#041: Disney Building Real Droids, Going From Non-Technical to Technical, Learning How Our Brains Work

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week we will explore how Disney is creating droids in real life, how you can go from being non-technical to technical in building apps, how the human brain works, and more. Let's dive in:

Eureka! Platforms That Teach You Everything

​Andrej Karpathy is one of the original co-founders of OpenAI, the former Director of AI at Tesla, a Stanford professor, and an upcoming YouTuber. On February 13, he announced on Twitter that he would be leaving Open AI to 'work on personal projects and see what happens. Those of you who've followed me for a while may have a sense for what that might look like ;)'.

On July 16, he made a new announcement declaring he would be starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs. He began his statement with the following (it's worth reading all of it):

It goes without saying we are beyond excited to see how this project unfolds. But what is even more uncanny, is that another Twitter user, @mynamebedan, had also been working on an AI education platform named Eureka for the last 8 months. Two separate platforms, but the same goal = distributed teaching using the power of AI, to learn anything you want.

Disney is Building Real Droids

Disney Research has demo'd what might become the future of household assistants and companions. Their newest release, Design and Control of a Bipedal Robotic Character, is their attempt at creating a real life crossover between Wall-E and a Star Wars droid. From the abstract:

This is not optional - you must watch their full presentation. It details how and why they are designed the way they are, and is an unbelievable achievement in the robotics space.

Learn How Human Brains Work

Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models (LLMs) are roughly similar to how our actual brains works. In short, we intake lots of data from our surroundings and look to create patterns and 'guess' what comes next from our previous knowledge. Because of this similarity, it makes sense to study how our brains work.

​@mrslipa had a similar thought, and posed the following question:

The responses range from the comical (live dissection) to the practical (YouTube channels & books). Here are a few that either received the clear most votes in favor or stood out to us: MIT 9.13 The Human Brain, Teach Me Anatomy, and The Human Brain Book by Rita Carter.

Going From Non-Technical to Technical

​Garry Tan, President and CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, recently shared what he noticed as an 'underrated trend' of solopreneurs making impressive progress on quickly building robust apps. The replies are filled with people noting how useful something like Claude Artifacts are, especially when you know a little bit of the technical side of coding. But what if you aren't technical?

​@clairevo provided a quote tweet that laid out a 'cheat code for *non* technical folks':

Thank you Claire Vo. This is simultaneously incredibly useful and incredibly frustrating that Uplimit and Code With Antonio weren't on our radar before.

With Code With Antonio, you can build a Duolingo clone, a Notion clone, a Twitch clone, and even a finance platform. It's an unbelievable site and one of our new favorite resources for learning technical app buildouts.

Naval On Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Our spiritual guide & mentor, Naval Ravikant, recently shared the following:

Naval @naval The future of freedom depends on zero-knowledge proofs. 5:18 PM • Jul 13, 2024 1019 Retweets 6807 Likes Read 308 replies

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This prompted us with a couple questions:
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1) What the hell is a 'zero-knowledge proof'?

2) Where can I go to learn more about them?
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To start, a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is defined as "is a cryptographic method that allows one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that a statement is true without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself". This is particularly useful in blockchain and cryptocurrency systems, where ZKP's can enhance privacy and security.
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Question 2 was also asked by @arjunkhemani, who received various replies. The best and most trusted reply of all came from another genius, Brett Hall, who recommended listening to the Naval Podcast episode, Vitalik: Ethereum, Part 1. Vitalik Buterin is the creator of Ethereum, and we are sure that understanding everything in this episode will require multiple listens.

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Always wishing you the best,

J.B.