TL;DR: Virtualization emerges as the strategy to increase efficiency and achieve feats that physical reality never could. To the point where even our work, friends, and experiences have gone virtual. But what’s the real cost of living in abstractions — and could reality itself be just another layer we can’t see through?
A July 2025 MIT study examined how large language models (LLMs) handle complex, changing information. Researchers tasked AI models with predicting the final arrangement of scrambled digits after a series of moves, without knowing the final result. Transformer models learned to skip explicit simulation of every move. Instead of following state changes step by step, the models organized them into hierarchies, eventually making reasonable predictions.
In other words, the AI developed its own internal “language” of shortcuts to solve the task more efficiently. Does it hint at a broader truth? When faced with complexity, intelligent systems (biological or artificial) seek compressed, virtual representations that capture the essence without expending the energy to simulate every detail. — Read More
Daily Archives: August 30, 2025
Google and Grok are catching up to ChatGPT, says a16z’s latest AI report
ChatGPT rivals like Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and, to a lesser extent, Meta AI, are closing the gap to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, according to a new report focused on the consumer AI landscape from venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.
The report, in its fifth iteration, showcases two and a half years of data about consumers’ evolving use of AI products.
And for the fifth time, 14 companies appeared on the list of top AI products: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Poe, Character AI, Midjourney, Leonardo, Veed, Cutout, ElevenLabs, Photoroom, Gamma, QuillBot, Civitai, and Hugging Face. — Read More
TIME100 AI 2025
Meet the innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence. Time’s 100 most influential people in AI of 2025. The list includes familiar names like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and Fei-Fei Li alongside newcomers like DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng. — Read More
#strategyMass Intelligence
More than a billion people use AI chatbots regularly. ChatGPT has over 700 million weekly users. Gemini and other leading AIs add hundreds of millions more. In my posts, I often focus on the advances that AI is making (for example, in the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Google AIs chatbots got gold medals in the International Math Olympiad), but that obscures a broader shift that’s been building: we’re entering an era of Mass Intelligence, where powerful AI is becoming as accessible as a Google search.
Until recently, free users of these systems (the overwhelming majority) had access only to older, smaller AI models that frequently made mistakes and had limited use for complex work. The best models, like Reasoners that can solve very hard problems and hallucinate much less often, required paying somewhere between $20 and $200 a month. And even then, you needed to know which model to pick and how to prompt it properly. But the economics and interfaces are changing rapidly, with fairly large consequences for how all of us work, learn, and think. — Read More
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