this man is living in the future

I went down a rabbit hole trying to understand which real creature Yoda is based on. What I learned was more interesting than Yoda.

Tarsiers, tiny primates native to south east asia, have very weird eyes - each is larger than its brain (and its stomach.)

They lack a reflective ats have) so the size helps to maximize light sensitivity. Like humans, they have round pupils that they can shrink to 0.5mm.

Tarsiers can't rotate their huge eyes; but instead they can turn their heads ~360°. Quiet watchers of the night, they are.

“Follow your dreams—ideally in a field that will still require humans when you graduate.”

Barely over a year after I wrote this, AI is already commoditizing the formalizer - making the best intuitionists more valuable than ever.

People treat Pangram as an infallible oracle. They weaponize its probabilities to shame others by some arbitrary purity standard. The irony is that it’s mostly redundant: obviously AI-generated stuff is already recognizable without it. And for more nuanced writing, Pangram fails to distinguish between text written by a human and edited by AI, vs text that is generated whole-cloth from a prompt.

At the end of the day, @pangram ’s goal is about monetizing people’s anxiety about AI - it’s not about protecting creative integrity. They sell a false binary certainty to those gullible enough to ignore probabilities.

People treat Pangram as an infallible oracle. They weaponize its probabilities to shame others by some arbitrary purity standard. The irony is that it’s mostly redundant: obviously AI-generated stuff is already recognizable without it. And for more nuanced writing, Pangram fails to distinguish between text written by a human and edited by AI, vs text that is generated whole-cloth from a prompt.

At the end of the day, @pangram ’s goal is about monetizing people’s anxiety about AI - it’s not about protecting creative integrity. They sell a false binary certainty to those gullible enough to ignore probabilities.

Who puts a confidential letter into Pangram? Commits a clear violation of privacy & protocol, while failing to note that the use of AI to draft or refine one’s own opinions is not disqualifying as the sender is presumed fully responsible for, and supportive of, the content.

@abhishekn Why are you putting a confidential letter into Pangram? This seems like a clear violation of privacy and protocol, whereas the use of AI to draft or refine one’s own opinions is not disqualifying as the sender is presumed fully responsible for, and supportive of, the content.

Machines are not conscious. For that matter neither are some people.

Fascinating

This correlates well with which fields are getting disrupted first and fastest by AI

“Originality is the fine art of remembering what you heard but forgetting where you heard it.”

matter tells spacetime how to bend

Visual intelligence is the future. Cameras are the enablers of this future. Language is a latent abstraction of the physical world, not a replacement for it.

Visual intelligence is the future. Cameras are the enablers of this future. Language is a latent abstraction of the physical world, not a replacement for it.

@minilek You make it sound like you had no idea what was going on until very recently because you're on the "inside". (You worked part time at GDM for 5 yrs) If you had no sense of how advanced things are across the industry, maybe you were collecting a paycheck without paying attention.

Language is a latent space for world knowledge, optimizing for model tractability at the cost of inevitable information loss during encoding and decoding.

Extraordinary interview - this is something you need to hear.

For the last 10 years we've been raising funds to bring AI to Africa (@DeepIndaba) and South America (@Khipu_AI). The efforts have been very successful, but this year we are finding it hard to raise money. If you work for an AI company, please share the following with the right team to support us. Thank you!

About KHIPU 2027

What it is: KHIPU AI (khipu.ai) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing AI talent, research, and community across Latin America. Alongside year-round regional initiatives, we host a biennial in-person gathering rotating across the continent, previously in Uruguay (2019, 2023) and Chile (2025).

Next Edition: April 5–9, 2027, in São Paulo, Brazil, hosted at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), one of Latin America's leading research universities.

Watch our 2-minute video: youtube.com/watch?v=Db19zo… (hear directly from past speakers, including Nando, and Latin American students on how KHIPU grew from a single gathering into a regional AI movement).

Who Attends & Why Support - Engaging with the region's top talent and lab leaders: We bring together around 500 participants, including leading faculty and lab directors from across Latin America alongside a curated cohort of ~300 graduate students and industry researchers selected from over 1,000 applicants. As the local AI ecosystem grows rapidly, KHIPU offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with these emerging researchers and regional leaders in one place, helping shape research priorities and the safety mindset across Latin America while connecting with talent and perspectives outside Silicon Valley.

100% free attendance & student grants: Attendance is completely free for all selected students, professors, and researchers. Sponsorship funding goes directly toward travel and accommodation grants for students and faculty across Latin America who otherwise could not afford to attend.

Community & Track Record: Past editions have featured speakers such as @Yoshua_Bengio , @JeffDean , @jpineau1 , and @NandoDF (2025 lineup: khipu.ai/khipu2025/spea…), and have been supported by the Hopper-Dean Foundation, @GoogleDeepMind , @Apple , @Microsoft , @Meta, @cohere , and @MistralAI . For 2027, @OriolVinyalsML and @sarahookr are already confirmed.

2027 Sponsorship Prospectus: Attached (also available at khipu.ai/prospectus-2027)
Contact: @FortunatoMeire (meirefortunato@khipu.ai) & KHIPU Sponsorship Committee (sponsors@khipu.ai)

Language is a latent space for world knowledge, optimizing for model tractability at the cost of inevitable information loss during encoding and decoding.