Sora

I work on pretraining for Sora. Sign up here!

Chat-Tree

A tree-structured chat. Play with it here!

Project Astra

I led the long memory, low latency, interruption, and event-detection capabilities of the real-time multimodal assistant that was demonstrated at Google I/O 2024.

See the official video, where you can find demonstrations of proactive response to visual stimuli (0:10-0:18) and long memory (1:20-1:34).

I co-watched the Google I/O keynote livestream with Astra, which was then posted immediately after the main keynote and appended to the developer keynote.

I also similarly co-watched OpenAI's GPT-4o announcement a day earlier, and a clip of that can be found here.

Gemini

I worked on evaluating Gemini's hours-long video understanding capabilities, where I was co-responsible for the results shown in Fig. 9, Fig. 15, Fig. 28, and Table 47 of the Gemini 1.5 Pro paper.

The artificial programmer is the drosophila of AGI

I define AGI as the capacity to create new knowledge. The process of knowledge creation is the iterative cycle of conjecture and criticism.

Similarly, the process of programming, and debugging, is also an iterative cycle of conjecture and criticism, where the knowledge is encoded as the program. We conjecture programs for achieving a certain functionality and we criticize those programs by running them through tests. If the code fails, we conjecture reasons for why the code does not do what we want, and we criticize those reasons by comparing what we expect the values of the variables to be with what the values actually turn out to be.

The processes of programming and of knowledge creation are isomorphic.

Therefore, I believe that the artificial programmer is the drosophila of AGI: studying the process of writing and debugging code can teach us the fundamental principles for building self-improving knowledge-creating AGI systems.

Code is also cheap, verifiable, and valuable, so I believe that the shortest path to AGI is through the goal of building artificial programmers.

The "No-Push" Principle

A large fraction of our relationship with information-processing machines has been to spoon-feed machines information that they already have access to.

Examples include doing taxes, copying data from one spreadsheet to another, and filling out forms.

Such tasks reduce humans to mindless communication channels. They stifle our creative potential.

I therefore propose the No-Push Principle: Humans should not have to push information to machines that is already there. The machines should pull that information on their own.

A good example of software that has evolved in accordance with the No-Push Principle is navigation software. A few decades ago, if we wanted to go somewhere we needed to manually type in our current location to get a route to our destination. Now our phones automatically pull our location information without us having to specify it. This is good. Trends like this should continue.

Principles like the No-Push Principle give us a way to bifurcate the world and identify problems to solve. Next time when you interact with computers, ask yourself, "Am I unnecessarily pushing information to the machine that it should already know about?" If yes, then that's a problem to solve.

Here are some of my past and current readings that have changed the way I think.

Longer Works

Holes - Louis Sachar

Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling

The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

三國演義 Romance of the Three Kingdoms - 羅貫中 Luo Guanzhong

The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

莊子 Zhuangzi - 莊子 Zhuangzi

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn

Hegemony or Survival - Noam Chomsky

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Harold Abelson and Gerald Sussman with Julie Sussman

The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands

Republic - Plato

道德經 Tao Te Ching - 老子 Laozi

Discussions on Youth - Diasaku Ikeda

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny - Robert Wright

The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli

Reality is Not What it Seems - Carlo Rovelli

Talking to My Daughter about the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism - Yanis Varoufakis

Can't Hurt Me - David Goggins

Never Finished - David Goggins

Shorter Works

A Psalm of Life - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You and Your Research - Richard Hamming

Building Machines that Think and Learn Like People - Brendan M. Lake, Tomer D. Ullman, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Samuel J. Gershman

Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence - Marvin Minsky

As We May Think - Vannevar Bush

The Philosophy of Composition - Edgar Allan Poe

The Differences Between Tinkering and Research - Julian Togelius

Others' Reading Lists

Lucas Morales' reading list

MIT Probabilistic Computing Project's reading list

Jürgen Schmidhuber's recommended readings

Gerry Sussman's reading list

Marcus Hutter's reading list

Patrick Winston's reading list

Tom Griffiths' reading list

Scott Aaronson's reading list

Blogs

Scott Aaronson's blog

Bret Victor's blog

Here are some of my heroes that have shaped my worldview.