New Space, Stable Point Aware 3D and Deep Research – Live and Learn #61

✨ Quote ✨

Copies of AI Sundar can craft every product’s strategy, review every pull request, answer every customer service message, and handle all negotiations - everything flowing from a single coherent vision.

– Dwarkesh Patel - (source)

🖇️ Links 🖇️

New Space Documentary by S3. This is a look into the new privatized business of Space. And how "New Space" is replacing old, sluggish government agencies with startups. Startups that are doing the same things but much better, faster, and at a fraction of the cost. It is the story of SpaceX and others like it, who are ushering in a new age for human space exploration, making the advancement of humanity into the solar system a business opportunity. S3 is making some of the best quality mini-documentaries on startups, and this is their first feature film. The positive outlook they provide on developments always amazes me.

Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert Interview by Lex Fridman. A five-hour conversation about Chips, data centers, and the role of AI and AGI in global politics with two of the most knowledgeable people on this subject. Dylan Patel, the guy behind Semianalysis in particular, is like a walking encyclopedia on everything related to the manufacturing of chips. They discuss a lot about Deepseek R1, a model from China that shook the world recently. On the same topic, I liked the Stratechery DeepSeek FAQ, too. Whenever I listen to conversations with Dylan Patel, what strikes me the most is how little I know about semiconductor manufacturing, given how important it is for everything. In Dylan Patel's words: "If I had a few missiles, I know exactly where I could cause the most economic damage. It’s not targeting the White House." He would target Hsinchu, Hillsboro, and Pyongyang instead. Never heard of any of these places? They are the physical location of R&D for the big chip manufacturers: TSMC, Intel, and Samsung. They are some of the most important places on Earth. You are dependent on the existence of these places. Without them, technology like smartphones simply wouldn't exist, and so would many other things.

Stable Point Aware 3D by Stability AI. AI-generated 3D assets are becoming pretty good, pretty fast. This is another breakthrough in this direction, the main improvement this time: speed that allows for creative control and artistic direction. Updates take less than a second—when you update something about the model, the AI generates the novel changes on the fly. Image to 3D now takes about 0.7 seconds. The code is available on Github, and you can try the model on the StabilityAI platform.

Deep Research (this time) by OpenAI. OpenAI combines its newest o3 reasoning models with the ability to browse the web and synthesize information across various websites, generating detailed reports and coming back to you with its own analysis of a situation. This idea is identical to another tool by Google (even sharing the same name). For now, OpenAI's version is paywalled by the 200$ per month plan, but they will roll it out to free and premium users as well. Their announcement video on YouTube is worth watching as they demo a few of the potential use cases for their tool.

AIs can build and destroy by Emergent Garden. I wanted to include this video here because it has pretty insightful commentary on the potential for misuse and creativity of AI models with reasoning capabilities. Letting AI build things in Minecraft shows what will be possible in the future. Because AI is already creative and understands the rules of a simpler game world. Sure, the real world is much more complex, but given the right tools and better models, AI will be capable of creation in the real world too. The scary thing about this video is that the current AI models, though guardrailed, happily go along building both utopia and dystopia. And they are creative in both regards. Heaven and hell can be constructed by AI (albeit in a simple video game) already. The AIs show no preference for one or the other; AIs, at least for now, don't care. Misuse will, therefore, become a more serious issue as these tools get more and more capable.

🌌 Travel 🌌

The last two weeks, I spent resting from traveling: writing, absorbing information and reading—in general tapping in with the internet and planning my year and what I want to do. It's weird, but sometimes I feel like I need this time in between. Time to digest all the new experiences from traveling. I can't go on for months without a couple of weeks in between where I stay in the same place—a place of not moving, of stillness and routine. I am thinking: "I'll be traveling again soon enough". Everything has its time—so do traveling and adventures.

🎶 Song 🎶

Outer Wilds Reprise by Andrew Prahlow

Youtube Music | Spotify

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That's all for this time. I hope you found this newsletter useful, beautiful, or even both!

Have ideas for improving it? As always, please let me know.

Cheers,

– Rico