Brandon (@BrandonVanB) header
Brandon (@BrandonVanB) profile picture

I cut cost and carbon out of buildings | Also Tech nerd | Also futurist | Also always curious.

Auckland, New Zealand
Joined February 2009
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Great review on Agents. I really hope Dots has a quantum leap. I’m already bought into the OpenAi ecosystem and you can’t get Muse outside of the US. youtu.be/fbm5LevEJyI?si=aYuE…
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Wowza 👏🏼
Introducing Muse Wonder, our new family of frontier models with state of the art performance for personal and professional agentic work.
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Very interesting perspective… Does make me wonder, how do you build walls tall enough and gates strong enough?
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Absolutely incredible. What a time to be alive 💪🏼
Interim ER-100 trial results are out 👀 The Phase I trial is designed to evaluate safety & tolerability, not to demonstrate efficacy. Grateful to participation of the patients in the trial 🙏
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Incredible first step. We are so close.
Interim ER-100 trial results are out 👀 The Phase I trial is designed to evaluate safety & tolerability, not to demonstrate efficacy. Grateful to participation of the patients in the trial 🙏
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Started using my Dot as my personal trainer. So far it’s been a really great experience 💪🏼
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Hot Take - The retailer that builds its business model around agentic processes will win. My @openai, @bot or @Muse should be able to find the best deals and shop for me.
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If it’s not an engineering problem, it can’t be solved.
Today, with over 100 industry partners, we introduced the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, bringing together OpenShell and Sentry. Artificial intelligence is extraordinary technology that will advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity for generations to come. But its full promise can only be realized when people have confidence that AI is being built to be safe and deployed with wisdom and responsibility. This is bigger than a single product. It's the beginning of an open ecosystem to build the trust layer for safe agent systems. Together, we are building the foundation of the AI economy. Trust and innovation are not in conflict. Safety is how trust is earned. We must build not only the most capable AI, but the most trusted AI, so that this extraordinary technology can realize its enormous promise for the world. nvda.ws/4hcoq7m
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I love @dhh! Most inspirational Ai pill dispenser the world has at the moment.
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Anyone else getting “Selected model is at capacity. Please try a different model.” On Codex? Running GPT-6 Astra (Max) - Pro (20x) @thsottiaux @OpenAI
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With all due respect I’m not sure Voxium has ever started and tried to scale a business before..
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
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Brandon retweeted
I said "auto-regressive LLMs, in and of themselves, will not lead human-level AI" That statement is still totally true. First, the reasoning abilities of current AI systems are based non-auto-regressive search (which is what I have always advocated for). But AFAICT, they do it in token space, which is limited and inefficient. I have claimed that human-like reasoning must be a search in continuous representation space. It looks like the industry is moving towards that. Second, the self-improvement methods, as currently practiced, only work for domains where the quality of outputs can be scored without human intervention, such as mathematics, code, and scenarios that can be simulated accurately. Not anything else. Humans and animals learn new skills way more efficiently than current RL methods. Third, the multimodal capabilities of current AI assistants generally use separately-trained encoders (that are not LLMs). This is also what I've been advocating. Except that I think the best way to do this is with JEPA trained with self-supervised learning. The research community is clearly moving towards that (3000 papers on JEPA in just 4 years). Fourth, if LLMs were a path to human-level AI, we would have domestic robots and Level-4 or Level-5 self-driving cars for consumers by now. And we don't. We certainly don't have cars that can learn to drive in 20 hours or practice like any teenager. We're still missing something pretty huge to claim human-level intelligence (let alone superhuman). Sure, we now have computer systems that are impressive, very useful, and whose performance is superhuman in an increasing number of domains (coding being one of them). But that's true of the entire history of progress in computer technology. Lastly, there is a basic confusion about what intelligence actually is. It is not the mere accumulation and regurgitation of existing declarative knowledge (which is essentially what LLMs do). As Jean Piaget famously said, "intelligence is not what you know, it is what you do when you don't know." It is your ability to solve new problem without any prior training, to act in previously-unknown scenarios, and to adapt very quickly to new situations with minimal training. We're still far from that.
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Can’t get it out of my mind when reading about Jev @typesafeai 😂
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A new dawn…
I’ve put a ton of tokens through Jev now, and...I have thoughts. 1. The big labs lost the script TypeSafe’s intro video says, “We’re building prod, not God” — and can I just say? Hell yeah. @typesafeai built something for engineers like me, so I can build products for people like your mom (she says hi btw). They’re not trying to create “Machines of Loving Grace”; they’re trying to build things that let OTHER HUMAN BEINGS create new types of products. The proof is in the pudding. When ChatGPT shipped, we were all blown away by…ChatGPT. When Jev shipped, we were all blown away by what everyone was making with it. I cannot tell you how refreshing this is. It takes a sincere form of humility to believe that you, the creator of a technology, will not be the best at deploying the technology into the marketplace. The big labs, especially Anthropic, have proven not to have this humility…and now everyone hates AI. Thanks, Dario. I guess what I’m saying is: Diogo for president. 2. Ultra-smart classifiers were genuinely a missing primitive. I don’t know how this got missed. Diogo calls it “machine-native intelligence,” and that’s really what it is. I cannot tell you how much bending and twisting I've had to do with LLMs to get them to act like a classifier when they just weren’t. I’m absolutely shocked this is the first time this “type” of model has come to market. These models will unlock AI utility for entire industries: robotics, trucking, aviation, meteorology, finance, defense, retail…even your smart coffee mug is going to use this. 3. It’s still too expensive Jev is really, really cheap compared to LLMs. But you don’t use it like an LLM. In my full self-driving example, or any robotics example, you’ll be making decisions several times per second continuously. The #1 value proposition of a model like this is speed and cost. To be clear, at current pricing, the model will still be successful and well integrated. It will be able to replace a number of tasks that were already being performed (poorly) by LLMs. However, to unlock industrial-scale demand (Jevons paradox), I believe it needs to be roughly 10x cheaper. Currently, Jev is $0.042/M input, which is actually 7x more expensive than a cache read on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash ($0.006). If our industrial application requires decisions at 10 Hz and we provide only 10k of context, that would cost $0.0042/second to operate, or $15/hour, $600/week, etc. The good news is Diogo said on a recent AMA that they have substantial margin at their current pricing and have already considered dropping the cost further. I hope it's a lot further. 4. Latency is a real limiter I really hope TypeSafe AI works with an edge network provider to improve the co-location of models and reduce network latency. Ultimately, these models really need to run on-device. I would even be willing to pay some kind of recurring license fee to have a great closed model running on my own hardware, just so I can reduce the TTD (Time To Decision) as much as possible. Imagine running a model like this at 60 Hz, or even 120 Hz. At that point, we’re looking at a new kind of logic gate — we can’t even imagine what that will be like. In summary, this one really is a game changer for everyone building AI products, and, assuming cost and latency are further improved…it’ll be a game changer for everyone doing anything.
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Love Zuck’s approach here. I agree 👏🏼
Last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone: meta.com/thefutureisforevery… Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens. The reality is: - People won't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned. There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind. - Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well. Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security. We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us. I'm proud of the security foundations we've built. - Engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. In general, it would be helpful for there to be a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators. - Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do.
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Brandon retweeted
The p(doom) discussion gets all the headlines, but the p(abundance) scenery is far more like and deserves much more engagement.
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Uncomfortable truths suck for those wishing to control the narrative.
I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands. And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.
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