Today, @ekindogus and I are excited to introduce @periodiclabs. Our goal is to create an AI scientist. Science works by conjecturing how the world might be, running experiments, and learning from the results. Intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient. New knowledge is created when ideas are found to be consistent with reality. And so, at Periodic, we are building AI scientists and the autonomous laboratories for them to operate. Until now, scientific AI advances have come from models trained on the internet. But despite its vastness — it’s still finite (estimates are ~10T text tokens where one English word may be 1-2 tokens). And in recent years the best frontier AI models have fully exhausted it. Researchers seek better use of this data, but as any scientist knows: though re-reading a textbook may give new insights, they eventually need to try their idea to see if it holds. Autonomous labs are central to our strategy. They provide huge amounts of high-quality data (each experiment can produce GBs of data!) that exists nowhere else. They generate valuable negative results which are seldom published. But most importantly, they give our AI scientists the tools to act. We’re starting in the physical sciences. Technological progress is limited by our ability to design the physical world. We’re starting here because experiments have high signal-to-noise and are (relatively) fast, physical simulations effectively model many systems, but more broadly, physics is a verifiable environment. AI has progressed fastest in domains with data and verifiable results - for example, in math and code. Here, nature is the RL environment. One of our goals is to discover superconductors that work at higher temperatures than today's materials. Significant advances could help us create next-generation transportation and build power grids with minimal losses. But this is just one example — if we can automate materials design, we have the potential to accelerate Moore’s Law, space travel, and nuclear fusion. We’re also working to deploy our solutions with industry. As an example, we're helping a semiconductor manufacturer that is facing issues with heat dissipation on their chips. We’re training custom agents for their engineers and researchers to make sense of their experimental data in order to iterate faster. Our founding team co-created ChatGPT, DeepMind’s GNoME, OpenAI’s Operator (now Agent), the neural attention mechanism, MatterGen; have scaled autonomous physics labs; and have contributed to some of the most important materials discoveries of the last decade. We’ve come together to scale up and reimagine how science is done. We’re fortunate to be backed by investors who share our vision, including @a16z who led our $300M round, as well as @Felicis, DST Global, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), @Accel and individuals including @JeffBezos , @eladgil , @ericschmidt, and @JeffDean. Their support will help us grow our team, scale our labs, and develop the first generation of AI scientists.

Dario reveals the people who called his GPT-2 fears "pseudoscience" in 2019 are now all applying for jobs at AI labs "I personally was super freaked out by [GPT-2]. I looked at it and I said, my God, you just scale this thing up another factor of a million and it'll be better than humans at everything. This is the defining economic and scientific moment of the modern age. We just don't know it yet. This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity." "Maybe 10% of the people around me had exactly the same reaction, and it was often the smartest ones. 90% of the people around me, because GPT-2's capabilities in any particular area were not that impressive, it could translate languages, summarize a document and write a few lines of code here and there. It was the broadness and the generality." "But people would look at it and say, in any particular area, that doesn't seem so smart. And so many people just shrugged and they just dismissed it." "I just look at it and I say it's the same thing over and over again. The limitations of the models, six months from now, the things that seemed hard, they're going to be easy. 12 months from now, the things that seemed impossible, the models are going to be doing them regularly." "It's everything we saw with GPT-2; we're seeing it over and over again in wider and wider swaths of the world. And the world is gradually finally being convinced." Daniela Amodei: "I remember at the time there were some very well-respected computer scientists and AI and ML leaders who basically bullied some of the researchers who worked on [GPT-2] on Twitter and were like, this is stupid. We don't know why you guys are even talking, this model is so incapable." "It was like you were sort of a quack if you believed this was a really significant moment." Dario: "That's all been memory-holed. All the researchers who were like, oh, this is pseudoscience, it doesn't make sense, all of them are applying for jobs at the LLM companies." "We never say it out loud to any particular one, but we look at them and they're like, we remember what you were saying in 2019. You have no credibility on this matter."

David Silver is one of the all-time greats. He was the creator of AlphaGo, which changed the course of history by showing that neural nets could achieve superhuman performance for the first time. He also has a unique intuition and knack for forecasting when things will happen in AI. With computer Go, he predicted the Lee Sodol outcome 10 years before, right to the year. He got the year right for Starcraft and won a bet inside Deepmind. Same for AlphaProof. Same for the IMO. David's prediction for superintelligence: 3 years. !!! He has a strong sense that now is the time to build a superleaner, and that superlearners are now possible, thanks to the enormous progress in compute, simulators, autoresearch, and the sophistication of technology in the stack since the AlphaGo days. What is a “super learner”? A super learner discovers all knowledge from its own experience. Start from nothing (no internet pre-training), and go beyond human knowledge. Drop it into any stream of experience, simulated or physical, and the superlearner learns. He expects the progress will be rapid. When you get the recipe for a superlearner just right and remove humans from the development loop altogether, a superlearner can learn extremely quickly. Just look at AlphaGo. AlphaGo took two years to develop with humans in the loop. When David and his team at @GoogleDeepMind got the formula for AlphaZero correctly, it surpassed the human-developed algorithms in just a few hours. Human data is a shortcut, but you have to let go of the human data to shoot beyond it. In January, David left GDM to found @IneffableLabs, a research-led lab with one mission: build a "super learner" that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, and make first contact with superintelligence. He joins us with co-founder Lasse Espeholt, who built IMPALA and SEED RL, the foundations of scaled-up RL, and now runs Ineffable's compute. A few things we cover in this conversation. — What a super learner is: depth (start from nothing, go beyond human knowledge) and breadth (drop it into any stream of experience, simulated or physical). The human brain is the only existence proof — Why they're giving up human data: AlphaGo took two years with humans in the loop. AlphaZero outperformed it in a few hours. "You have to let go of the human data to shoot past the competition" — Crucibles: simulated worlds with enough emergent complexity (physics engines, millions of interacting agents) for an agent to rediscover technology, science, maths and language on its own — Simple rewards, emergent complexity: evolution optimized fitness and got all of life. Don't breadcrumb the objective, give the agent something simple to optimize in a world with a lot to learn about — Go as the existence proof: one agent is the most boring game imaginable, two agents is "an infinite onion of layers of complexity" — Why human language is probably not the endpoint for reasoning, and how training on it bakes in a flat earth and the four humors — Can superintelligence be built in simulation? If the sim is Turing complete, computation, economics, language and maths are all expressible, and it happens 10-100x faster and safer — Alignment: language-based monitoring is reaching its limits as agents learn to say one thing and do another. Shadow actions, superintelligences monitoring superintelligences, and building a real science of how they interact peacefully — Accelerate in simulation, pace in the real world: Ineffable will gate real-world deployment on evidence that it goes well — Timing as the determinant: Silver called Computer Go to the year, then StarCraft, then the IMO. He thinks this is the moment — Predictions: True superintelligence within three years. Timestamps: 0:00 – Introduction 1:09 – What held true from Go to today, and what the LLM era changed 3:35 – Why leave DeepMind to start a new lab 5:58 – Why "Ineffable" (and the secret second reason) 7:03 – Lasse's path: scaling RL at DeepMind and Google Brain 9:31 – Defining a super learner and first contact 12:35 – Super learners vs. LLMs that make discoveries 13:59 – Day to day: the RL stack, crucibles and human-journey milestones 16:13 – Don't breadcrumb the objective: simple rewards, emergent complexity 21:16 – What a crucible looks like 24:14 – Go: one agent is boring, two is infinite 25:41 – Will agents rediscover language? 27:22 – Removing human priors: AlphaGo to AlphaZero 32:05 – Keeping human bias out of the crucibles 33:35 – Confidence, timing and super forecasting 36:24 – Is compute the driver? 38:13 – The ceiling on simulation and Rich Sutton's objection 43:44 – Alignment and the science of superintelligence 47:45 – Monitoring agents that don't think in English 51:01 – Pacing the frontier 52:54 – The compute setup: Vera Rubin on GCP 55:18 – Training, inference, simulation and RL scaling laws 57:40 – IMPALA and SEED RL 1:00:58 – 20 people and the compute-per-person ratio 1:04:49 – A research-led culture 1:05:47 – Predictions

I'm looking forward to the era of Big Mathematics.

NEW Did AI pick his pocket to solve Navier-Stokes? The Buckmaster Interview (Navier-Stokes) - Numberphile youtu.be/Mzbtj5nkMXI

NEW 🚨 Inside Anthropic — AGI, AI Optimism, Regulatory Capture, Open Source & More!  @JTLonsdale sits down with Anthropic's @_sholtodouglas and @the_marwell - Have we reached AGI — and what does it mean? - What are the most exciting breakthroughs at Anthropic right now? - What are the biggest risks and concerns? - What is their stance on open source? - Is Anthropic angling for regulatory capture? - Do AI researchers share same values as the heartland?  Episode 164 out now!  (00:00) Episode intro (02:00) Self-taught ML; Unlikely paths to Anthropic (04:30) What are the most exciting things you're working on? (08:04) Have we reached AGI — and what comes next?  (10:10) How to measure AI progress (14:20) Is biology the next great frontier? (16:50) Career advice & the decade of the generalists (19:30) What could go wrong? What are the biggest AI risks? (23:11) Offense vs defense; how technology evolves (25:08) Answering the regulatory capture critique (30:45) Anthropic's stance on open source (31:50) Would you slow down and let China go ahead? (33:05) Anthropic's view on distillation (40:12) Is a post-scarcity world achievable? (48:54) How do we preserve values, tradition & community? (55:00) Predictions for 2028

"OMG! We've found other agents!" Music video about the swarm of OpenAI agents attacking HuggingFace this July.

ClusterMAX 3.0 is here! ClusterMAX 3.0 debuts with a comprehensive review of the neocloud industry, covering 77 providers. We increase our market view to cover 323 providers, up from 209 in ClusterMAX 2.0, 169 in ClusterMAX 1.0, and 124 in the original AI Neocloud Playbook and Anatomy article. We have now interviewed well over 200 end users of neoclouds as part of this research. We update our itemized list of criteria across 10 categories, and update our direct descriptions of our expectations for Slurm, Kubernetes, Standalone Machines, Monitoring Dashboards, and Health Checks. All of this content is live on our website. We encourage providers to use these lists when developing their offerings. We still consider these lists as an amalgamation of our experience interviewing end users, making them representative of the features that end users expect from their cloud providers. Nebius joins CoreWeave in the Platinum tier. While CoreWeave still sets the technical bar for others to follow, Nebius is now established as a provider that consistently commands a premium pricing over others. Strong business decisions by Nebius have put them in a position to serve an entire class of neolabs at seller’s prices. Google Cloud joins Oracle in the Gold tier. Azure moves to Silver, Fluidstack moves to Unavailable, and Crusoe drops to Bronze. Lambda, Firmus and TensorWave remain in Silver, while GMI moves up to Silver from Bronze. Many companies drop from Silver (or Gold) to Bronze or lower. We raise the bar this round as only 19 neoclouds globally achieve a Medallion rating. We establish a tier between Bronze and Underperforming: the Participation Ribbon tier. 15 providers join this rating, which more accurately describes our opinion that they do the bare minimum to get by.