fixing bugs @mayalabsio. tweets are notes to self.
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To build machines that can program themselves to do any task, you need to measure how well they learn to do things they were never programmed to do.
Today we release a new benchmark that's the first attempt to do this for any real-world task.
so cool because if you were to look at the final 3d object and question a coordinate in time - (when was the stickman at the peak of the backflip?) - the answer would be a coordinate in space
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interesting POV. math produced cheaply not for human consumption (i.e. via academic papers), but for machine consumption (like code is for the compiler) in service to a larger engineering goal
IMO, the next steps are:
Within 1 year: strictly better than human AI in all problem-solving aspects of math.
Within 2 years: producing mathematics becomes so cheap, AI will produce mathematical theories for all kinds of applied domains on the fly at need.
Mathematics becomes the true infrastructure of all of engineering and applied sciences (including AI, biology, optimization, cybersecurity, etc) where approaching things theoretically was too expensive to be practical.
tjoresearchnotes.wordpress.c…
good read
21st century version of Newton's bucket thought experiment :
if the rest of the universe shrank around it, would the tiny atom still retain its wave-like behaviour?
Collating thread of biological intelligence generalising to out-of-distribution tasks from just a few samples.
1. Pro basketball player composes models of the hoop and the windmill mentally, in order to simulate the right trajectory to throw ball at - in just two tries.
octopus learns how to play a custom piano!
youtu.be/PcWnQ7fYzwI?si=NUyw…
youtu.be/rc58xOwjwto?si=5OiI…
bees learn to dribbles balls from inverse causal reasoning
'Bees took progressively less time to learn it over trials'
'coding agents are neurosymbolic' debate is unproductive
for it to be 'symbolic' in any useful sense, the symbolic learning system must be decoupled from the neural system in way that it should make no difference if theres 1T model or 30B model underneath it
modern hellscape right out of Herbert's Dune
btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”
it was called project panama.
here's exactly what happened:
1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.”
2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.
it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.”
3: that piracy created a massive legal risk.
so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.”
4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.
those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.
5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.
6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.
a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling.
7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data.
the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.
hard to imagine anything more horrible than this, right up there with the 12th C destruction of Nalanda
nitter.gq/HedgieMarkets/status/2…
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
interesting how relativity means travelling to larger and larger scales of the universe will require mastering tinier and tinier scales of autonomy/self-replication
