Becket U curates the best resources in Math, Physics, Computers, Microeconomics, Game Theory, and Persuasion. With this knowledge, you will understand how the world works.
Undiscovered #105: "Prediction" is the 21st Century Theme, New California City Proposal, Karpathy Popping the AI Bubble
#105: "Prediction" is the 21st Century Theme, New California City Proposal, Karpathy Popping the AI BubbleHi 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 take a look at the "meta-theme" of the 21st century, a new city proposal in California, a social media metric 10x more important than followers, and more. Let's dive in: "Prediction" is the 21st Century Meta-ThemeAlex Danco is Editor-at-Large at Andreessen Horowitz and a sharp observer of tech and culture. After stepping away from writing for a while to focus on new roles, he recently came out with an article titled, "Prediction: the Successor to Postmodernism". This piece marked an exciting return to form, which led other writers, like David Perrell, to sing his praises with the following: Alex is a uniquely observant writer who can make any topic interesting. He's one of ~5 writers who I'll read anything by, and it's good to see him writing in public again. In his article, he talks about how prediction markets are having their moment. This matches the spirit of today and hints at a deeper cultural shift. Danco argues that prediction is now the leading way we interpret events, moving us past postmodern thinking into active, open participation. Instead of just reacting, people create value by making and sharing predictions, setting the pace for what comes next and organizing our ambitions around public bets and forecasts. Progress is now marked by collective insight and contribution, and with AI essentially being the world's most advanced prediction technology, "prediction" will become the new language of meaning. New California City ProposalJan Sramek is the founder and CEO of California Forever, a real estate development company looking to build a master-planned community in Solano County, CA. By 2071, they are looking to bring in 400,000 residents while providing affordable housing and high-quality jobs in tech and manufacturing. He recently shared a thread outlining the latest in his project's development. It seems to be the dream of many individuals to want to build their own city. One of the most fascinating reads of this year for me has been Mike Solana's article on how Walt Disney's true legacy is the innovation of the charter city. Entrepreneur Brunello Cucinelli rebuilt the Italian town of Solomeo. Reading Jan's outline sparks simultaneous optimism and frustration we aren't building enough. Cities like Shenzen in China demonstrate an against-all-odds success story that many have tried to emulate. One of the factors that allowed that code to be cracked was the freedom that came along with the Special Economic Zone designation. This allowed market reforms, foreign investment, and rapid industrialization that transformed it into a global tech and manufacturing hub. Jan listens to feedback from people on what the city will look like going forward, and I can't wait to continue monitoring how it progresses. More Insightful Metric Than FollowersReally loved the following insight from Isaac Medeiros, the founder of brands Mini Katana and Kanpai Foods: Followers don’t matter. It’s a vanity metric. Every single platform over the last few years have shifted to becoming increasingly algorithmic. That’s why you could crush content and not see amazing follower growth like years ago. You could do hacky stuff to pump follower numbers, but it’s not good for the account. Internally, we look at ‘monthly audience’ as our North Star. This is a metric that YouTube rolled out recently. Focus on quality and the rest follows. As someone with hundreds of millions of views across all social channels, Isaac saying this is something that immediately made me pay attention. Will become very interesting to see how social platforms either show, minimize, or alter the main metrics that we see across their views/followership. Karpathy Popping the AI BubbleAndrej Karpathy is one of the most respected voices in the tech community. He was a former director of AI at Tesla, a founding member of OpenAI, and is currently the founder of the AI education company Eureka Labs. @signull on Twitter says: karpathy speaks like someone who’s running a mental compiler in real time with minimal interpretive latency & almost zero runtime garbage. he’s not verbose. he just threads complexity into compressed lossless statements. most smart people can be dense, but they lose clarity. Karpathy keeps clarity while cranking the bitrate like an llm tuned with perfect temperature control. it’s so beautiful to listen to that i had to hear this three times already. i might add a fourth. Karpathy was recently featured on the Dwarkesh podcast where he discusses a myriad of topics, but the most headline-inducing one are his thoughts on AGI and its future impact on society. Here are 7 lessons and quotes @Prithvir12 found that illustrate the main takeaways:
1. LLMs don’t work yet They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t use computers, and they don’t remember what you tell them. They’re cognitively lacking. It’ll take about a decade to work through all of that. 2. When you boot them up, they always start from zero They have no distillation phase, no process like sleep where what happened gets analyzed and written back into the weights. 3. What’s stored in their weights is only a hazy recollection of the internet It's just a compressed blur of 15 trillion tokens squeezed into a few billion parameters. Their context window is just short-term working memory. 4. They’re good at imitation, terrible at going off the data manifold Too much memory, not enough reasoning. We need to strip away the memorized knowledge and keep the cognitive core: the algorithms, the magic of intelligence, problem-solving, strategy. 5. We’ve probably recreated a cortical tissue, pattern-learning and general, but we’re still missing the rest of the brain No hippocampus for memory. No amygdala for instincts. No emotions or motivations. 6. They memorize perfectly but generalize poorly If you give them random numbers, they can recite them back. No human can do that. That’s the problem: humans forget just enough to be forced to find patterns. 7. Anything truly new, code that’s never been written before, ideas that have no template; they stumble They’re still autocomplete engines with perfect recall and no understanding. Until we find that cognitive core, intelligence stripped of memory but full of reasoning, they’ll stay brilliant mimics, not minds. Patrick Collison and Moby DickStripe CEO Patrick Collison has some of the most beautiful long-form writing on Twitter. He is able to pull insights from and compare seemingly disparate texts while seeing what truths they reveal about humanity. Most recently, he finished reading Titan, the story of John D. Rockefeller, and wanted to continue exploring oil entrepreneurs. This lead him to write an incredible thread contrasting Moby Dick's literary similarities of Shakespeare with the economics of the whaling industry. Something I wasn't aware of was that the whaling industry holds many similarities to the venture capital industry. He talks about Ahab acting like an founder ignoring market realities, and how this begins to speak volumes about meta themes in certain centuries and their attitudes towards sustainable ecosystems, both in the natural and business worlds. It's a fascinating, challenging piece, but one worth reading alongside all foundational texts Collison mentions. P.S Can you please respond to this email and bring it into your 'primary' inbox? You can say 'Hi!', tell us the last book you read recently, or what your favorite resource was from above. We appreciate any feedback you are able to provide here. What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Feel free to reach out to us on Instagram and give us a follow there, tag your friends on our posts, and please forward this newsletter along to anyone else who would enjoy it. Disclaimer: Becket U is an Amazon Associate and purchases through Amazon links may earn a small affiliate commission, but the price is the same for you. We only recommend books we love and think you would love, too. Always wishing you the best, J.B. |
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Becket U curates the best resources in Math, Physics, Computers, Microeconomics, Game Theory, and Persuasion. With this knowledge, you will understand how the world works.
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