By Akhilesh Tilotia
A trial digest of what four episodes from two interview shows discussed in the week from Sun, Oct 18 to Sat, Oct 24. Each summary is in my own words and links to the episode. Transcripts were read in full for the four episodes below.
AI
The Cognitive Revolution: Alex Rives of Biohub on a world model of life
Guest: Alex Rives, Head of Science at Biohub. Host: Nathan Labenz. Released Tue, Oct 20.
Alex Rives is Head of Science at Biohub, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative backed institute whose stated mission is to cure or prevent all disease. He was previously co-founder and Chief Scientist at EvolutionaryScale, which makes the ESM protein models. This week Biohub announced a $1.8B expansion of its Virtual Biology Initiative with the Department of Energy, the NIH, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic, and Meta.
- Curing all disease, in Rives’s practical framing, means a world without cancer, infectious disease, and chronic or degenerative illness, reached by learning to read and rewrite the programs of biology.
- Today’s virtual cell models do not yet qualify as models of the cell. Rives puts the limit on measurement: so much of what happens in a cell cannot be observed.
- The near-term target is not a full world model of life. Rives says that is far off, and what is possible within about five years is an information theoretic model that predicts a cell’s next state from its current state and inputs.
- The $1.8B goes mainly to new data: cell maps in tissue context at the scale of hundreds of billions of cells, and new instruments such as the laser phase plate for electron microscopy.
The Cognitive Revolution, AI:AM Highlights: clean neurons, Black October, the GPU credit crunch, and buying the supply chain
Hosts: Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan. Guests: Zvi Mowshowitz, Evan Conrad, and a guest from the fund Cambrian. Released Sat, Oct 24.
A weekly highlights show built from the week’s AI:AM conversations. Zvi Mowshowitz writes about frontier AI at Don’t Worry About the Vase. Evan Conrad is co-founder and CEO of SF Compute, which runs a market for GPU compute. The hosts are Nathan Labenz and his cohost Prakash Narayanan. It is a recap of earlier conversations, not a new interview.
- On recursive self-improvement, Mowshowitz says the analysis that the feedback loop will peter out is probably true but beside the point, because it assumes no one ever hits a breakthrough.
- Conrad says the bottleneck for AI compute is financing. Lenders cannot value a GPU cluster if the AI lab fails, so they lean on the customer’s credit, which new labs lack.
- On the essay arguing that neural networks are already clean to interpret, Mowshowitz calls it a good paper that the commentary oversold. Weak activations and attention remain unexplained.
- On the leaked draft federal AI bill, Mowshowitz argues it trades away state laws for too little, and that passing it would make a stronger bill harder to pass later.
Climate and energy
Volts: Can distributed energy work around American utilities?
Guest: Nick Chaset of Octopus US and Uplight. Host: David Roberts. Released Wed, Oct 21.
Nick Chaset runs Octopus US and Uplight. Octopus Energy is the largest household electricity supplier in Britain, where it has turned customers’ devices into a large virtual power plant. In the US it came in 2020 and still sells electricity only in Texas. It has now bought Uplight, which runs customer programs for 85 utilities.
- Participation is the gap. Chaset says a good utility program sees 5% to 20% of customers join, while Octopus sees about 60%, because it makes signing up take a click or two and speaks to customers in its own voice.
- Of the UK’s market features, Chaset would import meter data access before forced choice of supplier, because without customer data targeting and settlement get harder.
- Texas is a puzzle for flexibility. Cheap solar and utility batteries have flattened price swings, which is good for bills and bad for the daily price arbitrage that flexibility earns from.
- On consumer protection, Chaset says households do not have enough of it, and prefers retailer or utility led models, where an obligation to serve applies, to third party aggregators.
Volts: Building our piece of the electric stack
Guest: Sam D’Amico, founder of Impulse Labs. Host: David Roberts. Released Fri, Oct 23.
Sam D’Amico is co-author of “The Electric Slide” and founder of Impulse Labs. He worked on VR headsets and game controllers at Facebook before starting a company that makes a battery-powered induction cooktop. The episode’s notes say the electric stack, meaning batteries, motors, chips, and power electronics, has become about 99% cheaper since 1990.
- D’Amico’s electric stack has four parts, batteries, power electronics, electromagnetics, and embedded compute, and what makes it new is that all four can be controlled by software.
- He argues China and Elon Musk treat the parts of the stack as the bottleneck, while the US chases AI demand without steering it onshore, so owning the components may matter as much as owning the models.
- Rebuilding US manufacturing is blocked less by cost than by rules. He says that in places like California, some factory work that was once offshored is now effectively illegal, and calls for legalizing green jobs.
- On AI and climate, he expects AI and robotics demand to pull the whole economy toward electric machines, and says geoengineering will probably become the next hard topic.
Not covered: The Seen and the Unseen published episode 455 in this window (Mon, Oct 19). Its site blocked access and has no transcript, so it was not read in full and is not summarized. The Lex Fridman Podcast had no new episode between Sun, Oct 18 and Sat, Oct 24.
Built by Akhilesh Tilotia, with assistance from Instinct.
