Four short links: 4 September 2017
Autonomy and AI, Reinforcement Learning Hacks, Hyperscale vs. Lifestyle, and Kickstarter for Public Benefit
- Genevieve Bell to Lead New Autonomy and AI Research Unit — The institute will be investigating the issues raised by the autonomy of artificial intelligence, the questions around how much agency autonomous beings would or should have, and the problem of regulating artificial intelligence to give humans a comfortable level of assurance.
- Deep RL Hacks — From a talk given by John Schulman titled “The Nuts and Bolts of Deep RL Research” (Aug 2017). A lot of good practitioner knowledge, and I believe that Start simple until you see signs of life works for every problem.
- Tim O’Reilly and Reid Hoffman Debate — ostensibly about blitz scaling vs. indie.vc. One thing I think Bryce has done brilliantly in Indie.vc is to create an investment vehicle that actually supports the choice of the founders to go either way [hyperscale or lifestyle].
- Kickstart’s Journey to Public Benefit Corporation — Strickler and Chen received an email from Albert Wenger, who was a partner at Union Square Ventures, the firm that led Kickstarter’s last round of funding. “Albert reached out to Perry and me, as PBC was about to become legal in Delaware, to say, ‘Hey, here’s this new instrument that’s available. It’s very fitting of where you are. You guys should go for this. This is your destiny,’” Strickler said. But at first, he and Chen weren’t sure. “I think when he first shared that, we thought, Albert’s more radical than we are.” The push came from their VC!
