upstartsmedia.com

The Startup Training Robots With Video Games

Clippord has no maps or specific data on the office layout as a reference; it's approximating its own size, and how to handle obstacles, entirely from a corpus of video game usage data, topped off with 8 minutes of real-world data collected on the sidewalk below.

dwarkesh.com

The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job

But one reason that I think it quite underrated, and also which reveals the canyon walls against which the river of AI progress will only slowly chip away at, is that it is not enough for a domain to be verifiable. It also has to be very grindable—in the sense that you can run lots of parallel rollouts against a deterministic and replayable simulator.

dwarkesh.com

The sample efficiency black hole

Imagine if it took a couple decades worth of courses with hundreds of concurrent professors and millions of practice tasks for you to learn how to polish a word file. Even the task count difference understates the gap - the models have to grind their far more numerous tasks each far harder. Whereas a human student might practice a textbook problem once or twice, GRPO has the model generate hundreds to thousands of rollouts per task.

dwarkesh.com

Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

naive policy gradient RL has to figure out which of the 100k+ tokens in your trajectory actually got you the right answer, while AlphaGo's MCTS suggests a strictly better action every single move, giving you a training target that sidesteps the credit assignment problem.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #192

The reason they believe robots haven't generalized like LLMs isn't that the models aren't smart enough, but that the data has been a fraction of a percent of what humans naturally generate every day, captured through interfaces that distort the very behavior they're trying to record.

wired.com

A New Implant Aims to Rewire Stroke Patients’ Brains

The implant works by recording electrical signals from the brain's motor cortex, then using machine learning to decode the user's intended movements and send signals to stimulate the muscles, essentially creating a new neural pathway that bypasses the damaged tissue.

wired.com

A School District Tried to Help Train Waymos to Stop for School Buses. It Didn’t Work

The incidents in Austin raise questions about how self-driving cars "learn" and adapt to their surroundings.

ai-supremacy.com

What is Advanced Machine Intelligence or AMI Labs?

AI agents need world models that allow them to predict the consequences of their actions before they take them. This is key to enabling agents that can plan, remember, and reason about complex observations.