Builds stuff.

Portugal
Joined April 2009
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works already-clean.goodfire.com/
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The entire product org at Instagram responsible for the placement and functioning of that repost button should take a long hard look in the mirror.
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
Lord please bless me like you blessed this man.
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
Has AI progress slowed down? I’ll write some personal takes and predictions in this thread. The main metric I look at is METR’s time horizon, which measures the length of tasks agents can perform. It has been doubling for more than 6 years now, and might have sped up recently.
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The Grok companion is a catalyst to the ultimate inevitability of what's coming right at us: a total fucking shitshow.
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
Linus used to speak to engineers in 2012 the way I speak to LLMs now.
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
Thrilled to finally share what we've been working on for months at @huggingface 🤝@pollenrobotics Our first robot: Reachy Mini A dream come true: cute and low priced, hackable yet easy to use, powered by open-source and the infinite community. Tiny price, small size, huge possibilities. A robot built to code, learn, share with AI builders of all ages, all around the globe, using the latest vision, speech and text AI model. A first robot for today's and tomorrow's AI builders. Read more and order now at hf.co/blog/reachy-mini First deliveries expected right after the summer.
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vibe coders discovering why other jobs outside of sw eng exist. "if i frame the problem correctly, my AI agent actually builds the thing. 🤯"
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by the by, this can be a net positive for everyone in product roles: it will force a reframe of how people think about the limits of their functions tho: writing.colivetree.com/3/pro…
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
A gentle reminder that we've already had one 'general purpose technology that increased productivity across the board' — the PC. And in that revolution, higher productivity/speed DIDN'T result in company wins.
Wild how many people claim to be 10x more productive with AI tools and yet I haven’t heard a single person say that one of their coworkers has become 10x more productive.
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on my way to swat flies around the house this morning.
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This says everything you need to know about asymmetric opportunity pools and profiling leading to path-dependency in hiring. It's broken, and the use of AI on both sides of the equation will make it an extraordinarily hard problem to solve.
Not a joke. This is happening real time. This is the 3rd DM today about someone firing him. soham-gate
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you wouldn't last a minute in the asylum i was raised in
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
No we literally calculated tariff and non tariff barriers. ustr.gov/issue-areas/recipro…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
1) xᵢ = total exports 2) mᵢ = total imports 3) price elasticity of import demand, ε= 4 4) elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ = 0.25 Hence, ∆τᵢ = (exports-imports) / (0.25*4*imports) = deficit/imports ustr.gov/issue-areas/re…
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The unsung piece of PM is just being there, making sure good decisions get made every single day and they add up to a great product. It'll all look obvious in hindsight, yet somehow not at all while you're building.
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
Thinking for longer (e.g. o1) is only one of many axes of test-time compute. In a new @Google_AI paper, we instead focus on scaling the search axis. By just randomly sampling 200x & self-verifying, Gemini 1.5 ➡️ o1 performance. The secret: self-verification is easier at scale!
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
Excited to announce GR00T N1, the world’s first open foundation model for humanoid robots! We are on a mission to democratize Physical AI. The power of general robot brain, in the palm of your hand - with only 2B parameters, N1 learns from the most diverse physical action dataset ever compiled and punches above its weight: - Real humanoid teleoperation data. - Large-scale simulation data: we are open-sourcing 300K+ trajectories! - Neural trajectories: we apply SOTA video generation models to “hallucinate” new synthetic data that features accurate physics in pixels. Using Jensen’s words, “systematically infinite data”! - Latent actions: we develop novel algorithms to extract action tokens from in-the-wild human videos and neural generated videos. GR00T N1 is a single end-to-end neural net, from photons to actions: - Vision-Language Model (System 2) that interprets the physical world through vision and language instructions, enabling robots to reason about their environment and instructions, and plan the right actions. - Diffusion Transformer (System 1) that “renders” smooth and precise motor actions at 120 Hz, executing the latent plan made by System 2. We deploy N1 on GR1 robot, 1X Neo robot, and a large collection of simulation benchmarks. N1 achieves up to +30% boost in diverse manipulation tasks for household and industrial settings. While humanoid robots are the main focus of N1, our model also supports cross-embodiment. We finetune it to work on the $110 HuggingFace LeRobot SO100 robot arm! Open robot brain runs on open hardware. Sounds just right. Let’s solve robotics, together, one token at a time. Links to our Whitepaper, Github repo, HuggingFace model, and open dataset page in the thread: 🧵
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Carlos Oliveira retweeted
What rugby is all about 💝 #WALvENG | #GuinnessM6N
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