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rdlecler1

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Founding Partner of AgFunder, one of the most active foodtech and agtech VCs. BA in Philosophy. MSc in CompSci (ALife = AI, virtual robotics, developmental and genetic algorithms); PhD from Yale in theoretical and computational evolutionary biology (Gene regulatory networks, bioinformatics, whole genome analysis) working under a MacArthur Fellow. Published in Nature, Forbes, TechCrunch, Harvard Business Review. Interviewed by WSJ, Bloomberg TV, CNBC.

Contact: rob@agfunder.com

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robleclerc.substack.com 1y ago

The Curious Similarity Between LLMs and Quantum Mechanics

rdlecler1
16pts14
robleclerc.substack.com 1y ago

Super Intelligence ≠ Hyper Intelligence

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3pts0
robleclerc.substack.com 2y ago

General Theory of Neural Networks

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217pts92
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: Anyone seen a reputation attack on their mailing list?

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2pts2
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Will California Consumer Privacy Act Kill the Newsletter?

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6pts4
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Media companies shaking down startups for using news logos

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news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: Do we really need to assign an EU Representative for GDPR compliance?

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2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: YC lawyers, what are you doing about GDPR?

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41pts5
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: YC lawyers, what are you doing about GDPR?

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: VCs, what are your favorite questions you ask entrepreneurs?

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8pts5
agfundernews.com 8y ago

Eating reindeer meat

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28pts33
agfundernews.com 8y ago

Dupont acquires farm management software Granular for $300m

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2pts0
medium.com 9y ago

What’s Next for Agriculture Technology

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agfundernews.com 9y ago

Challenges for AI in agriculture

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extranewsfeed.com 9y ago

Trump thinks China is already waging a trade war

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medium.com 9y ago

Trump thinks China is already waging a trade war

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medium.com 9y ago

It's time for Nvidia to buy a moat

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hackernoon.com 9y ago

Software engineers are eating the business world

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medium.com 9y ago

Software Engineers Are Eating Capitalism

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hackernoon.com 9y ago

Apple's AirPods are ushering in augemented reality

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medium.com 9y ago

Apple just quietly announced its next big wearable device

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www.techradar.com 9y ago

Does this mystery vehicle belong to Tesla or Apple?

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agfundernews.com 10y ago

Agriculture 2.0 – $4.6B Raised by AgTech Startups in 2015

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news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Was Roswell a Department of Energy Coverup?

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medium.com 10y ago

The Real Problem with Artificial Intelligence

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medium.com 10y ago

Fidelity wiped $14B off Snapchat's Valuation

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news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Is Y Combinator doing enough for its alumni?

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Why don't mobile friendly sites allow zooming?

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2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: Why Did TechCrunch Snub 500 Startups Demo Day?

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Is Apple the new Microsoft?

rdlecler1
21pts18

that wavelength penetrates the skin. you need to be around 222nm for human safety

uviquity has prototypes of a 220nm solid state chip they’ll commercialize next year (we’re an investor). a single far-uvc photon will destroy the covid virus.

https://uviquity.com/

This sits in a larger field of complexity theory and complex adaptive systems. There was also some interesting work on “Artificial Life” although that research program seems to have fallen out of favor. My introduction in 1995 was the book Chaos and then Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe. Wolframs New Kind of Science was also interesting.

I could have bogged the essay down with qualifiers to address all the potential straw man objections, but that didn't seem productive. It's easy to take an uncharitable view on this, but I do explain more about GRNs later in the essay. I worked with them for 8 years, and yes, they do act like the rudimentary brains of the cell, and that's the reason this system is selected again and again by evolution.

I'm not arguing that this approximator is necessary (not sufficient) for this class of networks. I've proposed some conjectures on what we might expect to see, but there are certainly other salient ingredients and common principles that we haven't discovered, and I think it's important to hunt for them.

This is a great question, and I don't yet have an answer. I'm going to butcher this description, so please be charitable, but functionally, the attention mechanism reduces the dimensions and uses the coincidence between the Q and K linear layers to narrow down to a subset of the input, and then the softmax amplifies the signal.

One unsatisfying argument might be that this might fall into implementation details for this particular class. Another prediction might be that an attention mechanism is an essential element of these networks that appears in other networks of this class. Another is that this is a decent approximation, but has limitations, and we'll figure out how the brain does it and replace it with that.

More generally there’s graph neural networks, for instance, but not you’re including many dynamic networks that are not open-ended or evolvable. The idea is to identify common dynamics and add constraints on the types of networks that are included to find general principles within that class. Kisen the constraints, you make the class too broad and can’t identify common principles.

Those neurons are being trained the day we were born. Reality corresponds to about 11 million bits per second. What I suspect’s happening is that we train higher and higher levels of abstraction and we get to a point where new knowledge is involves training a new permutation of a few high level neurons.

I don’t know if this exists outside of spacetime, but I have a suspicion that UACs didn’t begin with gene regulatory networks, but are more fundamental part of a computational universe hypothesis.

The topology needs to be information bearing. Weights of 0.0001 are likely spurious and if other weights are so relatively big they can effectively make the other fan in weights spurious as well.

Despite vast implementation constraints spanning diverse biological systems, a clear pattern emerges the repeated and recursive evolution of Universal Activation Networks (UANs). These networks consist of nodes (Universal Activators) that integrate weighted inputs from other units or environmental interactions and activate at a threshold, resulting in an action or an intentional broadcast. Minimally, Universal Activator Networks include gene regulatory networks, cell networks, neural networks, cooperative social networks, and sufficiently advanced artificial neural networks.

Evolvability and generative open-endedness define Universal Activation Networks, setting them apart from other dynamic networks, complex systems or replicators. Evolvability implies robustness and plasticity in both structure and function, differentiable performance, inheritable replication, and selective mechanisms. They evolve, they learn, they adapt, they get better and their open-enedness lies in their capacity to form higher-order networks subject to a new level of selection.