Thanks for writing that up Charbel & Gabin. Below are some elements I want to add.
In the last 2 months, I spent more than 20h with David talking and interacting with his ideas and plans, especially in technical contexts. As I spent more time with David, I got extremely impressed by the breadth and the depth of his knowledge. David has cached answers to a surprisingly high number of technically detailed questions on his agenda, which suggests that he has pre-computed a lot of things regarding his agenda (even though it sometimes look very weird on first sight). I noticed that I never met anyone as smart as him.
Regarding his ability to devise a high level plan that works in practice, David has built a technically impressive crypto (today ranked 22nd) following a similar methodology, i.e. devising the plan from first principles.
Finally, I’m excited by the fact that David seems to have a good ability to build ambitious coalitions with researchers, which is a great upside for governance and for such an ambitious proposal. Indeed, he has a strong track record of convincing researchers to work on his stuff after talking for a couple hours, because he often has very good ideas on their field.
These elements, combined with my increasing worry that scaling LLMs at breakneck speed is not far from certain to kill us, make me want to back heavily this proposal and pour a lot of resources into it.
I’ll thus personally dedicate in my own capacity an amount of time and resources to try to speed that up, in the hope (10-20%) that in a couple of years it could become a credible proposal as an alternative to scaled LLMs.
Thanks for writing that up Charbel & Gabin. Below are some elements I want to add.
In the last 2 months, I spent more than 20h with David talking and interacting with his ideas and plans, especially in technical contexts.
As I spent more time with David, I got extremely impressed by the breadth and the depth of his knowledge. David has cached answers to a surprisingly high number of technically detailed questions on his agenda, which suggests that he has pre-computed a lot of things regarding his agenda (even though it sometimes look very weird on first sight). I noticed that I never met anyone as smart as him.
Regarding his ability to devise a high level plan that works in practice, David has built a technically impressive crypto (today ranked 22nd) following a similar methodology, i.e. devising the plan from first principles.
Finally, I’m excited by the fact that David seems to have a good ability to build ambitious coalitions with researchers, which is a great upside for governance and for such an ambitious proposal. Indeed, he has a strong track record of convincing researchers to work on his stuff after talking for a couple hours, because he often has very good ideas on their field.
These elements, combined with my increasing worry that scaling LLMs at breakneck speed is not far from certain to kill us, make me want to back heavily this proposal and pour a lot of resources into it.
I’ll thus personally dedicate in my own capacity an amount of time and resources to try to speed that up, in the hope (10-20%) that in a couple of years it could become a credible proposal as an alternative to scaled LLMs.