Co-founder of Wisq & Glint (acquired by LinkedIN) Building, Writing, Music, Philosophy, AI. https://hyperstellar.substack.comhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.socialhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lt2y4qlp2k2tBefore humans could write, how did we think? The leap from oral culture to literacy fundamentally reshaped human consciousness. What does that have to do with LLMs and AI today? My latest piece on substack: https://hyperstellar.substack.com/p/magic-spells-for-intelligence03 Jul 2025 14:52 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lt2y4qlp2k2thttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lnnl6sn3e22oThe new vision-language-action model can help robots operate in entirely new environments - clean a kitchen or tidy a bedroom that the robot has never seen before during training. A notable advance. www.pi.website/blog/pi05 https://www.pi.website/blog/pi0525 Apr 2025 15:50 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lnnl6sn3e22ohttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lmulxef3x22v"So long and thanks for the fish" :-) (in all seriousness, really excited for applications like this) https://blog.google/technology/ai/dolphingemma/15 Apr 2025 17:27 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lmulxef3x22vhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lgdtzftnnk2cTwo cool real world applications of AI (Diffusion/DL) - 1. Designing antidotes for snake venom (>100K/year global snakebite deaths) and, even cooler, 2. Sifting thru venom-derived peptides to fight drug-resistant bacteria (snake venom has antimicrobial properties) https://blog.asimov.com/p/antivenom-renaissance22 Jan 2025 17:05 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lgdtzftnnk2chttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lfsax6xqd22r “One of my fav Kaggle facts: after a long leaderboard stagnation period for a competition, seeing one team make a sudden breakthrough will often cause multiple independent teams to quickly reproduce the same breakthrough—with no knowledge of how the first team did it.” https://gwern.net/on-really-trying15 Jan 2025 17:08 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lfsax6xqd22rhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lfpx7l767s2f"Imagine a fictional society that has unlimited wealth, unlimited health, and permanent peace. Would they be overflowing with joy? Probably not. I think their defining characteristic would be how trivial and absurd their grievances would be." https://collabfund.com/blog/minimum-levels-of-stress/14 Jan 2025 19:08 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lfpx7l767s2fhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lea54jhzlk2iRegardless of AGI & ASI, as soon as AI agents can own assets, we’ll have to deal with new ideas of person-hood. AI owning assets (crypto is a natural fit) will introduce a new kind of competitive surface with humans and new frontiers for what it means to be a person.26 Dec 2024 18:46 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lea54jhzlk2ihttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3ldwf4fm5sk2cThis would've been mindbogglingly reeking of magic just a few years ago but now it barely makes the news (even if it's a still mindboggling). Generative AI (VLM) leveraging Physics Solvers to create physically accurate simulations. AI + Physics! genesis-embodied-ai.github.io https://genesis-embodied-ai.github.io/22 Dec 2024 21:43 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3ldwf4fm5sk2chttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3ldkbhtqq6s2bThis. Narrative is sense-making. It is thinking. Descriptive writing processes sensory data through multiple lenses of meaning to create connections that may not pre-exist in the reader's mind. [contains quote post or other embedded content]18 Dec 2024 02:06 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3ldkbhtqq6s2bhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lcvfxyw5o223An illustrative timeline of how kernel smoothing ideas ultimately became "attention" in Transformers. This reminded me of Cosma Shalizi's earlier piece on this topic: http://bactra.org/notebooks/nn-attention-and-transformers.html [contains quote post or other embedded content]09 Dec 2024 19:00 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lcvfxyw5o223https://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lcghizesr22vAny space that AI can proliferate in will be flooded with slop, inauthenticity, and fraud (as is already happening) [contains quote post or other embedded content]03 Dec 2024 20:18 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lcghizesr22vhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lcayehiwv22uHappiness doesn't always require positive emotional valence. Interview with Susan Cain - https://www.econtalk.org/susan-cain-on-bittersweet-and-the-happiness-of-melancholy/01 Dec 2024 16:04 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lcayehiwv22uhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3lb6ega6tsd2xWhat do you do when you hit a plateau? Here are a few ideas: https://hyperstellar.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-overcoming-plateaus17 Nov 2024 21:36 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3lb6ega6tsd2xhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3kgbvdngvcd2jIn my latest essay, I explore Mastery by connecting the dots between eastern philosophical ideas, modern cognitive science, and the study of expert performers. Plus some unexpected analogies from training AI models. Enjoy! https://hyperstellar.substack.com/p/how-to-master-just-about-anything11 Dec 2023 16:57 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3kgbvdngvcd2jhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3kd5a27j5hl2rJohn McLaughlin at 81 still has the chops, and so does Zakir at 72. A wonderful 20 mins of Shakti performing at Tiny Desk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx8AaSvH4EQ01 Nov 2023 16:09 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3kd5a27j5hl2rhttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3kd3qjnmtzv22Nice framing of "unwanted drives" in AI without invoking agency "... if a model hallucinates a fact, it is unwanted behavior (but not drive); if it insists on the hallucinated fact & works to convince the user it is true... that would be an unwanted drive." https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/intrinsic-drives-and-extrinsic-misuse-two-intertwined-risks-of-ai/01 Nov 2023 01:59 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3kd3qjnmtzv22https://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3kcqt6llwip2i"So if ultimate impact on the world is what you crave, becoming a top science fiction writer is probably the best bang for your buck." Love this framing as a reason to write sci-fi: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/so-you-want-to-have-impact27 Oct 2023 17:47 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3kcqt6llwip2ihttps://bsky.app/profile/gkurra.bsky.social/post/3kclnkw75eb2rA long-form essay on what AI can reveal to us about human cognition. In which I somehow connect Elena Ferrante with LLMs. Enjoy! https://hyperstellar.substack.com/p/let-me-finish-your-sentences25 Oct 2023 16:23 +0000at://did:plc:xwef5cdfrwyveccdy2ud735s/app.bsky.feed.post/3kclnkw75eb2r