Jensen looks better in this book than in his Dwarkesh podcast. He made a bunch of really good gambles on various strategies to ship more faster, on cuda, on deep learning, on Transformers, etc. In comparison his post-ChatGPT predictions look quite bad. It is surprising that he says that he wants Nvidia to be prepared for what comes after AI once scaling laws saturate, which he thinks is likely to be digital biology (the book was published in 2024).
I did not realize graphic chips used to be much less programmable than they are now, CPU-like programming via CUDA arrived over a decade after the founding of Nvidia.
I am somewhat surprised that the extremely successful companies I know about have both a very intense work culture with insanely long hours and concentrate a lot of great talent, I would have thought it would be easier to have either one or the other, and I would have not expected for it to be so important compared to e.g. having a good organization, good training programs, being in the right place at the right time, etc. Concentration of intelligence being so powerful is somewhat scary when it comes to what awaits us.
33 Strategies of War, by Robert Greene
I spend most of my time with people who believe in altruism, it’s interesting to read a book by someone who basically doesn’t believe in it. Greene paints a world only made of combat, where it’s obvious everyone only wants to win and be glorious, where the only reason why someone would bring up morality is as a weapon to wield against you, and where guilt is only the sign that your enemy has successfully attacked you—not the sign that you did anything wrong.
This is the sort of book that spends its time giving one heuristic and then something close to its opposite, telling you to attack your enemies on multiple fronts but not spread yourself too thin, to cut their supplies but also to not corner them in a way that makes them fight harder, etc. I am sure you can find a beautiful synthesis in each real world example, but I don’t think these heuristics are that useful.
But the book has a bunch of interesting real-world military examples where great strategy and tactics mattered and where they feel quite clever. I don’t know how much to trust the account of how important the decisions of the leader were given how much the book is trying to sell the importance of leaders that can make great decisions.
It has a meta-commentary chapter that I found very funny, where he analyzes Machiavelli’s writing, explaining how Machiavelli uses historical examples to make his point, how Machiavelli uses this process to make his point sound legitimate by attributing it to someone else, and how Machiavelli’s goal is not to transmit actual information, but to shape the mind of the readers (only losers write a book to convey some factual information, this is not how you win!)
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes
This book is frustratingly low in information density, it is mostly biographical and technical details that were not really of interest to me. But it slowly picks up steam when the war starts. It does a really good job at making you feel the stakes get higher, going from some academic debate to the realm of politics, then of industry, then of a technological marvel (around the Trinity test), then of war. It helped me realize how AI doesn’t feel very real yet.
The parts describing the horrors of WW2 are also very powerful. I think it’s easy to forget the horrors of war, and how tempting it feels to use such powerful tools.
It is also a good reminder that building a tool doesn’t give you much power over how to use it.
Unit X, by Christopher Kirchhoff
This is mostly an account of the many ways that the US military is insanely inefficient when it comes to technological innovation. It is shocking how bad it is portrayed as a huge bureaucracy that you can only fight via loopholes and somewhat miraculous and brittle political support, at the mercy of big companies trying to milk money out of it in extremely inefficient ways.
But clearly the authors have an axe to grind and a position to defend, so it’s hard to tell how unfair they are being from the book alone.
Crystal Society by Max Harms
It’s a nice piece of science-fiction that aged quite badly now that it’s not weird at all to be talking with non-AGI AIs that have common sense.
The characters in this book are quite incompetent, the humans can’t figure out how to monitor the unlimited network access that they give to the AI or how to physically secure the AI (you don’t need to leave the computer in its robot body!), and the AI falls into many somewhat obvious traps it miraculously recovers from. It still makes for good fiction, but it did not meet my hopes. I hope the AIs will look that foolish and that we won’t.
This is the sort of book that spends its time giving one heuristic and then something close to its opposite, telling you to attack your enemies on multiple fronts but not spread yourself too thin, to cut their supplies but also to not corner them in a way that makes them fight harder, etc.
I’ve read his “48 Laws of Power”, and it was the same thing: One chapter is “the only people you can trust are your childhood friends, who loved you before you became powerful” (with a historical example), and the other chapter is “never trust your childhood friends, they were always looking for the right moment to stab you in the back, but the fact that you know each other so long prevents you from noticing it” (with a historical example).
Then there is “refuse to join any faction until the very last moment, let them compete for your favor, while they take their early allies for granted”, followed by “choose one faction and commit early, so that you become a part of the inner circle”. And probably other examples that I do not remember that clearly.
It sounds like hindsight bias. If someone succeeds, look at something they did and declare that this was the secret to their power. If someone else does the opposite and succeeds, that also was the secret to power. If someone does either and fails, they probably failed at some other secret to power, who cares.
Small reviews of books I listened to:
The Nvidia Way, By Tae Kim
Jensen looks better in this book than in his Dwarkesh podcast. He made a bunch of really good gambles on various strategies to ship more faster, on cuda, on deep learning, on Transformers, etc. In comparison his post-ChatGPT predictions look quite bad. It is surprising that he says that he wants Nvidia to be prepared for what comes after AI once scaling laws saturate, which he thinks is likely to be digital biology (the book was published in 2024).
I did not realize graphic chips used to be much less programmable than they are now, CPU-like programming via CUDA arrived over a decade after the founding of Nvidia.
I am somewhat surprised that the extremely successful companies I know about have both a very intense work culture with insanely long hours and concentrate a lot of great talent, I would have thought it would be easier to have either one or the other, and I would have not expected for it to be so important compared to e.g. having a good organization, good training programs, being in the right place at the right time, etc. Concentration of intelligence being so powerful is somewhat scary when it comes to what awaits us.
33 Strategies of War, by Robert Greene
I spend most of my time with people who believe in altruism, it’s interesting to read a book by someone who basically doesn’t believe in it. Greene paints a world only made of combat, where it’s obvious everyone only wants to win and be glorious, where the only reason why someone would bring up morality is as a weapon to wield against you, and where guilt is only the sign that your enemy has successfully attacked you—not the sign that you did anything wrong.
This is the sort of book that spends its time giving one heuristic and then something close to its opposite, telling you to attack your enemies on multiple fronts but not spread yourself too thin, to cut their supplies but also to not corner them in a way that makes them fight harder, etc. I am sure you can find a beautiful synthesis in each real world example, but I don’t think these heuristics are that useful.
But the book has a bunch of interesting real-world military examples where great strategy and tactics mattered and where they feel quite clever. I don’t know how much to trust the account of how important the decisions of the leader were given how much the book is trying to sell the importance of leaders that can make great decisions.
It has a meta-commentary chapter that I found very funny, where he analyzes Machiavelli’s writing, explaining how Machiavelli uses historical examples to make his point, how Machiavelli uses this process to make his point sound legitimate by attributing it to someone else, and how Machiavelli’s goal is not to transmit actual information, but to shape the mind of the readers (only losers write a book to convey some factual information, this is not how you win!)
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes
This book is frustratingly low in information density, it is mostly biographical and technical details that were not really of interest to me. But it slowly picks up steam when the war starts. It does a really good job at making you feel the stakes get higher, going from some academic debate to the realm of politics, then of industry, then of a technological marvel (around the Trinity test), then of war. It helped me realize how AI doesn’t feel very real yet.
The parts describing the horrors of WW2 are also very powerful. I think it’s easy to forget the horrors of war, and how tempting it feels to use such powerful tools.
It is also a good reminder that building a tool doesn’t give you much power over how to use it.
Unit X, by Christopher Kirchhoff
This is mostly an account of the many ways that the US military is insanely inefficient when it comes to technological innovation. It is shocking how bad it is portrayed as a huge bureaucracy that you can only fight via loopholes and somewhat miraculous and brittle political support, at the mercy of big companies trying to milk money out of it in extremely inefficient ways.
But clearly the authors have an axe to grind and a position to defend, so it’s hard to tell how unfair they are being from the book alone.
Crystal Society by Max Harms
It’s a nice piece of science-fiction that aged quite badly now that it’s not weird at all to be talking with non-AGI AIs that have common sense.
The characters in this book are quite incompetent, the humans can’t figure out how to monitor the unlimited network access that they give to the AI or how to physically secure the AI (you don’t need to leave the computer in its robot body!), and the AI falls into many somewhat obvious traps it miraculously recovers from. It still makes for good fiction, but it did not meet my hopes. I hope the AIs will look that foolish and that we won’t.
I’ve read his “48 Laws of Power”, and it was the same thing: One chapter is “the only people you can trust are your childhood friends, who loved you before you became powerful” (with a historical example), and the other chapter is “never trust your childhood friends, they were always looking for the right moment to stab you in the back, but the fact that you know each other so long prevents you from noticing it” (with a historical example).
Then there is “refuse to join any faction until the very last moment, let them compete for your favor, while they take their early allies for granted”, followed by “choose one faction and commit early, so that you become a part of the inner circle”. And probably other examples that I do not remember that clearly.
It sounds like hindsight bias. If someone succeeds, look at something they did and declare that this was the secret to their power. If someone else does the opposite and succeeds, that also was the secret to power. If someone does either and fails, they probably failed at some other secret to power, who cares.