Posts

Featured Post

Are We Full of Dr. Strangelove?

Image
  On Thanatos and the Machines We Claim Will Bury Us Copyright: Sanjay Basu Satire. This is a philosophy essay wearing a whoopee cushion. Read it for the argument, not the arraignment — no one here is being accused of anything except perhaps a little too much drama in the group chat. There is a particular pleasure in prophesying your own doom, and this week the AI industry indulged it fully. Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic on Tuesday and told the internet that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Two colleagues — still employed, mind you — stepped forward to say he was right. One put the odds of human extinction at north of ten percent within the decade, which is either a sober risk assessment or the most confident thing anyone has said about the 2030s while still declining to sell their stock options. I want to take them seriously. I genuinely do. But I also want to introduce them to a Viennese neurologist and a wheelc...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cheapest Millisecond

Image
  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Notes from Chicago on why inference infrastructure stopped being a compute problem I gave a keynote at The Connected World Live in Chicago on September 9th, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Twelve minutes is a punishing format. It is long enough to need a real argument and short enough that a single tangent costs you a fifth of it. Constraints like that are clarifying. You find out quickly which parts of your thesis you actually believe, because there is no room to carry the parts you are only fond of. Afterward I joined a fireside chat and then a panel with NVIDIA, Edgecore, and Interglobix. More on that at the end. Here is the argument I made. The question the building has to answer has changed From 2021 to 2024 we built data centers to answer one question. How large a model can we build? That question has a shape. It wants the largest coherent cluster you can power and cool. It tolerates a bad night, because you checkpoint and resume. It books c...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Day the Robots Won a Million-Dollar Math Prize (Sort Of)

Image
  Copyright: Sanjay Basu On the morning of Tuesday, September 8, 2026, a group of mathematicians at a company called OpenAI said something remarkable. They had set 10,000 computer helpers loose on a math problem that people had been stuck on for over a hundred years. And the computers cracked it. The problem is one of six famous puzzles called the Millennium Prize Problems. Whoever solves one gets a million dollars. Only one of the six had been solved before this. Now the computers may have gotten a second. Let me tell you what the puzzle is, why it matters, and why grown-up mathematicians are both cheering and squabbling about it. What was the puzzle? Imagine you are watching water flow down a river, or smoke curl up from a candle, or air moving over an airplane wing. Way back in the 1800s, two scientists wrote down a set of math rules that describe how all of that moving stuff behaves. We call them the Navier-Stokes equations. Say it out loud: "nav-YAY STOKES." Fancy name, ...
Post a Comment
Read more