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Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

From one piece @fchollet on X 2 beliefs · x.com

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  AGI should not be declared until AI is capable of invention, including conceptual breakthroughs, novel insights, and new real-world technology.

  AGI

  Their words

  So I would not "declare AGI" until we have AI that is, at last, capable of invention -- conceptual breakthroughs, novel insights, new real-world technology, etc.

  @fchollet on Xx.com

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  The case for building AGI has always been framed around invention, such as curing cancer or solving fusion energy.

  AGIenergy

  Their words

  The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention -- "it will cure cancer", "it will solve fusion energy", etc.

  @fchollet on Xx.com

Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.

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  The early Web 2.0-era promise of universal API interoperability and user ownership of data and control never materialized.

  Their words

  I long for the halcyon days of early Web 2.0 when it was predicted that all APIs would work with everything and data and control would belong to the user. Oh well - that didn't happen.

  feld.com

Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

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  Curing disease is not worth it if the price is the permanent deprecation of most human beings' existence.

  Their words

  As someone coming from a biology background, who considers “curing disease” as a very noble mission, I still believe that the vague promise of “curing disease” is fundamentally not worth it if it comes with a form of permanent deprecation of most humans’ existence.

  Curing cancer won't redeem AIwritingruxandrabio.com

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.

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  The blockchain is the most important development in history since the invention of writing, because it is a cryptographically verifiable, highly replicated, unfalsifiable, complete digital record.

  Their words

  As incredible as it may sound, the blockchain is the most important development in history since the advent of writing itself, as it’s a cryptographically verifiable, highly replicated, unfalsifiable, and provably complete digital record of a system.

  The Network Statethenetworkstate.com

Programmer and writer known for detailed source code reviews of classic game engines, and author of the Game Engine Black Book series on Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

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  Thunderbolt's official wake-from-sleep certification does not guarantee the feature works reliably in practice.

  Their words

  At this point, I had pretty much given up and filed Thunderbolt's "wake from sleep" promise in the "unreliable" folder, right next to Bluetooth Pairing.

  A dock that finally wakes up reliablyfabiensanglard.net

Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.

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  A supplement or drug should be judged on well-defined benefits for well-defined problems in well-defined populations, never on a vague promise of slowing ageing.

  Their words

  That’s a lesson we could all learn about our approach to supplements and even drugs: not to fall for hazy promises that a single molecule will deliver vaguely-defined benefits for all aging persons, but to demand rigorous evidence for well-defined benefits for well-defined problems in well-defined populations.

  Metformin and cancer: active surveillance neededpeterattiamd.com

Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.

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  Practices marketed as transformative, such as therapy, meditation, and psychedelics, often produce little real progress despite years of use.

  psychedelicsPsychotherapy

  Their words

  There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us-therapy, meditation, psychedelics-, but that branding doesn't mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems.

  How not to forget what mattershenrikkarlsson.xyz

Editor at Works in Progress writing on architecture, urbanism and housing policy, and a fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies and Create Streets. Has worked in think tanks, academia and government in Britain.

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  Zoning is a European invention: German and Austro-Hungarian cities wrote the first rules protecting rich suburbs from denser building.

  Europe

  Their words

  In fact, zoning was invented in Europe, in Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the late nineteenth century.

  worksinprogress.news

Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.

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  You do not have to know how it works underneath, but depth is where invention comes from — nobody who only knows the surface invents a programming language.

  Their words

  But if you ever want to get better at anything, and sometimes that depth, that nuance is the thing that leads to an invention, right? If you know how a compiler works, if you know how memory management works, that might give you enough information to say, "Oh, I can make a new programming language."

  youtube.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

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  The Bronze Age, not the invention of farming, was the shock the human genome reacted to most strongly.

  Their words

  our cartoon picture is that the big transition is farming, but the genetic data, the biological readout is saying our genome is reacting much more strongly to this these events that happened 5,000 years ago.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

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  You can bet your entire business on Nvidia shipping a better architecture every single year and your token cost falling by an order of magnitude — no ASIC team can promise that.

  Their words

  Pick your ASIC team where you can say I can bet the farm of I can bet my entire business that you will be here for me every single year. Your cost, your token cost will decrease by an order of magnitude every single year. I can count on it like I can count on the clock.

  Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?youtube.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  The Mythical Man-Month

  Their words

  If you could only read one computer science book, this would be it. Almost fifty years old, it’s as relevant as ever. I promise you’ll nod your head as Brooks skewers mistakes that engineering leaders continue to make to this day.

  bringthedonuts.com

Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.

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  That data centres have not raised national electricity prices so far is no promise that they never will.

  data centersenergy

  Their words

  This is not to say that data centers won’t affect national prices in the future.

  blog.andymasley.com

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

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  Qobuz

  Their words

  Qobuz unlocks millions of tracks of hi-rez quality music. I promise you can hear the difference, especially with headphones.

  seths.blog

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  Telegram would rather shut down in a country than change its system to let anyone read users' messages, because it promised its users it would not.

  Their words

  No. We designed a system in a way that's impossible. It'll require us to change the system and we won't do that because we made a promise to our users. We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.

  youtube.com

German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.

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  Hitler stopped the tanks at Dunkirk because he feared his own high command and had been convinced by Göring's morphine-high promise that the Luftwaffe could finish the job.

  Their words

  This was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of his army high command, and convinced by Goering's morphine-high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn't.

  youtube.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  School's purpose should be humanistic rather than economic, and the people who are not academically talented need a welfare state rather than a promise that school will lift them.

  Their words

  What we need, ultimately, is a return to a holistic, humanistic vision of what school is for, and we need a robust social safety net to protect those who are not lucky enough to be naturally academically talented.

  Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com

Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.

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  America will keep leading on zero-to-one breakthroughs, but it is diffusion that decides how much productivity a technology actually releases, and China is better at that.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  The US will lead for some time on breakthroughs on disruptive technologies, the zero to one technologies that ultimately change the world. But innovation is a process. It goes from invention to production and commercialization and diffusion, diffusing technology throughout all parts of the economy. And on those two stages, I think that China has a unique advantage, even if it still can’t do the zero to one breakthroughs, because in the end, how much this technology is adopted by the countries and by the various parts of the economy is fundamentally crucial to how much productivity will be unleashed.

  youtube.com

Engineering leader and writer; wrote The Manager's Path and Platform Engineering, and blogs at Elided Branches.

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  Flat, manager-free organisations do not deliver the equality they promise: they get abandoned, and the informal power left behind is unaccountable.

  Their words

  The Tyranny of Structurelessness has yet to be overcome, and for those who still care about creating strong, transparent, equitable organizations, this work matters.

  10 Years of Engineering Ladderselidedbranches.com

Founder of what became Bloomberg New Energy Finance; writes and speaks on clean energy, hydrogen and the economics of the transition, and hosts the Cleaning Up podcast.

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  Direct air capture costing hundreds of dollars per tonne is too expensive to be part of the climate solution.

  Their words

  Whatever the solution to climate change is going to be, it is certainly not going to involve anything that costs $1,000 per tonne of carbon removed, or even the $400 to $600 that they promise by 2030.

  Why Tony Blair needs to reset his climate resetliebreich.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

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  Promising that a homepage or marketing-site redesign will drive acquisition is a failed promise, and usually a million-dollar one.

  Their words

  But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus

  youtube.com

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

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  And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared

  Their words

  A delightfully insane introduction to systematic invention.

  worrydream.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  The Invention of the Jewish People

  Their words

  Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.

  sive.rs

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

  Their words

  The result is extremely engaging, and while I didn't particularly learn from it, I daresay most of the prospective audience will not, in fact, have read as widely in Ansary's sources as I happen to have done.

  bactra.org

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

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  The Chip

  Their words

  The Chip -- the invention of the microchip.

  patrickcollison.com

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

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  A professional keeps a promise whether or not they feel like it, and that obligation is what separates professional work from amateur work.

  Their words

  A professional makes a promise and then keeps the promise whether or not they feel like it. Amateurs get to be authentic, whatever that means. And amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make.

  youtube.com

Music critic and historian; author of The History of Jazz and Music: A Subversive History. Writes the newsletter The Honest Broker on music and culture.

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  A service paid by the hour of your attention is rewarded for delivering the opposite of what it promises.

  Their words

  The dating app does not make money from you finding a life partner—it needs you to keep looking, so the app provider can hold on to you as a recurring customer. These companies actually get rewarded by delivering the opposite of what they promise.

  How to Break Free from Dopamine Culturehonest-broker.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

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  Flat, manager-free organisations do not deliver the equality they promise: they get abandoned, and the informal power left behind is unaccountable.

  Their words

  On the other hand, the manager-free experiments I’m aware of (e.g. holacracy at Medium and GitHub, or “Choose Your Own Work” at Linden Lab) have all been quietly abandoned or outgrown.

  charity.wtf