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sunilpaul.bsky.social
@sunilpaul.bsky.social
42 followers 42 following 17 posts
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Reposted
tedunderwood.com
For those of us who always stressed that "AGI" was an empty concept, what's happening now looks like

1. Substantive utility claims for AI are broadly acknowledged.
2. "But it's not AGI" == a politic gesture that allows critics to save face.

I'm not criticizing Chris; this is how we move forward!
mims.bsky.social Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · Jul 11
thiiiiis

semantic search is CRAZY useful in how it can unlock the value of the vast majority of data, which is unstructured

the fact that LLMs can also summarize and recontextualize that unstructured data is truly a breakthrough

this is not by any stretch of the imagination AGI
karlbode.com Karl Bode @karlbode.com · Jul 11
A good 70% of the fighting over AI would have been avoided if VC hucksters (and gullible access journalists) hadn't conflated incrementally useful automation with computational sentience to make money
July 11, 2025 at 8:30 PM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
pen.org/banned-words...
Federal Government's Growing Banned Words List Is Chilling Act of Censorship - PEN America
Banned words list 2025: The federal government is banning a growing number of words to comply with executive orders from President Trump.
pen.org
June 26, 2025 at 9:22 PM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
This is a critical question
emollick.bsky.social Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · Apr 18
It seems like a big question in AI right now is whether there is a flywheel in AI development & when it kicks in, either because having advanced AIs let you code & train better AIs, or due to other returns to experience in building AI

If/when it does, all non-frontier labs fall behind the race.
April 19, 2025 at 2:43 AM
Reposted
annabower.bsky.social
Here is the full text of Rachel Cohen’s firm-wide email:
Jeremy and colleagues, Many deals I work on have concepts of conditional notice. This is mine. Please consider this email my two week notice, revocable if the firm comes up with a satisfactory response to the current moment, which should include at minimum i) signing on to the firm amicus brief in support of Perkins Coie in its litigation fighting the Trump administration's executive order against it, (i) committing to broad future representation, regardless of whether powerful people view it as adverse to them, (iii) refusal to cooperate with the EEOC's request for personal information of our colleagues clearly targeted at intimidating non-white employees, (iv) public refusal to fire or otherwise force out employees at the Trump administration's directive or implied directive and (v) public commitment to maintenance of affinity groups and related initiatives. This is not what I saw for my career or for my evening, but Paul Weiss' decision to cave to the Trump administration on DEl, representation and staffing has forced my hand. We do not have time. It is now or it is never, and if it is never, I will not continue to work here. When I went to law school and to Skadden, I did so in pursuit of agency. I was driven by a desire to be in rooms where decision-makers were, to get to play a role in things that mattered, because things felt so needlessly terrible. It never occurred to me that the people in those rooms might feel that they were powerless. I am forced to hope that our lack of response to the Trump administration's attacks on our peers, both those at other large firms and the many people in this country with far fewer resources, is rooted in feelings of fear and powerlessness, as opposed to tacit agreement or desire to maximize profit. I still hope that is true. But it has not yet been borne out. It feels mortifying to say "I suspect you know who I am," but I suspect you know who I am. Over the last few weeks, I have devoted an inordinate amount of time trying to leverage various relationships and privileges to get our firm and broader industry to admit that we are in the throes of early-stage authoritarianism and that we are uniquely positioned to halt it. There is an open letter (now signed by over 600 other AmLaw 200 associates, many of them at this firm), mainstream media coverage and an oped explaining why I feel this way. To anyone who feels sympathetic to the views I've espoused but wonders why I have taken the path I have: on Thursday, March 6, after the issuance of the Perkins Executive Order, I sent emails to multiple trusted partners in management asking to help with whatever response we coordinated. One of them went unanswered. One of them replied, "Thanks, Rachel. Always appreciate your With gratitude and ur... "Thanks, Rachel. Always appreciate your perspective." One of them replied offering to talk and then failed to reply to my email asking for a time until a week later, significantly after I had begun speaking publicly. Know that I attended internal meetings about this topic, sent emails to decision makers, avoided commenting on the EEOC investigation publicly or airing any internal firm discourse publicly. I did all of these things out of hope that we would do the right thing if given time and opportunity. The firm has been given time and opportunity to do the right thing. Thus far, we have not. This is a moment that demands urgency. Whether we are failing to meet it because we are unprepared or because we don't wish to is irrelevant to me— and to the world —where the outcome is the same. If we were going to resist, we would have done so already. If we were not going to respond to the EEOC (a refusal that would be fully legal), the firm would have already told us. This is the first firmwide email that has been sent on this topic. What. Are. We. Doing. Colleagues, if you question if it is as bad as you think it is, it is ten times worse. Whether what we measure is the cowardice in face of lost profits, or the proximity to authoritarianism, or the trauma inflicted on our colleagues who are nonwhite, or the disappointment that I feel in this moment, take what you suspect and multiply it by a factor of ten. Act accordingly. I recognize not everyone is positioned as I am, and cannot act the same way. But do not "Thanks, Rachel. Always appreciate your perspective." One of them replied offering to talk and then failed to reply to my email asking for a time until a week later, significantly after I had begun speaking publicly. Know that I attended internal meetings about this topic, sent emails to decision makers, avoided commenting on the EEOC investigation publicly or airing any internal firm discourse publicly. I did all of these things out of ho… Do not pretend that what is happening is normal or excusable. It isn't. To the many superiors, support staff and friends that I know I disappoint by making this announcement firmwide instead of talking to you first, I sincerely apologize. There are so many thank yous that I have for so many people at this firm. Please know that if you suspect that you have helped me or taught me or cared for me, that I agree and am eternally grateful. In the coming days, I will make every effort to reach out to you separately, but there is urgency here that makes it impossible to go to each of you first. I will do everything in my power to mitigate difficulties caused by my unexpected departure. Like any self-important adolescent, I spent most of my high school history classes wondering what I would do in the moments before true horror or chaos or where my values were tested and demanded great sacrifice. I do not wonder anymore. I know who I am. I thought I knew who we all were. Thank you for the opportunity. My personal email is cc'd. I wish each of you the best, and that you use the privileges you hold to work for the best for others. Rachel Rachel Cohen
March 21, 2025 at 1:02 PM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
This just in: Musk sues European consumers insisting they must buy Teslas. electrek.co/2025/02/05/t...
Tesla sales dropped 60% in Germany
Tesla’s sales have dropped nearly 60% in January in Germany compared to the same period last year. The same thing...
electrek.co
February 22, 2025 at 1:14 AM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
Today Ronald Regan is turning in his grave as Putin & Trump slow dance over it together.
February 21, 2025 at 1:00 AM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
@emollick.bsky.social - I appreciate that you are posting all your material here on Blue Sky, now. I followed you on Twitter from before chatGPT 3.5 and enjoyed the social science posts. Now am loving your AI focus and still including occasional social science/innovation/entrepreneurship posts.
February 9, 2025 at 9:00 PM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
The emergence behavior of neural nets continues to astound. Deepseek also had a (very different) approach that also involved fewer GPUs but running more cycles. So did Apple with its AV example (see prior repost by me from @emollick.bsky.social ).
emollick.bsky.social Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · Feb 7
This paper is wild - a Stanford team shows the simplest way to make an open LLM into a reasoning model

They used just 1,000 carefully curated reasoning examples & a trick where if the model tries to stop thinking, they append "Wait" to force it to continue. Near o1 at math. arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19393
February 7, 2025 at 5:44 AM
Reposted
emollick.bsky.social
Apple team shows self-driving AI can learn entirely by practicing against itself - no human driving data needed

In testing, their system averages 17.5 years of continuous driving between incidents, far surpassing humans. All through self-play, not imitation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349
February 7, 2025 at 1:20 AM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
🚨 Elon Musk’s DOGE: Efficiency or Empire-Building? 🚨

Musk runs Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) while 60% of his fortune is tied to federal funding, contracts, and regulation.

Is Musk fixing Washington—or fixing the game? 👇
February 7, 2025 at 4:49 AM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
Why isn't this being mentioned in all the press about DeepSeek?
January 30, 2025 at 12:49 AM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
Trump's first acts as president:

* pardoned criminals who attacked police
* enriched himself by launching a cryptocoin
* denied disaster aid for fellow Americans who lost their homes

We won't forget.
January 24, 2025 at 7:29 PM
sunilpaul.bsky.social
Published in 2017 by @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social , this article about AI is worth re-reading in today's AI hype. Favorite quotes:
- We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
- Nothing in the universe is without limit.
The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions
Mistaken extrapolations, limited imagination, and other common mistakes that distract us from thinking more productively about the future.
www.technologyreview.com
January 22, 2025 at 1:01 AM