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rdlecler1

3,511 karma · joined December 7, 2013

Founding Partner of AgFunder, one of the most active foodtech and agtech VCs. BA in Philosophy. MSc in CompSci (ALife = AI, virtual robotics, developmental and genetic algorithms); PhD from Yale in theoretical and computational evolutionary biology (Gene regulatory networks, bioinformatics, whole genome analysis) working under a MacArthur Fellow. Published in Nature, Forbes, TechCrunch, Harvard Business Review. Interviewed by WSJ, Bloomberg TV, CNBC.

Contact: rob@agfunder.com

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rdlecler1··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
that wavelength penetrates the skin. you need to be around 222nm for human safety

uviquity has prototypes of a 220nm solid state chip they’ll commercialize next year (we’re an investor). a single far-uvc photon will destroy the covid virus.

https://uviquity.com/

rdlecler1··on The Curious Similarity Between LLMs and Quantum Mechanics
You clearly have deep understanding of base reality and the emergence of complexity. So please share an actual argument.
rdlecler1··on Elon Musk wants to dominate robotaxis–first he needs to catch up to Waymo
It’s the other way around. Waymo may do the job exquisitely, but exquisite is also expensive. Telsa has always constrained their system to lower cost hardware. It’ll be easier for Tesla to eventually punch through than for Waymo to cut their costs to that of a Tesla robotaxi.
rdlecler1··on The AI startup drama that's damaging Y Combinator's reputation
Power eventually turns a high trust society into a low trust society when that power is used to one’s own advantage.
rdlecler1··on Apple removes nearly 100 VPNs used by Russians to bypass censorship
Think different. No kidding. No one is going to think this.
rdlecler1··on YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
YC is putting through 200+ companies per batch and making a tiny investment. It’s far more efficient to swallow the occasional bad bet than to do a lot due diligence… Now the VCs that came in after… that’s another story.
rdlecler1··on If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
This is a great point. LLMs may flood an app with more features without making it better. At the end I do the day you still need to make something people love. AI may help you build that faster if you know what do build, but it’s not going to make a bad product great.
rdlecler1··on Myocarditis complications more common after Covid infection than vaccination
Remember there is still survival bias here. We’re not seeing the complications from people who died of the infection.
rdlecler1··on America’s Transit Exceptionalism
Do driverless cars make all this moot?
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
Super interesting.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
This sits in a larger field of complexity theory and complex adaptive systems. There was also some interesting work on “Artificial Life” although that research program seems to have fallen out of favor. My introduction in 1995 was the book Chaos and then Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe. Wolframs New Kind of Science was also interesting.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
I could have bogged the essay down with qualifiers to address all the potential straw man objections, but that didn't seem productive. It's easy to take an uncharitable view on this, but I do explain more about GRNs later in the essay. I worked with them for 8 years, and yes, they do act like the rudimentary brains of the cell, and that's the reason this system is selected again and again by evolution.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
I'm not arguing that this approximator is necessary (not sufficient) for this class of networks. I've proposed some conjectures on what we might expect to see, but there are certainly other salient ingredients and common principles that we haven't discovered, and I think it's important to hunt for them.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
This is a great question, and I don't yet have an answer. I'm going to butcher this description, so please be charitable, but functionally, the attention mechanism reduces the dimensions and uses the coincidence between the Q and K linear layers to narrow down to a subset of the input, and then the softmax amplifies the signal.

One unsatisfying argument might be that this might fall into implementation details for this particular class. Another prediction might be that an attention mechanism is an essential element of these networks that appears in other networks of this class. Another is that this is a decent approximation, but has limitations, and we'll figure out how the brain does it and replace it with that.

rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
More generally there’s graph neural networks, for instance, but not you’re including many dynamic networks that are not open-ended or evolvable. The idea is to identify common dynamics and add constraints on the types of networks that are included to find general principles within that class. Kisen the constraints, you make the class too broad and can’t identify common principles.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
Genetic systems code gene regulatory networks. I spent most of the essay on them.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
Those neurons are being trained the day we were born. Reality corresponds to about 11 million bits per second. What I suspect’s happening is that we train higher and higher levels of abstraction and we get to a point where new knowledge is involves training a new permutation of a few high level neurons.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
Activation functions are implementation details. See appendix for the general formula.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
No, graphs are too inclusive.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
The original papers were published in scientific journals. More assertive claims aren’t kosher.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
You’re right. Writing is hard—especially when you’re cutting across disciplines. I wasn’t happy with the writing, but I stand by the claims.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
I don’t know if this exists outside of spacetime, but I have a suspicion that UACs didn’t begin with gene regulatory networks, but are more fundamental part of a computational universe hypothesis.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
Are those just implementation details?
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
The topology needs to be information bearing. Weights of 0.0001 are likely spurious and if other weights are so relatively big they can effectively make the other fan in weights spurious as well.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
No, too inclusive.
rdlecler1··on General Theory of Neural Networks
Despite vast implementation constraints spanning diverse biological systems, a clear pattern emerges the repeated and recursive evolution of Universal Activation Networks (UANs). These networks consist of nodes (Universal Activators) that integrate weighted inputs from other units or environmental interactions and activate at a threshold, resulting in an action or an intentional broadcast. Minimally, Universal Activator Networks include gene regulatory networks, cell networks, neural networks, cooperative social networks, and sufficiently advanced artificial neural networks.

Evolvability and generative open-endedness define Universal Activation Networks, setting them apart from other dynamic networks, complex systems or replicators. Evolvability implies robustness and plasticity in both structure and function, differentiable performance, inheritable replication, and selective mechanisms. They evolve, they learn, they adapt, they get better and their open-enedness lies in their capacity to form higher-order networks subject to a new level of selection.

rdlecler1··on Can ketones enhance cognitive function and protect brain networks?
Agree, will pass this on to the team. Thanks for the feedback
rdlecler1··on Can ketones enhance cognitive function and protect brain networks?
We recently invested in https://www.drinkkey.com/ I’ve been drinking it daily and I usually fast until 2-4pm. Anecdotally it’s helped with headaches and fatigue. I can’t rule out placebo effect, but I feel great.
rdlecler1··on LLM-generated code must not be committed without prior written approval by core
Let’s go back to writing in assembly because if you’re writing in python you don’t understand what you’re doing (this is sarcasm of course).

AI has decoupled code design from fabrication. We’re just going to need to improve our design language and fabs to get better yield.

rdlecler1··on Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
Nature is out to kill us. We’re doing a far better job in this fight than we ever have. I’d rather deal with problem of climate change than the problems of our ancestors.
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