Will we forget what pre-LLM era looked like?

Was chatting with a friend yesterday and it hit us that pretty soon we will forget what it was to live without LLMs.

It’ll be inconceivable to us that there was a time when if you had a question, you did not get an intelligent instant answer for it.

Some more interesting predictions that came out from our conversation:

– Maybe we will stop having multiple softwares; just one agent that spins up personalized software on demand

– Maybe soon we will have so much automation that our AI agents will predict what we want to do next, leaving us to wonder what’s our role when we open up our work laptops ...  Read the entire post →

Are we headed towards a stable dystopia?

I’ve been thinking about how AI is going to shape up society and one particular scenario seems like a high-probability outcome to me. Here’s how it could play out:

• AI automates more and more of human-work

• Returns from this automation flow back to capital holders, making them wealthier

• As incomes of masses drop, government ignores/abolishes income tax but rather taxes corporate income / wealth for its needs

• Rich isolate themselves (as they do) and use AI-enabled drones/robots to protect themselves ...  Read the entire post →

Crossposting from X to my WordPress

Today I built a nifty little utility that monitors which of my tweets has /syndicated tag in it, and then crossposts automatically to my blog (invertedpassion). This is done via webhooks from Typefully, the app I use to post my tweets.

If all goes well, I should see this both as a tweet and a blog post.

I did this because I have started writing long-form content here, but it irks me that my thoughts will be behind a walled garden. So, this workflow will enable me to post once and syndicate everywhere!

In case you’re interested to know more, see https://alexn.org/blog/2023/09/21/post-once-syndicate-everywhere-pose/

[2025 review] Life is a holiday!

Ok, this was a phenomenal year for me. The vibe of the year is cleanly captured by what I had scribbled on a whiteboard on Jan 3rd, 2025.

To my amazement and giddiness, the feeling still holds up as the year wraps up. Let’s see what all kept this spirit alive.

Brief interlude: the yearly review has become a sort of an annual tradition for me. In case you’re interested, you can check out previous years’ reviews too: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 and the entire decade before that.

🫡 Exited Wingify

I had started Wingify in 2010 (when I was 22) and in Jan 2025 (when I was 37) exited my stake to Everstone, a private equity firm. As you can imagine, Wingify consumed the entirety of my early youth. It taught me about startups, business, leadership, human psychology and put me in contact with an incredible set of people who I’m proud to have worked with (especially my co-founder Sparsh and CTO Ankit Jain). ...  Read the entire post →

Human behavior is an intuition-pump for AI risk

I just finished this excellent book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

This book influenced my opinions on p(doom). Before reading the book, I was uncertain about whether AI could pose an existential risk for humanity. After reading the book, I’m starting to entertain the possibility that the probability of doom from a superintelligent AI is above zero. I’m still not sure where I would put my own p(doom) but it’s definitely non-zero.

The question I’m interested in is this: ...  Read the entire post →

Notes on doing science and research

I know it’s been awfully quiet here. I’ve not posted for a while.

But I’ve been writing prolifically somewhere else. Earlier this year, I started an AI lab called Lossfunk and that is what has kept me (happily) busy. We have a newsletter there called Lossfunk Letters where I write very often, so if you’re interested in my thoughts, please follow that publication.

The initial posts there are about me trying to build a mental model for what is that thing we call scientific research. I explored this topic via a series of posts: ...  Read the entire post →

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Brace yourself for some wild speculations!

Been thinking if nothing is even possible.

I think it’s impossible for nothing to exist.

When we’re sleeping, it’s not as if we’re feeling nothing. There’s actually no feeling then. It’s as if such moments don’t even exist, and that’s a hint..

So the more I think, the harder it’s for me to imagine nothing existing. Can you really imagine no concepts existing? No numbers, no space, no time, no blip – just nothing at all. If you can imagine that, something (the imaginer) must exist. ...  Read the entire post →

Becoming a Republic

The following is the essay I had submitted as part of the one week summer course I took at the Oxford University, where we read Plato’s Republic. The essay includes a few references to structure and specific content from the book, so if something doesn’t make sense, it’s probably because it refers to an “insider” joke.

What’s inspiration is that my class comprised of people of all ages (including one who is 80+). Everyone was there for their hunger for learning, and I hope it stays with all of us until the very end of our lives.
PS: I’m the guy in the front and in the middle, the one who is wearing a white shirt.

I was sitting at my lunch table, eating bread and ruminating whether it was worth it for me to fly thousands of kilometers from India to Oxford, just to study one book: Plato’s Republic. ...  Read the entire post →

Life as a physical process

It’s always hard to define life. Everyone has their favorite definition – some describe it as a struggle against entropy, while others describe it as an emergent property of chemicals. Countless books have been written on the topic, yet we’re far from a consensus.

Against the backdrop of the second law of thermodynamics, life seems like an improbable accident. When everything tends to go towards disorder, how come life is able to create cities, computers and space ships? How do we reconcile all the beautiful complexity we see around us with the stupidly simple laws we observe in physics? ...  Read the entire post →

Do you know what GDP is?

I thought I knew! But the more I introspected, the hazy my understanding got. Is GDP amount of stuff produced or consumed? Does it include imports or exports? What does it have to do with well being? Why does it keep increasing?

So, I fired up Claude and started understanding what GDP really is. This post contains my notes on the same.

But before we start, it’s worthwhile to reflect how many such concepts that we think we know, do we really know. Often there’s a gap between what we think we know, and what we actually know. It’s worthwhile to question your understanding of commonplace phenomena. Do we know what life is? What does productivity mean? How do greenhouse emissions warm the Earth, and so on. For so many such things, our mind convinces us that we know stuff when upon probing, it turns out to be a vague miasma. ...  Read the entire post →