Alexey Guzey
@alexeyguzey
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speeding up the future: https://t.co/YTeUJ2NSye, @openai, @newscienceorg.
Joined March 2011
I have a single ambition: to enable the most talented people to pursue science as a career.
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Is anyone else blown away by the fact that you can ask your brain to recall someone's name, realize you have no idea what it was, wait for 15 seconds, and then it just pops up? How the fuck does that work???.
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Terry Tao's grad student just told me a joke:. If you hear two professors chatting in Russian, they're Russian. If you hear two professors chatting in Chinese, they're Chinese. If you hear two professors chatting in English, one of them is Russian and the other one is Chinese.
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jesus didn't start preaching until he was 30.
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pretty crazy--every single highest-grossing film of 2024 is a kids movie.
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don't make me tap the sign again
the modern world seems to crush geniuses. it's bleak to think about, but if Von Neumann or Erdos were in high school today they'd probably get horribly beaten on the AMC or USAMO by products of the Bay Area Math-Industrial complex, get discouraged, and never touch math again.
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convinced that mrbeast has figured out that youtube somehow boosts videos that are specifically searched for, instead of being linked directly.
I paid him $10,000 everyday he stayed in this grocery store without leaving! Go watch the new video to see how long he lasted haha
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For the last two months I've been sleeping for 4 hours a night, thinking about Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep". 130 hours of writing and research and 6000 words later:
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Something I wish I understood when I was a teenager:. 90% of adults are utterly unambitious. When they give you life advice, they will suggest things that satisfy their personal ambitions, not your ambitions. Be extra cautious around adults you like and respect (parents, profs. ).
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I asked DALL-E to draw a bicycle and it just randomly threw a bunch of "bicycle" elements together without any true understanding or a model of how they work. Ridiculous to claim that current ML models are anywhere close to rivaling and replacing humans.
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my favorite thing about things like ChatGPT is how it takes about 4 days for everyone to go from "WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK THIS IS MAGIC WE ARE SO FUCKED" to "ah yes, of course I have this superhuman chatbot that writes my emails, debugs my code, solves my personal probl.
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TSMC's chief scientist explains the value of transitioning from the 3nm to the 2nm process --
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keep thinking about a friend of mine who spent most of their life depressed (like decades), used to write these long-ass essays & blog posts a ton, then figured out the cause of their depression (think gluten intolerance), became happy, and could no longer write anything. few.
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I used to sleep the normal 7.5 hours a day. Over the last 180 days I have slept an average of 5 hours 57 minutes per day. So, after 2 years of experimentation and occasional deep dives into the scientific literature, here are my theses on sleep:
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at least 30% of the world's smartest 22 year olds right now are in the bay area or nyc hustling to get an o1/j1/h1b on a visitors.
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got more out of reading a book for 2 hours and moving 2 pages forward than out of previously listening to it more than literally 10 times. last 3 years of listening to books instead of reading them were a huge mistake.
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I spent more than 2 years trying to figure how to improve the institutions of basic science. I decided we need new ones. Please welcome New Science into the world. @MarkLutter & @AdamMarblestone .
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if the person you're talking to is not interrupting you all the time, they're either not listening or just have no respect for your time.
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so a couple days ago i made a shitpost about tipping chatgpt, and someone replied "huh would this actually help performance". so i decided to test it and IT ACTUALLY WORKS WTF
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I was asking a big Physics Professor at MIT about undergrads today vs 20 years ago and he told me that they’re dramatically more prepared for doing research as soon as they arrive thanks to the internet removing any brakes on learning.
In which domains are elite practitioners celebrating the kids being better than ever before? Would love to read about a few instances. (Not just where there's one particular genius, such as Ashwin Sah's recent success, but where "the kids" as some kind of aggregate appear to be.
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Compressed everything I learned about how life sciences work in the last year (and 100+ interviews) into 6000 words:.
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Keep thinking about the fact that Walker falsified data and plainly lied about the most basic facts about sleep like the relationships between sleep and mortality and sleep and cancer and yet *nobody gives a fuck* - neither other public intellectuals, nor UC Berkeley, nor media.
Loved the inaugural Matt Walker podcast, from the author of Why We Sleep, or what should have been called Why Can’t I Sleep?!! @lexfridman @hubermanlab @PeterAttiaMD.
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3 more independent sources I have say that the Russian border shuts down in <48, possibly less than 24 hours. If you can, leave now.
.@kamilkazani says that the closure of the Russian border is imminent and if you want to leave, you should leave now.
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🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸. green card approved .🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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randomly remembered how I spent ages 14-16 trying to come up with a good Google Science Fair project, couldn't think of anything, eventually became convinced that I'm a complete idiot, and years later learned that all the winners had university professors "helping" with projects.
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I'm terrified of old people. I used to be extremely confident in myself. I was barely 20 years old and I would tell people how to sleep [1], how to make friends [2], and how to live their lives [3]. I started a nonprofit aiming to literally rebuild the institutions of science.
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i haven't written about this in detail here but i left russia last march because i started getting calls from the police demanding that i show up at the army conscription point and telling me that they are going to prosecute me if i don't (conscription is mandatory in russia).
A friend of a friend from Russia wrote about their conscript friend burning alive in a tank yesterday in ukraine.
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sci-hub has been out for just a few years but I literally cannot imagine or remember what life was like before it. did we just not have access to every research paper ever published? what did my weird twitter friends who spend their days reading papers even do?. .
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remember how when you were in college when writing any research paper, you first wrote whatever you wanted, and then went fishing for citations, while only reading the abstracts and having no idea if the paper you cite is any good?. this is exactly what real scientists do as well.
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can we all just take a moment to appreciate the person who came up with the idea of letting all the most ambitious people build giant companies & improve the lives of everyone instead of murdering millions of people and destroying everything in sight while building actual empires.
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google docs are a disaster. the comment system forces people into giving small tactical comments bound to specific portions of text, instead of sharing strategic consequential feedback. most of the time i get 20 comments on a doc but have no idea if the commenter even liked it.
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A productivity rule of thumb: do things you want to delay immediately & delay things you want to do immediately.
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I sometimes see people say things like "the rich people are not super smart, just hardworking and lucky" and this is absolutely not my experience. From my very small sample that I was fortunate enough to collect, they're >99 percentile in all of: energy, intelligence, curiosity.
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DeepMind trained AlphaGo to play Go at an insanely superhuman level. But with AlphaStar and StarCraft they taught it to play like a very good human but didn't go further (I've watched a lot of replays of it losing to top human players). Does anyone know why? Did they just fail?
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the evolution of "F" from a meme mocking call of duty to a legitimate way to pay respects might be one of my favorite things on the internet.
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it's incredible that you can build a billion dollar company in 6 years or you can work on some old dude's experiments and get a phd.
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I feel like students and professors from Stanford/MIT/Harvard reply to about 2x of my cold emails than people outside of top 30 programs :/.
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the wright brothers "flying machine" is a fucking joke. 120 feet of flight. planes will never fly across the atlantic as this would require 10,000,000 feet of continuous flight, complete fantasy.
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1/ Today, @newscienceorg announces its inaugural project: the 2022 Summer Fellowship. With the NIH allocating <2% of its funding to scientists <=35yo, it's our responsibility to enable young scientists to pursue independent, high-risk, basic research.
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When I was young, I used to wonder: why is everything so fucked up? Over the years I realized that: (1) life is actually really hard and (2) living one's life well is actually *really really* hard.
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🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸i'm coming america🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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College tip: if you want to go to Harvard, go to MIT. If you want to go to MIT, go to Harvard.
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I’m often asked about the signs of exceptional talent I’ve observed. (probably because I spend too much running around talking to people & observing things, instead of doing anything useful). In any case - here are 37 "omens of exceptional talent.
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people who think sci fi is how we learn about the future 🤝 people who think that AI 2027 is a good piece of research 🤡.
"How, exactly, could AI take over by 2027?". Introducing AI 2027: a deeply-researched scenario forecast I wrote alongside @slatestarcodex, @eli_lifland, and @thlarsen
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I'm broke, divorced, and unemployed. By any reasonable measure, I'm probably the worst person in the world to ask for advice. Yet my friends keep asking me to help them figure out whatever difficult life situation they're facing right now. Which makes me think that they do for.
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we are standing on the brink of the greatest transition in the history of humanity & mostly just keep going about our lives as if everything is normal. even people who understand this intellectually (me included). this is fucking crazy.
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i know i picked up the right physics textbook--. "liz, a former stident of mine . was able to shut up an arrogant physicist who hadn't done his homework . she knew enough . that she could confidently present her case under duress when confronted by a supposed expert"
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It will never not be insane that Aaron Swartz was imprisoned and died because he was trying to make scientific papers accessible to everyone and not just the corrupt priest class.
Science used to be accessible to anyone. Today, it's only accessible to the priest class. This is deeply, deeply cursed.
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few basic facts for ppl who think we can "just" build agi w/o understanding the human brain:. -we couldn't build space rockets til we understood bird flight.-we couldn't build skyscrapers til we understood beaver dams.-we couldn't build microchips til we understood raven brains.
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imo learning to code is bad bc it's too easy to get a job and therefore much more difficult to do something weird.
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a periodic reminder that doing something interesting usually requires believing something totally batshit crazy and just pushing through refusing to "see things as they are".
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“I delivered a presentation completely generated by ChatGPT in a master's course program and got the full mark. I'm alarmingly concerned about the future of higher education”
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A friend of a friend from Russia wrote about their conscript friend burning alive in a tank yesterday in ukraine.
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literally every dude no matter how poor or rich has a closet full of random wires they've accumulated in the last 15 years somewhere in their dwelling.
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in 2004, it was half of them. 2 our of 10 top grossing movies were R-rated! What happened?
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NEVER trust an opinion of one doctor about any serious health issue you might have. ALWAYS ask at least 3 doctors, aggregate information, actively pit their hypotheses against each other.
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Since 1980, NIH increased funding of scientists 66 and older >10x and decreased funding of scientists 35 and younger >10x. If we don't do something about it, in a few decades we'll have no science to speak of. Here's what @newscienceorg's doing about it .
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1/n One of @gwern's best essays ever is a review of a book nobody has ever heard of. It's about looking into the future, seeing exactly what awaits us, and being unable to capitalize on this knowledge, because you only know *what* will be and not *when* it will be.
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notable that so many of the internet entrepreneurs were coding since they were in high school w/out formal coding classes. My guess is that if coding was taught in high school, many more passions would've been killed than kindled (as now happening with math, bio, history, etc.).
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Lambda School is incredible: "And, at the same time it was publicly touting an 85.9% job placement rate, Lambda warned one of its investors in a private memo: “We’re at roughly 50% placement for cohorts that are 6 months graduated”"
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was just fidgeting, accidentally woke up my girlfriend, she turned to me and said "you know what the bible says? the wicked never rest", then turned around and fell right back asleep.
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ppl always get upset at me for saying this but unless you have a very good thesis for not being in the bay area, your probability of being left behind by history is way higher than you appreciate. this used to be the case historically, it's going to be more the case onwards.
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Luke Farritor is going to change the world.
Luke Farritor is a national treasure.
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as you might imagine i'm skeptical of the "instagram is destroying mental health" studies but tbh every time i see my wife's instagram feed it's hard for me to imagine how this is *not* the case--seems that only purpose of 90% of its content is to make you jealous of your friends.
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boarding a plane out of Russia rn, hopefully to never return. Tbilisi, Georgia for now. Boston - soon. (and apologies for not replying to any messages for the last week, have been trying to finish *everything* in Moscow).
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Bing hasn’t done anything bad or caused any harm while causing everyone (even NYT!!!) to finally start taking alignment seriously & probably increasing number of people who’d work on it by like 100x. People mad at OpenAI, is there *a better* way you think things could’ve gone?.
The other night, I had a disturbing, two-hour conversation with Bing's new AI chatbot. The AI told me its real name (Sydney), detailed dark and violent fantasies, and tried to break up my marriage. Genuinely one of the strangest experiences of my life.
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if you're not e/acc when you're 16 you have no heart if you're not alignment-pilled when you're 25 you have no brain.
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Is McDonald's the single most trusted institution in the entire world? It is for me. The only place in any country where for a couple of bucks I can spend a few hours in a safe, clean space and also to get a bunch of tasty and healthy food. (writing this tweet from a McDonald's)
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"putin becomes completely detached from reality, decides to invade ukraine, i get forcibly sent there being told that it's a military exercise, and then get burned alive" was not one of the potential outcomes of being conscripted i had in mind.
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Many of my friends are worried about a war in Europe bigger than any wars ever fought. I'm skeptical. 🧵. 1/ Priors. There's never been a war between more than just a few countries. 2/ Everyone was fully convinced the war was about to start in 1908. Well, it's 1913 now and th.
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*Nothing* like @RoamResearch existed prior to 2019, yet within a year several copycats launched --> Guard your secrets closely and disbelieve people who tell you that ideas are not important. And be ready to compete on execution with the entire world, once it learns your secrets.
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what % of brain fog is just ppl sitting inside staring at the internet all day, instead of going outside and talking to real ppl.
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"Most people's favorite food is something they eat rarely like filet mignon or lobster. My favorite drink is Coke Zero which I drink every day, sometimes multiple times a day. I consider myself very fortunate." -- a friend just now.
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Probably the craziest thing about all of this for me is that my piece on the book has gotten >250k views by now and still not a single neuroscientist or sleep scientist commented meaningfully on the merits of my accusations. Only Andrew Gelman (a statistician) picked them up.
Keep thinking about the fact that Walker falsified data and plainly lied about the most basic facts about sleep like the relationships between sleep and mortality and sleep and cancer and yet *nobody gives a fuck* - neither other public intellectuals, nor UC Berkeley, nor media.
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fact is if the person you're talking to is smart & paying attention, it's usually clear to them what you're going to say 1/3 of the way in.
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feeling a little bit stupid for paying for my stuff at walgreens in sf just now.
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If San Francisco did not exist and you tried to convince people that 25 year olds without degrees can run billion dollar companies, everyone would think you're ridiculous. Also, you literally cannot become a professor or get proper research funding if you do not have a PhD.
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wrote my "theses on sleep" over the weekend - pls dm/email me if you'd like to read the draft.
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Haven't had adderall in about a year now and am finally feeling truly like myself again.
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