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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

Novelist and writer on craft; wrote The War of Art, Gates of Fire and The Legend of Bagger Vance.

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  Resistance to finishing is strongest at the finish line, precisely because the work is about to be done.

  Their words

  We talked in an earlier chapter about Resistance being the strongest at the finish line. It is. Resistance knows we’re about to defeat it. It summons all its genius and all its power to stop us.

  The Drive to Finishstevenpressfield.com

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

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  Now that everyone can build apps with AI, distribution is the thing that separates who wins.

  Their words, before

  I think the challenge is that everyone can now build apps But 1) almost nobody has distribution (like an audience), or 2) the money to pay for distribution (ads or UGC), or 3) the creative genius to get distribution for free (classically called guerilla marketing)

  Their words now

  I thought it'd be distribution but who knows, obviously creativity and ideas, but if you can copy a successful app in an hour, then how does that differentiating work?

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

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

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  Inventing the Renaissance

  Their words

  Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, and a leading historian of the Renaissance, and last year, she published her magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning book about so much more than history

  pluralistic.net

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

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  Darwin's genius was not having the idea of selection, which animal breeders already had, but seeing how central it was to the whole of biology.

  Their words

  and in some sense Darwin's genius wasn't in having that idea. It was understanding just how central it was uh to to to biology.

  youtube.com

Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

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  The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization

  Their words

  The genius of this work is its interdisciplinary scope.

  razibkhan.com

Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.

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  The genius of writing was the moment somebody realised a picture could stand for a sound rather than for a thing.

  Their words

  And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that’s the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot but it meant the sound of the word for foot.

  youtube.com

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

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  The idea of driving the whole German army through the Ardennes, not the methamphetamine, is what won the campaign in the West.

  Their words

  That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I.

  youtube.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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  Ensorcelled

  Their words

  Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper is genius. It’s a unique format that can be read in one setting. The writing is beautiful.

  feld.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

Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.

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  The Mongol Empire was the first modern empire, because Genghis Khan invented the idea of one supreme law under which every people keeps its own.

  Their words

  And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I'm putting together that story. And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.

  youtube.com

Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.

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  If anyone in the Nazi leadership was a genius it was Goebbels the propaganda chief, not Hitler.

  Their words

  And you were talking about the genius of war. It’s not Hitler that’s a genius. If anyone’s a genius, it’s Goebbels, the propaganda chief.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief executive of Superhuman, the email client; previously founder of Rapportive, which he sold to LinkedIn; a professional game designer before that.

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  A company deserves everyone in it, the chief executive included, to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius — which is an org design problem.

  Their words

  And number two, the superhuman opportunity deserves everyone who works at the company to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius. And so that includes me as well as everybody else. So what I did is I hired a really great president. I went from eight direct reports to two.

  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

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.

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  Dune

  Their words

  I love Dune, but Frank Herbert – a genius writer – was obviously tripping balls writing that book.

  x.com

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

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  Creativity in Science

  Their words

  This book surveys theories of creativity, contrasting four competing explanations: expertise, genius, society, and chance, in offering a model for how creativity works. Simonton's work provides a nice hybrid between the purely anecdotal work of biographers and the data-driven work of experimental scientists.

  scotthyoung.com

Founder of Amazon in 1994 and of the space company Blue Origin in 2000.

From one piece Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin | Lex Fridman Podcast #405 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  An inventor's highest ambition should be that the invention is eventually taken for granted and stops being seen as an invention at all.

  ambition

  Their words

  That's an inventor's greatest dream, is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted. Nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an invention.

  youtube.com

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  Efficiency and real invention are at odds, because genuine invention requires wandering and you have to give yourself permission to do it.

  Their words

  Efficiency and invention are sort of at odds, because real invention, Not incremental improvement... Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering, and you have to give yourself permission to wander.

  youtube.com

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  Large language models are discoveries rather than inventions, closer to looking through a telescope than to engineering an aircraft.

  LLMs

  Their words

  It's interesting to me that large language models in their current form are not inventions, they're discoveries. The telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons, was a discovery.

  youtube.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

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  "Lots of anonymous people worked it out by trial and error" is never the real story of an invention: on closer investigation, identifiable people always turn out to be responsible.

  Their words

  “lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.

  Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coalageofinvention.xyz