Stephen Malina
This is my blog. There are many others like it but this one is mine.
Dialogue on Viriditas
Introduction A few months ago, Elliot Hershberg, one of my favorite Substack writers, wrote apost laying out his personal mission. I really enjoyed his post and, as is customary in blogging, the best way I could think of to compliment it was to share some (hopefully constructively) critical thoughts on it. After sending my post to Elliot, he proposed the great idea of us having a discussion of this over email, which we could then potentially publish.
Reflections on 2022
2022 was another exciting, fun year. To round it out, I wrote up some scattered reflections. Enjoy, or if you aren’t a fan of this genre of post, don’t! Also, each section is mostly self-contained and they’re not organized in any special order, so don’t hesitate to skip a section if it sounds boring. Writing 2022 felt like a productive year for blogging even though my post count dropped down from 11 in 2021 to 6.
Decentralization of Atoms is Underrated
This post was co-authored with Austin Vernon. Summary While the internet often focuses its furious debate energy on decentralization in the realm of bits, in the realm of atoms, decentralization is currently underrated in terms of its feasibility and desirability. New technologies in areas like aviation, freight, and life sciences can and are shifting the scales towards decentralized models being possible. This has the potential to broaden access, reduce costs, and increase individual empowerment.
GPT4 Predictions
As a way to keep myself honest, I’m going to be recording GPT4 predictions here and archiving versions of the post so I can’t go back and change it without people knowing. Not that I would do this anyway, but it’s been a tough week for “trust me, I’m telling the truth” so I’m doing this in case readers want the receipts. I predict GPT4 won’t be able to… Write a blog post about gene therapy that I consider to be of equivalent quality to my own Write a scientific paper about machine learning.
AI Omens: Signs of AI acceleration
A friend recently asked me what my “AI timelines” were. Especially with recent progress in image generation, language modeling, code generation, robotics, protein folding, and other areas, this has become an increasingly popular question amongst those who are paying attention. However, I find trying to answer this question pretty frustrating. There already exist long, thorough reports (another) which build quantitative models and carefully define terms to make sure there’s as little ambiguity as possible.