The app for independent voices
I spent last week at Neurips (the big ML/AI conference) and had hundreds of amazing technical conversations with old friends and new. Beyond the technical, I'm deeply grateful for the love from all the folks who stopped me in the hallways and in the street to say kind words and share their research & life stories with me. Once again, I felt like the luckiest kid in the world.
I took a lot of notes at the conference, and will try to write up my takeaways, here on Substack, so subscribe if you like. Additionally, I will likely do lecture(s) on the state-of-the-art in AI as I've done in the past, and I'll post those here too.
I'm trying to get back to occasionally publishing in conferences & journals (because it's fun & makes me happy). As I said previously, grounding myself in engineering tasks many hours a day, humbles me to the reality of the world. For me, this is important to do regularly. I'm collaborating with a few incredible people at MIT and Caltech on human-robot interaction research, with humanoid and quadruped robots. It's a bit of an experiment to see if I can find the time to both do deep prep for each podcast episode (sometimes 100+ hours) and also do the serious research grind required to publish interesting papers. Like everything in life, when max effort is applied, even short-term "failure" leads to growth & lessons-learned, which is a win. So really, the only way to fail is to not try with max effort.
Also, attached is a Neurips pic for the memes, with Dylan and Nathan. Both are super-interesting voices in the AI world whose writing everyone should follow. We did a great AI-focused podcast episode last year, and will probably do many more.
Nathan Lambert - interconnects.ai
Dylan Patel - newsletter.semianalysis…
Other people's writing & tweets I recommend:
Sebastian Raschka, PhD - magazine.sebastianrasch…
Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D. - cameronrwolfe.substack.…
Simon Willison - simonw.substack.com
Jordan Schneider - chinatalk.media
There's many more I'm forgetting! Please give suggestions of technical folks I should follow & read.
And importantly, the reason I'm posting on Substack is because Jasmine Sun talked to me at Neurips about it and sold me on how incredible the team behind Substack is, from the CEO to the engineers, all super passionate humans. So go subscribe to her as well, she's great: jasmi.news
What a crazy life this is… Truly, I'm a lucky dude. I love you all! ❤️
