Yafan Wang > Recent Status Updates

Chpt 19 Step by Step

Oh well Gemini at one point did perform better but no one cared. Products release is so important and Altman unveiled Sora at that point. Then deepmind lost the RL chain of thoughts model improvement again to o1 of OpenAI. This seems to be the case that biz acumen does lead OpenAI much further than deepmind

Chapt 18 we are cooked
AI safety has race too. Whenever deepmind published a paper, Altman offered them a job and higher salaries lol. Recalled the 2023 coup to oust Altman, but Ilya actually chose the worst timing when Dan is about to close the deal to allow employee to sell their private stocks, worth roughly 1m per person sigh. With rainmakers waving cash on one side and employees wanting cash on the other, cooked

Chapt 16 the power and glory
Inventors are destined to follow the power and glory
So interesting to see how deepmind was always cautious at releasing products where as Altman sprinted ahead. There are ppl like Irving who preferred deepmind whereas Rae preferred openAI. Also so interesting how Sparrow and ChatGPT both used RLHF but sparrow lost on just taking a few months to release product

Chapter 15 Fermat of biology

Alphafold got made, from RL to convolution neuronetworks to transformer! Terminated CASP comp. Alphafold solved protein folding, and cascaded the AlphaDev, AlphaGeometry etc
Never say impossible to the boss if he wants it to be possible lol

Chpt 14 Project Mario
Safety talk went rogue. When Google changed to alphabet, they tried to keep applied in Google and research out, but Pichai found a way to just fold in healthcare team without all the other promises, or i guess it happens to because a key supporter’s career change. At the same time, Musk left OpenAI, similar governance problem. Suleyman left because of workplace abuse hmmm

Chpt 13 on language and nature
Gaia sounds so interesting. An agent navigate an nature simulation and learn from perception and trial and the StarCraft thing too
Though during this era is where they lose to GPT

Chpt 12, the agent and the transformer
Sutskever left Google to join OpenAI
Radioed and Sutskever actually build GPT starting from a Google paper

Chpt 11 P0 Plus plus
Interestingly their healthcare stab comes from just building a normal notification system called streams and then went on train kidney radio detection and retina, but so sad the data, privacy and AI fear has prevented any of them to go anywhere.
Moose’s applied division has a task ranking system and everything becomes P0 plus plus lol
And he sounds like quite an intolerable boss too

Chapter 10 Out of Eden
Page speciest view is so crazy. Musk and Sam Altman launched openAI. Poor Demis’ singular wished and optimism

Chpt 9 intuition
AlphaGo was produced to beat humans

Chpt 8
Get Google
Woww they went from struggling to raise 60m to sold at 650m

chapt 7
Thiel trouble
Founder’s found backed out series C’s lead, oh well never put ur eggs in one basket

Chpt 6 Atari

Recruited Mnih who first use memory buffer to overcome the deep learning exposure bias while bridging to RL and second add training and “coaching” separation so that RL does not spiral with infinite expectations

Chose Atari as a benchmark instead of developing its own

Chpt 5 founding deepmind

Won the investment of Peter thiel. Always accept equity from startup lol

Chapter 4 the Gang of three
He’s in the Gatsby Lab founded by Hinton. Shane Legg is in lab too. New Zealand, did some data science and worked for Goertzel. Mustafa Suleyman has an even crazier story of homeless since 15, confronting Muslim upbringing and dropping out of Oxford. Knew demis through his brother and got an landing after following up a gambling celebration’s conversation by noting Sergey Brian wuhuu

Chpt 3 the nature of bullshit
To persuade or impress not to lead to truth
Latour’s blackbox many bluffs and cites. To call one bullshit call all of them bullshit

criminal machine learning:
E.g 2016, ArXiv detect criminal from facial features. Data problem, non criminal smiling professional headshots and criminal Id photos. Curvature of the mouth etc just cause of data

Chpt 3 the Jedi
He founded his first company Elixir and dreamed bigger than capacity. He seemed to be a charismatic Jedi and slave driver despite himself hating to be controlled. Pretty impressive that he can still sell so effusively after the hardware problem at the conference though. Now both Silver and Him is taking a break by doing PhD oh houuu

Chapter 2 Deep philosophical questions
Hassabis was in college, Cambridge. Sounded like he had some fun. Met David silver and John Daugman his prof, reinforced his commitment on AI.
Went to work for Molyneux again on Black and White, game with reinforcement learning. He updated his perception of Molyneux is pretty manipulative and volatile. Now on his way to start a company which was not a common path

Chapter 2 Media Msg and Misinformation
Incentive misalignment of fostering long term subscription versus getting clicks
“Make u feel bla” most popular headlines
Share to signal self versus truth
Repercussions e.g. 2018 fake videos abt kidnapping, xenophobia, killed tourists
E.g Jordan peele and Obama face swap. Macedonian children and Russian bots. When ppl are scared enough, they stop talking.

Chpt 1 Bullshit everywhere
Brandolini’s principal of creating bullshit is so much easier than cleaning it up. E.g Wakefield’s anti vaccine paper and documentary

And bullshit spreads faster

Chapter 1 Destiny: So genius is a genius since born. Hassabis was alr playing chess at 5, understanding tree search at 10+ and working at video game company Bullfrog since 15 building metaverse like theme park.
His family upbringing is pretty interesting. His mom is Singaporean! His dad is an “idealist” mounting pressure on him to play chess, which shapes his “try your best to the point of death” ideology

Okie, so danglars’ daughter almost married his wife and villfort’s son and Benedetto fled and will be persecuted by his own father. The count of Monte Cristo has plotted Romeo and Julie for Valentine and Maximilien. I can see the ending is coming

Well these few chapters are really intense and heart rendering. It is very mature and courageous for Albert to recognize what has happened and let the duel drop. And the count giving Mercedes her “dowry” wuwuuwuwuwu so sad. Though when he was like there can be two Mercedes and he mighty be love Haydee I was like wat?? and fernand being abandoned by his wife and son ai. I know he is a big villain but still sad ai

LXXXIX Night
What?!! Mercedes just showed up like that and asked Edmond to spare her son like that. It was her son who sought death. This is crazy. And this chapter is so emotionally draining.

So she does recognize him from the start without saying anything and she is still ok with it knowing all his suffering was due to Fernand… idk life

Idk why Albert morcerf wants to fight the count so badly, like pls ur life is literally saved by the count and also ur father’s betrayal to Ali Teblin is just pure fact

Caderousse died out of his own greed and stupidity. Fernand is getting his justice as well with Haydee being the witness of his betrayal to her father, Ali Tebin. Just glad that everything is coming tgt now and it’s such a long book

Okie so there are a lot of intermingling now. Apparently villfort and m danglars also had an affair and their child is his servant’s undiscovered kid in that garden

Really need to lock in to finish it before going back cos I don’t wanna carry this brick around anymore!

Okie while I am pretty interested in the love affairs of the second generation like valentine and Maximilian, I kinda wish to have a clearer reading on what Dante plans to do. Pls don’t carry the vengeance onto the second gen

Have to put in a break while I traveled in Japan and picked it up on the plane. There was a very peculiar interlude of Franz and Albert and then slowly revealed the count. It is still a little bit unclear to me why he becomes the count and why he suddenly becomes so pale and cold instead of fit and healthy. Now he has entered Paris and slowly met his enemies, so probably gonna start revenge soon