OpenAI launched GPT-O1 today. Purely from benchmarks, it’s so over — AMIE 25/30 is absolutely absurd. I had a long voice chat with Eugene and Shun. At one point, Eugene asked an interesting question , “what are the signs of being attracted to someone?”
Dustin said to him that you start feeling like you want to do stuff for them, but also bettering yourself as a result of them as a person, or what they do. You’re happy around them, and you’re happy thinking about them — but also that you think about them a ton even without any context. I think the second sentence is more a symptom of limerence, not necessarily being attracted/“in love” — it’s probably temporary? Although to be fair, I’ve never been in a long term relationship, and he has, so he probably knows better than me. But I moreso am curious about what makes me attracted to people — it’s definitely not primarily physical (there are plenty of extraordinarily pretty people whom I feel no attraction to, perhaps due to lack of nuance.) But thinking back, every time I felt instantly attracted to someone it was this feeling of “I can trust this person right away”. Perhaps this is as a result of feeling really deeply understood. Maybe attraction is just trust. Maybe that’s why attraction is so diverse — because what symbolizes trust is different to everyone and constantly changes throughout life as well.
Truth be told, I have no idea how true this theory is, but it fits into my biases pretty well. It feels like I’ve been more loveable this year than I ever have been previously — sure I put some effort into improving my social skills, and I care more about my appearance more than ever, but on some level, it has to be deeper than that. I think I’m more emotionally available/aware, not as a result of my own work, but spending time around those who excel at this. Befriending people who are good communicators can make you a better communicator. Befriending people who are trustworthy makes you more trusting. Secure attachment can be a learned thing.
Anti-resume
One of my Twitter mutuals, Boon, has an anti-resume I quite like. So, in an attempt to keep my ego in check, here’s my anti-resume.
Before college
I put 1.5 years of my life into Kaggle just to never get a Gold medal. I got 3 silvers and 2 bronzes instead.
I got terrible grades in grade 11 and didn’t make it to any universities until January of grade 12 year. At one point, I got rejected from UAlberta CS and UCalgary CS/eng. At the time, my acceptances were Carleton CS (mid 70s admission average) and UAlberta Engineering (low 80s admission average).
Even grinding my ass off in grade 12, I didn’t make it to my childhood dream universities — nothing was enough to make up for my awful grade 11 grades. I was deferred at Waterloo into Geomatics, and I didn’t even bother to apply to MIT, or any US schools; what a missed opportunity, considering I had a fairly holistic application.
After deciding that ML was too credentialized and I couldn’t get even a solid junior position, I pivoted to crypto, shortly before the great LLM revolution which brought absurd amounts of money into the industry. Two years later, I’d meet people like Sholto Douglas, a mechatronics undergrad making $5m/yr at Google Deepmind. In reality, I probably just wasn’t good enough or didn’t sustain my effort for long enough to make it to the AI bull market.
Instead of doing my own startup, I thought that unicorn veterans would do better than I would, so I joined a company. I’m confident I would have done a better job and made 100x more money. I invented a $250m industry at 18 and somehow managed to capture <1% of the value from it.
After dropping out
I missed out on an unthinkable number of obvious investment opportunities either through laziness or just not putting in enough thought. Some obvious 20x+ investments (Solana at 4, pudgy penguins at 800) that I would have done if I remotely thought about them, or put in the effort to buy them.
I lost an absurd amount of money on some extremely stupid shit (FTX, Luna, not selling ETH in ‘22, etc.)
At one point, I was so unmotivated at work I got put on a 2 month unpaid leave, or else I’d be forced to quit. Up until then, I’d built half the company’s products singlehandedly.
At two different points, I got promised some absurd salary by a company that seemed to want me really, really badly. I put probably 100 hours of prep into each. I got (functionally) rejected at both.
I quit my job as the first engineering hire of a startup 6 months before it got acquired, costing me $REDACTED usd.
I still don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.
I think overall though every one of these was such a valuable lesson that if I went back, I wouldn’t change a thing. Except being too lazy to buy ETH in the bear market, that was straight up stupid. Money always comes back later, as long as I’m maximally learning, life is okay.