Best of Twitter weeks of January 13-26, 2025

Over 1/3rd of Nvidia sales go to China, probably ~$40B last year.

The Singapore backdoor is real: Nvidia even says “shipments to Singapore are insignificant” while 22% of billings last qtr were to Singapore.

— Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi)
4:37 PM • Jan 25, 2025

The most important news from today is this!?

— tylercowen (@tylercowen)
3:03 PM • Jan 20, 2025

"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."

— Mehran Jalali (@mehran__jalali)
3:58 AM • Jan 15, 2025

Today in @Nature: Our MatterGen model represents a paradigm shift in materials design, applying generative AI to create new compounds with specific properties with unprecedented precision.

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella)
6:34 PM • Jan 16, 2025

Okay, halfway done and the tracker's live:

— Ben (@BenShindel)
9:13 PM • Jan 22, 2025

i guess DeepSeek broke the proverbial four-minute-mile barrier.  people used to think this was impossible.
and suddenly, RL on language models just works  

and it reproduces on a small-enough scale that a PhD student can reimplement it in only a few days

this year is going to… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— jack morris (@jxmnop)
5:53 PM • Jan 24, 2025

You can literally just do whatever you want

— Leroy (@deadbeatregular)
7:27 PM • Jan 26, 2025

Human-like intelligence is suboptimal. Humans are optimized for sample-efficient lifetime learning out of necessity imposed by mortality, not because this is the best way to extract deep patterns from information. Pretrain+Distill is a superior paradigm to generational churn.

— Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek🐳 Cheerleader since 2023) (@teortaxesTex)
2:38 PM • Jan 18, 2025

@renenum10 If you're not enthralled by Dostoyevsky in your 20s, you have no soul; if you don't recognize the primacy of Tolstoy by 30, your ngmi.

— Jay (@ElessarVIII)
6:00 AM • Oct 23, 2024

TIL - 0.8% of the US budget is spent on Kidney dialysis

— Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi)
4:37 PM • Sep 13, 2024

The social mingling of men and women—including mixed dancing—is a cornerstone of Western culture, dating back to the customs of the early Germanic peoples, and a key part of what differentiates us from Islam and the East with their culturally stifling sex segregation.

— Roy (@royllovians)
9:01 PM • Sep 22, 2024