023, I wrote about acting AI - basically an LLM with full computer use.

Towards Acting AI

In October, Anthropic released a preview of Claude with computer use. Shortly thereafter, Deepmind previewed Mariner, a version of the same technology targeting the browser.

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In August 2023, I wrote about figuring out how to channel arbitrary amounts of compute into a problem.

The Most Valuable Problem in AI

The new reasoning models from OpenAI and Google have provided the final piece for that puzzle. A general solution as described in the article is still pending, but I believe we are not far off.

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And then, on top of all of that, o3. If you haven’t seen the announcement, I recommend watching at least some of it.

Looking at the benchmarks, I am willing to concede that in some important way, it is smarter than me. Previous models knew more than I do about the things I don’t care much about, but o3 seems to be just smarter than the vast majority of humans at tasks that require logical reasoning - math, coding, some parts of science. And the speed at which the progress from o1 to o3 was made is truly mind-boggling.

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I have been more bullish on AI than just about anyone outside of the research labs for about a decade. But that was pure logical reasoning, extrapolation of trends, you know, theoretical stuff.

This week, for the first time in my life, I felt the AGI. In my gut, I now know it’s all going to happen - generalist robots, AI scientists, autonomous colonization of Mars, the singularity - all of it, almost certainly in our lifetime.

I have never been more excited.