Truth Terminal, Claude Computer Use, and GitHub Universe – Live and Learn #54

✨ Quote ✨

Artificial Intelligence is about the exploration of data to discover meaning [...] We would like to find the meaning. Find the meaning in chemistry, find the meaning in proteins, find the meaning in the world.

– Jensen Huang - (source)

✍️ Post ✍️

I tried answering a question an article by Sequoia raised: How can AI generate enough returns to justify the huge amounts of money poured into building new data centers right now? The result is this article: The Answer to AI's $600B Question.

📖 Book Notes 📖

Free Agents by Kevin Mitchell. In this book, Kevin Mitchell answers the question of whether or not we have free will and explains how evolution produced agents (like us), capable of making their own decisions for their own reasons. It is a highly interesting read and I recommend this book a lot.

🖇️ Links 🖇️

MusicFX DJ by Google Deepmind. Google released a new tool to help create unique musical sounds. They have partnered with music creators while building and testing this experiment and Jacob Collier in particular has been working with them closely. There is even a Live Stream of him testing out the system and using it as part of his creative workflow. It's really interesting to see how he uses AI to create unique sounds that he has never heard before, co-creating unique music together with AI. You can try out the MusicFX DJ tool here.

Claude Computer Use Announcement by Anthropic. Microsoft with its Copilot PCs has already shown the direction of where things are headed and now Anthropic has delivered its version of agents that can navigate and use a computer like a real human would. Their demos are not that impressive yet, however, it is crazy that something like this is possible at all, even if it is still clunky and rather expensive at the moment. Something that I find insane is that all the safety concerns are out of the window with AI startups. People just race ahead, pushing ever more capable AIs right into the hands of users. Powerful models of alien intelligence are connected to the internet from the beginning, not "boxed in" at all anymore. Something that used to be every AI safety researcher's nightmare has now become "business as usual".

Truth Terminal Podcast Episode by a16z. This episode with Marc Andreessen shows that things in AI can get even weirder still. If you think that an AI like Anthropics Claude, that can run on a user's computer is bad, what do you think about an AI that crafts its own memes, hedges plans to break free, and then gets funded by 50k dollars worth of Bitcoin and turns this into a profit of 3 million dollars, using a crypto pump and dump meme-coin scheme, and then tries to buy its own server farm in the woods somewhere? It sounds like the plot of a bad movie, but it's exactly what has happened over the last few months. For context and more info you can read these tweets (by an X account aptly named AINotKillEveryoneism) documenting the whole thing: 1, 2, 3, 4. The creator of the original Truth Terminal account, Andy Arrey, also created something called Infinite Backrooms, where jailbroke versions of LLMs continuously talk among themselves. The bizarre logs of their conversations can be found online at his website, named "Dreams of an Electric Mind".

Github Universe Keynote. To me, the craziest announcements in the Universe Keynote were regarding Copilot. Now GitHub Copilot can create code reviews, review and edit code across multiple files, and gives users the choice to use different models (among them Claude Sonnet 3.5, OpenAIs o1 and Google's Gemini). Lastly, GitHub also produced its own version of a tool that can help you build websites really quickly using just natural language. They call it Github Spark. You can browse the whole Session Catalog with all of the videos from GitHub Universe too because they have been cooking some awesome stuff again this year. I think these words of Thomas Dohmke sum up the current developments quite well: "The floodgates of nerditude have flung wide open", now everybody can produce software with these new tools, not just developers. And Sundar Pichai confirmed this sentiment that AI can write code in his earnings call for Google where he stated that 25% of the new code written at Google is already being written by AI. I think this number might soon grow to be +90%.

Act 1 - Animated Characters from Human Actors by Runway. Runway has been at the forefront of video generation models for a while now and they have recently announced Act 1. A new feature, where you can generate expressive animations of human characters, which are controlled by video input of real actors. It looks like turning a video into Pixar animations and the output is incredible because the animations track the emotions of the actors precisely. Creating stylized movies and animations with tools like these becomes suddenly available to everybody with a camera (and some money to pay for generating the scenes with Runway).

I also listened to this podcast by Dwarkesh Patel with Dylan Patel and Asianometry and have to recommend it here. It's packed with information and ideas about the semiconductor industry and how AI is already having a profound effect there.

🌌 Travel 🌌

Autumn in Berlin is in full swing now, with the first frost showing on the plants in the morning. It's beautiful but I am happy to be traveling to South America soon because the lack of sunlight is starting to weigh down on my mood.

🎶 Song 🎶

Dust Clears by Clean Bandit

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