Discovery loops since ∞ · YC S13 · Pivotal Labs · Freakonomics Experiments · University of Vienna
Berlin, New York, Marseille,
Joined April 2022
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YO! I just completed my fourth @karpathy autoresearch-inspired project called "Beeline". It's sort of a prototype for "GPS without GPS" for UAVs.
Claude and I iterated through 81 ideas and found a small neural thingy that can be trained to recall 96% of locations, given satellite images to train on and then a camera frame to remember latitude and longitude for.
Basically:
1. Train: Here are all tiles and their latitude/longitude, remember them
2. Infer: Here's a live frame from my camera. Where am I?
Claude for experiment design and implementation, me for research cybernetics.
My favorite part is that the resulting artifact (the .onnx model that represents the memory of spot and lat/lon) is intentionally custom-built for the defined geo-fence and thus the research harness had to embrace overfitting for this one specific case as a feature, not a bug.
The biggest suprise was that in order to break-through the 75-long experiment plateau, I had to fix the harness, not the loop.
And of course, this is a personal research project, so a bunch of limits apply. Such as training only happened on day-time pictures and the training set is bound to a geo-fence and more.
But hey! It's invented and built completely from scratch, so no dependencies on domain-libraries which means it's all GPL-licensed, too!
If you're interested, check it out here! :D
alexisrondeau.me/low-light-g…
Let me know if you dig it, too!
YAY!
1. Less than five minutes after leaving Munich Hbf, this train stops because “…there is a freight train blocking our tracks. It can’t move on its own.”
2. One hour later and we have not moved an inch: “We are still waiting on a locomotive to move the train.”
3. Just now: “The locomotive could not move the train. A replacement needs to be found. There is a chance though that we might return to Munich Hbf.”
Deutsche Bahn, what is wrong with you? Seriously.
I've decided: I will host a "Autonomous Research 101" training during the @Eurodefensetech Hackathon in 🇨🇭 Switzerland next week.
@zhengyaojiang: Could my participants use @WecoAI to run their first experiment loops instead of bootstrapping everything via Claude Code?
And if not, what would you recommend?
Thank you @karpathy because I now realize that, while the curve's vertigo has been real for me for years, there's a HUGE gap in my communication skills to translate what I'm experiencing here on the edge with those closer to the center in a way that makes sense to them.
> "So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time."
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Accelerating scientific discovery with AI-powered Empirical Research Assistance: Autoresearch at Google (2025)
Lovely and very relatable: Once you have the experiment harness in place, you wanna test it against at least four kinds of interesting problems.
- Genomics: Batch integration of single cell RNA sequencing data
- Public health: Prediction of U.S. COVID-19 hospitalizations
- Geospatial analysis: Segmentation of remote sensing images
- Neuroscience: Whole-brain neural activity prediction
Same for me. It becomes utterly fascinating.
Thank you @elliottadams for sending me this
research.google/blog/acceler…
Love this. Via @patrickshafto and @DARPA's expMath program, @ayushkhaitan343 announces:
> "With Ben Chow, Yuan Liao and Ziyang Qin, we have completed a full Lean formalization of the Hamilton-Perelman proof of the Poincaré conjecture!"
For context on expMath and in @r0ck3t23 words over at teapawt.org/r0ck3t23/status/191701…
> "DARPA has just kicked off Exponentiating Mathematics (expMath), a three-year program aimed at radically accelerating pure math research by developing AI that can propose and prove abstractions. According to the official program brief, expMath will bring together teams focused on auto-decomposition; automatically breaking complex conjectures into reusable lemmas; and auto(in)formalization, bridging the gap between human-readable mathematics and rigorously checked proofs in languages like Lean."
With Ben Chow, Yuan Liao and Ziyang Qin, we have completed a full Lean formalization of the Hamilton-Perelman proof of the Poincaré conjecture!
The proof is around 4.7 million lines of code, written in roughly two weeks. Grateful to the @DARPA expMath program for its support!
"Pants down, page up! Is it slop or is it not?"
Hey there! Alexis here. I'm the author of Mosey and director of this little film here. As you may (or not) have guessed, the film was created with AI. If you're (like me) skeptical at this point, please read on.
On this page here:
alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/…
I want to show you exactly HOW I created it with AI so that you have a chance deciding for yourself if it's "slop or not."
Why is this important?
Well, it's important to me. I'm personally getting more and more sensitive and frustrated with content because a.) I can't tell the difference between human-made and AI-generated anymore and b.)
I can't tell if the person behind the artifact (blog-post, twitter message, promo video like this one) actually even cared about making it.
In fact, this page above is a kind of "prototype" of how I wish digital, AI-created content emerged. Was it a sloppy, careless one-shot of "Hey Claude. Make a cool video. Make no mistakes" or did the person behind the keyboard (in this case myself) actually put in the legwork?
I believe that giving you full access to my honest, imperfect, human side of the "creation" (warts and all), you and I get a fair chance to meet at eye-level on all of this.
How does the page work?
The first thing you'll see is the final cut of my little film. It's short and I highly recommend watching it first (if you haven't yet) so that you know what the rest of the page is about.
Then you'll see the full transcript of the "conversation" that I had with Claude Code to create the film withe the goal to put it on the frontpage to explain what this whole Mosey . app is about and, to a lesser degree, why someone should get it.
On the left side, you see my actual text inputs (or prompts although I would not call them that) which I sent to Claude Code. On the right side you'll see the assets (pictures, video clips and audio files) that Claude Code created in response.
When there was a intermediate deliverable (called "Cuts") where I felt like we had reached a milestone, you'll see them in row on their own. They're small highlights on the way to the final cut.
What I've left out: I've left out Claude Code's textual parts of the responses because they were mostly blathery fill-in wordsalat padding around the assets (which is what I cared for the most)
What I've left IN: In this version I'm leaving in ALL of it. ESPECIALLY the warts. You'll see my cursing and insulting and threatening Claude Code in ALL CAPS. Basically, you'll see me at my worst. This is incredibly embarassing to share but I feel like it's the most honest, too. It's how this sausage was made.
Your task now is: watch the short film itself, then peruse the full, pants-down "making of" of it.
Thank you and with best wishes,
Alexis
PS: Hey @isidentical I love fal and in message #107 you'll see me switching from elevenlabs to your company. What do you think of all of this?
Ever wonder "Why is my apartment so warm all the time?"
Turns out: my router has been quietly moonlighting 24/7 as a small space heater at 36℃/97℉.
And my fridge at 27℃/82℉. You can see how the hot air flows up, and makes sure my ceiling is nice and, err..., crispy.
I'm so glad I got this thermal phone adapter because I would NEVER even have considered these two as candidates. (I was 100% convinced the problem came from a broken floor-heating unit and/or wall-emission.)
Highly recommended!
PS: I now turn off the router at night. And yes, ambient temps have finally dropped to expected levels.
Hey @Topdon_Official 👋🏼 I'm using your TC002C Duo here. Works fantastic.
Also: I had a technical issue yesterday and Mr. Morad from your Germany office helped me resolve the issue in minutes! Really appreciated his support.
PS: Boosting this (via paid ads) for a day because I'm really curious to hear your thoughts.
And yes, I do feel like I'm putting my ass on the line here a bit. Mosey is "just" a personal project but still.
Be kind and let's have an honest conversation here.
Hm, interesting. Got a few thousand impressions but not one reply.
I asked on HN and got some really solid responses: news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
The kind of future I want currently costs $470 with a $5 monthly subscription:
- Oura ring, $270 + $5/month
- Redmi Buds 6 Pro, $50
- Comulytic Note Pro, $150
I like that none of them are connected to the internet. (I miss having a local AI though.)
After 20 years of touching glass, all I want is to touch some grass. Spend more time with my friends and family. Spend more time connected, less time wired.
Shannon's surprisal needs a friend called "explicability" or "responsibility."
As in: "Oh this solution is surprisingly novel. Can you please walk me through it over a cup of tea?"
Re: Currently reading; I had started DFW's biography alongside Infinite Jest and have now finished reading both. Worth it.
Removed 52/54 followers and 82/99 people I followed. If you're reading this right now, you are one of the lucky few :)
Was on the bike thinking about the whole mathematics/OpenAI thing.
Alan Watts: if we approached music the way we approach capitalism, the conductor who reaches the last note first would be the most successful. And the musician writing the shortest songs would win. Obviously silly. But is the journey is as important as the result?
Someone in a thread said a proof is only really valuable if you can explain it. I agree. Otherwise it's slop. Math slop?
But here's the conundrum: what if it works anyway? Throw brute force, money and machines at it, and out comes the actual record-shattering thing. Nobody can explain how.
Someone told me part of the payoff here would be physical prediction models weather forecasting for becoming orders of magnitude better. So you could argue: skip the drama, the back-and-forth, unlock the benefit for everyone, and let only the people whose job it is care about how we got there.
Basically, what if the slop solves world hunger?
And at the same time: the human version of this is years of grinding. You invest your time, your relationships, long stretches without reward. Even the million-dollar prize is nominal once you count opportunity cost.
These three, four, five researchers could have slid up the bell curve into a fund job and made that money anyway.
The most heartwarming part of the post that kicked all this off: the guy mostly said he shouldn't be credited, that it should go to his dude over there. Incredible sportsmanship at very high stakes.
Fast-forward 30 years. Are those researchers financially safe? Taken care of?
Risking your private time to hack on a problem for years IS risk. Spinning up 10.000 agents as part of a marketing budget is not at all risky.
Anyways, all of this is making me think harder about my own work and whether the techniques and methods I apply to my research are actually healthy ones.
