Hi Peter,

Would love your thoughts on the recent EO on AI and it's possible impact on immigration.

I think the impact will be huge; it gives USCIS officer the green light when reviewing applications where there's a scientific/AI component involved.

this is awesome

this is awesome

You’re awesome.

Figma could have been much bigger than adobe in 5-10 years. Why not go public? Is the economic scenario so bad that they could not raise money?

$20b is an offer nobody can refuse. Bird in hand and all that

The parts of the model and how to go about training it are well known (i.e VIT VQGAN, auto-regressive transformers etc). They also use LAION-400 for training which is an open source dataset. Can be replicated, but will take time, patience and compute.

This is not true for some of the other recent headline papers: DALL-E2, PALM, Imagen etc. datasets are the primary deterrent, model details are well known.

You could train the initial model in sim and do sim2real finetuning. Someone must be working on this already

Self-driving car companies are already working on this. Check out: https://waymo.com/research/block-nerf/

NERF is a very active research area, and the progress from 2020 to now has been nothing sort of astonishing. In 5 years, I expect there to be fully generative NERF's in research i.e describe a scene, and a NN produces a full 3d scene that can you interact with.

Can it be done with Google's existing Street View data?

In the demo video, they mention that they used a lot of footage from self-driving cars to produce that.

One thing I noticed is there are no pedestrians and cars in those scenes. So they must do a lot of work to filter them out by combining a lot of footage. Therefore, it likely can't be used (as-is) on the street view dataset...

Yes!!!! I always get frustrated when ever it does the weird stretch thing as soon as you move around in street view. Just jump to the next frame of you have to.

Can be done yes. Is it the best dataset to do what you describe, no.

There are on chain NFTs like cryptopunks. The rest of articles details around API centralization stand true.

Depends on whether the NFT is on-chain or off-chain. Both are valid.

I don't understand what problem email can solve that mail cannot.

Sorry to be sarcastic.

I am still skeptical of most web3 use cases touted on twitter, but have personally experienced a few that have made me pause and be a bit more open minded.

Personal experiences: - Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!! - Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks - ResearchDao's like ResearchHub

> I don't understand what problem email can solve that mail cannot.

I think it's a wrong example. Email provides light-speed delivery, dirt-cheap cost, and brain-dead convenience on top of also being able to mail. So email actually never competed with mail.

Web3 is yet to strike any decisive blow against today's web (or it may never). It's more like another part of the web.

> Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!! - Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks - ResearchDao's like ResearchHub

For a smaller amount of money (<$100k), banks already can transfer money within seconds. I've seen people sending $1Ms only using their phones, but, IIRC, you need a good record to do that.

"Email provides light-speed delivery, dirt-cheap cost, and brain-dead convenience on top of also being able to mail. So email actually never competed with mail"

These advantages are obvious now. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk . My point being that blockchain does offer some new capabilities that were hard to build before. We maybe oblivious in what applications that may unlock.

Regarding money transfer, I know the technology exists, but all providers don't built it. That is native technology in blockchain.

Here in the NL, we’ve been able to send money for free to each other instantly, for at least half a decade. We use apps like Tikkie to mask each other’s bank account numbers and automate some of the book keeping for many transactions, but we don’t technically need the app in the first place.

The US is very slow to move money, I still dread any time I have to use my old US bank accounts to get things done.

> Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!!

This is a problem that can be solved sans web3.

Transferring money is faster if you pay a fee.

You’re paying fees to transfer crypto.

That said, it’s free and instant with services like Zelle.

PayPal offers instant transfers in my experiences. Use it multiple times per week and have done for many years.