My friends Beka (former Principal Eng at Warner Brothers) and Akmal Paiziev (created myTaxi, Express24) recently founded a startup and now hiring a Sr. Staff Engineer. Beka himself is a strong engineer and runs a tight ship, so if you want to work with strong engineers, this might be a good fit.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bkodirov_hiring-activity-7351791921607946240-rbEF

Work hours

The discourse in the comments of the previous post surprised me a bit, so I figured I'll write about my work ethics, but first, a couple of disclaimers:
- how much to work is a personal choice. I don't think anyone should shame anyone else for working too hard or too little. Different people have different priorities and personalities
- working a lot doesn't necessarily mean working hard. When work is more interesting, it feels easier.

My grandad worked basically all the time, never stopped working and passed away in his office chair, I believe while reading a book. My retired dad continued to write his physics papers and each time I call him he says "there is so much work!". My mom worked the hardest, is proud of being useful to the society and expects the same from others.

I've been coding for 4-14 hours everyday since the age of 13. I remember starting to code when I got back from school and continuing till morning (after which it was very hard to go to school again). I argued with my mom about how much time I spent coding, so I tried to go to bed before she wakes up, but didn't always succeed because coding was addictive. I got my first programmer job when I was still at school. At Google I worked during weekends "secretly" from my family, waiting for Monday when I can work "legally" again. During Claude 4 crunch, I had to spend a weekend or two in the office, which is not unusual for younger people, but more unusual for someone with kids. Anthropic is more generous than Amazon with corp holidays, but my wife at Amazon doesn't have them and we carpool (drive) to the city together - so I spend those days in the office, usually alone.

Time is a critical resource. How you spend it is your personal choice, but my advice is to try to be intentional with it and to be honest with yourself about where your non-work time is actually going. Did you give undivided attention to your kids/spouse or otherwise contributed to an important relationship? Did you do something that evolves you? Went to the gym? Contributed to the society? If the answer is yes, then great! But if you don't have crisp answer, then IMO spending that time working/evolving is not a bad alternative.

Just talent isn't gonna cut it: it lets you learn fast but the work of learning is on you. If you are talented, don't waste it.

But even if all your time is spent usefully, the second thing I find very important is focus. It is a common knowledge that the more time you spend on a skill, the stronger it gets. 10k hours rule, etc. I think it is unlikely to achieve anything interesting without spending a LOT of time on ONE thing, simply because few people do that, so you get better at that thing than most. I spent probably 40-60k hours coding, stayed on the same big projects until they succeed, spent 6mo preparing for Google interview. My wife was coding for 5y before she got her first SWE job (AWS). I find perseverance critical.

Working for a startup isn't for everyone. You get nothing/little if it fails, but if it succeeds you can get much more than by working for a corp, potentially a financial freedom. Startup employees have more direct influence over their income, and they can increase their chances by putting more time and focus.

But like I said, it is a personal choice. Choose your lifestyle and accept the implications. Let others live their lifestyle in peace. Be clear about your expectations and respect others' consent.

This is an actual job posting at xAI: there must be a Waifu team

http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/xai/jobs/4789505007

I liked this talk.

Benjamin Mann is a co-founder of Anthropic. Prior to Anthropic, Ben was one of the architects of GPT-3 at OpenAI. He left OpenAI driven by the mission to ensure that AI benefits humanity. In this talk, Ben opens up about the accelerating progress in AI and the urgent need to steer it responsibly.

In this conversation, we discuss:
1. The inside story of leaving OpenAI with the entire safety team to start Anthropic
2. How Meta’s $100M offers reveal the true market price of top AI talent
3. Why AI progress is still accelerating (not plateauing), and how most people misjudge the exponential
4. Ben’s “economic Turing test” for knowing when we’ve achieved AGI—and why it’s likely coming by 2027-2028
5. Why he believes 20% unemployment is inevitable
6. The AI nightmare scenarios that concern him most—and how he believes we can still avoid them
7. How focusing on AI safety created Claude’s beloved personality
8. What three skills he’s teaching his kids instead of traditional academics

https://youtu.be/WWoyWNhx2XU?si=g0lkoY7gAU-bYRjd

Even OpenAI engineers use Claude.

Well, they wanted to.

https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access-to-claude/

Just some simple thoughts on jobs.

Some people believe there will be no work/jobs in the post-AGI world. I don't think so even though I consider myself AGI-pilled. Mostly because I'm cynical about human nature.

I cannot imagine a world without any problems. Look at the current state, there are wars, climate change, drug epidemic, idiotic country leaders, poor education. That will take a long time to fix. As long as there are problems, there will be work to do.

Second, it is true that work != job. I believe there will always be some scarcity of something, and in particular I don't expect the distance between poor and rich (or low status vs high status) to diminish any time soon. I don't expect a human will be satisfied, ever - there is always more to desire. Earning that will require work in exchange for what the person wants, or perhaps something that can get them what they want (aka money, or some other form of credit). That's a job.

And yes, it is quite possible that those jobs will be much easier, to the extent that you might not consider them jobs at all (is game streaming a job?). But I'm sure most people from 1825 wouldn't consider what we do jobs either.

The transitional period is gonna be rough though, and that's probably the toughest part. People who don't want to change will be hit the most.

Does this count as new knowledge? No human knew about these vulnerabilities and now we do

Knowledge discovery is a search problem.

Today as part of our commitment to transparency in this space, we are proud to announce that we have reported the first 20 vulnerabilities discovered using our AI-based "Big Sleep" system powered by Gemini

https://x.com/argvee/status/1952390039700431184?s=46

5x increase of max context length.

Note: tokens over 200k are more expensive if you use raw API
https://www.anthropic.com/news/1m-context

living in uncertainty

each of us is wrong sometimes. when a prediction you made turns out to be false, it's a good exercise to back-propagate it to your world model (what did i miss?) and then do a forward pass to understand what other implications this discovery has (what else must be true that i thought is false). usually it's not a big deal. often it is some wrong assumption/bias which impacts few things. you update your world model and move on

the ai of today was in the realm of fantasy a few years ago. i tried to find what we missed, but all plausible theories explaining llms suggest that we missed something very fundamental, and which has a lot of profound implications. among all world model updates i consider, the delta is large (the rabbit hole is deep), but also i'm not certain which one is the most accurate. just as an example, i am not aware of a theory that would explain why llms are getting good at coding but wont explain why they will eventually become good at everything else.

moreover it is dynamic. last year the talk was about prompt engineering. this year it's agents. i expect it to be different next year, and in general i expect things to continue to evolve. more capabilities will be developed, more work automated and more population waking up

it can be challenging to live like that: we like certainty. you might be used to have some life plan that you follow (say you are a prospective student who chooses your major). any plan has to assume that things that were true during planning will stay true. ok, maybe instead of a static plan you have a more dynamic strategy, essentially a function that accepts the current state and returns suggested actions. well, that function is still compressed knowledge of what works and what doesn't, but that knowledge might also get stale as the world changes

certainty is a luxury. i expect it to continue decreasing. i'm not even sure it will be coming back in our lifetimes, so I'd suggest to start getting used to a world where you can't be very confident in the increasing number of things (this is particularly hard for very smart people who are right most of the time and got used to that)

the only advice i have is gain some humility, be open minded and get ready to constantly adapt to the world changing under our feet

I appreciate being mentioned in top-30 AI people in Uzbekistan. Thanks.
https://yuksalish.org/uz/news_detail/835

Anthropic's first postmortem about the model being dumber, with a level of detail that we usually don't share
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-recent-issues

what an idiot. i mean, the fact that he is an idiot is not new, but this is the new level
https://x.com/whitehouse/status/1969147079478989220?s=46

OpenAI released a new eval that measures performance on economically valuable, real-world tasks across 44 occupations.

https://openai.com/index/gdpval/

great example of why i didn't even consider applying for openai. think of implications in a country with a racist president

https://x.com/gabrielpeterss4/status/1973120058907041902?s=46

You can now connect Slack to Claude. It can search your workspace channels, DMs, and files/gdocs to provide context for deep work.

You can also connect Claude app to slack, e.g. ask something in the app and claude can read your slack, search info there, etc.

Video below

https://x.com/claudeai/status/1973445694305468597?s=46

🦀 i recommend spending a year with Rust

i don't think i can explain all the reasons why do that in a way that's both short and clear. most likely i'll lose the reader in the middle of the post before i'd get to the point. it is only after some first-hand prolonged experience of learning the Rust way you start getting it.

just trust me on this 😎 go ahead and do yourself a favor

fair warning: first 6mo can be painful, but we have LLMs now that help a lot