@thinkymachines Doing amazing work!! Excited for the future
@johnschulman2 love this! rooting for you guys
We started Thinking Machines a year and a half ago with a couple of instincts: that people should have much more ability to customize models and do research on them, and that even as AI becomes more autonomous, there's a lot more to build to make humans and AIs work well together.
A lot has happened since then, especially the massive progress in agents, so we wanted to revisit those instincts in light of everything we've learned, argue about them, and write down what we actually believe now.
This is where we landed after a lot of debate. I'm happy with it!
Thinking Machines exists to pursue a differentiated view of the future of AI. Specifically, we care about those branches of the tech tree that are involved with maintaining the best of human participation in the new world in which we find ourselves. It is our belief that this is the most important thing we can do with our time and talents.
To us, this mission is both moral and opportunistic. We believe this is a moral imperative, because we think humans are important, and the best future is one where humans and AI work together deeply and functionally, not where humans are alienated from our work and lives by mass replacement.
We also think this is practical and economic: AI that is built for active human participation produces better work, builds a more resilient world, and is a more compelling version of AI safety than systems optimized to operate apart from us.
The narrative of mass automation and disempowerment that dominates the frontier of AI today can feel like a black hole. We, tiny astronauts, are dragged towards it—a fearsome maw amidst an expanse of glimmering potential.
In that future, machine intelligence is built to act on its own and to replace us; we are relegated to observers and consumers of a progress we can no longer touch. A small circle owns the systems, and everyone else is left behind, watching from afar. That road may produce enormous, concentrated material abundance; it will certainly create a world in which most people have no real part.
At Thinking Machines, we remember that the universe of possible futures is large, and understand we have not yet crossed an event horizon. There is yet another way.
everybody is concerned with use-things
means-to-an-end-ass
if you follow this to its bitter end, you find a hole inside yourself and in the world where you once were
if we take axiomatically that people are worthwhile
there technological and structural changes worth making https://twitter.com/thinkymachines/status/2075616463906537743
i personally see technology as uniquely high leverage and at times higher than capital and politics
and if you aren't using technology for praxis then do you just like leetcode? https://twitter.com/poastmilque/status/2075634751226904932
@johnschulman2 > and that even as AI becomes more autonomous, there's a lot more to build to make humans and AIs work well together
i agree so much with that, still so much to do
No idea what Thinking Machines is working on, but this line goes hard. https://x.com/srush_nlp/status/2075636689091928460/photo/1