# Genius Makers  ## Metadata - Author: [[Cade Metz]] - Full Title: Genius Makers - Category: #books ## Highlights - Rosenblatt saw the project as a window into the inner workings of the brain. If he could re-create the brain as a machine, he believed, he could plumb the mysteries of what he called “natural intelligence.” ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=375)) - It also inspired Geoff Hinton. Every Saturday, he would carry a notebook to his local public library in Islington, North London, and spend the morning filling its pages with his own theories of how the brain must work, building on the ideas laid down by Hebb. These Saturday-morning scribbles were meant for no one but himself, but they eventually led him back to academia. ([Location 570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=570)) - Hinton had very little experience with computer science, and he wasn’t all that interested in mathematics, including the linear algebra that drove neural networks. He sometimes practiced what he called “faith-based differentiation.” He would dream up an idea, including the underlying differential equations, and just assume the math was right, letting someone else struggle through the calculations needed to ensure that it actually was, or deigning to solve the equations himself when he absolutely had to. But he had a clear belief in how the brain worked—and how machines could mimic the brain. ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=591)) - “If Geoff Hinton is a fox, then Yann LeCun is a hedgehog,” says University of California–Berkeley professor Jitendra Malik, borrowing a familiar analogy from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. “Hinton is bubbling with these ideas, zillions and zillions of ideas bouncing in different directions. Yann is much more single-minded. The fox knows many little things and the hedgehog knows one big thing.” ([Location 837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=837)) - Dahl was an academic idealist who compared joining a graduate school to entering a monastery. “You want to have an inescapable destiny, some sort of calling that will see you through the dark times when your faith lapses,” he liked to say. ([Location 1006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=1006)) - Hinton came to see him as the only student he ever taught who had more good ideas than he did, and Sutskever—who kept his dark hair closely cropped and always seemed to be scowling, even when he wasn’t—fed these ideas with an almost manic energy. When the big ideas came, he would punctuate the moment with handstand push-ups in the middle of the Toronto apartment he shared with George Dahl. “Success is guaranteed,” he would say. ([Location 1417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=1417)) - “He’s got three things,” Hinton says. “He’s very bright, he’s very competitive, and he’s very good at social interactions. That’s a dangerous combination.” ([Location 1535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=1535)) - At UCL, he explored the intersection of memory and imagination in the brain. With one paper, he studied people who developed amnesia after brain damage and were unable to remember the past, showing that they also struggled to imagine themselves in new situations, like a trip to the shopping center or a vacation at the beach. Recognizing, storing, and recalling images was somehow related to creating them. ([Location 1566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=1566)) - He saw himself as the rare technology executive who understood the technology, a strategist as well as a systems architect, a visionary who read the research papers emerging from the world’s leading labs. ([Location 2779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=2779)) - His argument wasn’t that Microsoft should sell a driverless car. It was that Microsoft should build one. This would give the company the skills and the technologies and the insight it needed to succeed in so many other areas. Google had come to dominate so many markets, Lu believed, because it built a search engine in the era when the Internet was expanding as no one had ever seen. ([Location 2805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=2805)) - “It is not that people at Google drink different waters,” he said. “The search engine required them to solve a set of technological challenges.” Building a self-driving car, Lu believed, would enrich Microsoft’s future in the same way. “We must put ourselves in a position to see the future of computing.” ([Location 2809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=2809)) - “It’s a global platform competition, and it is extremely important that the platforms be invented in America. Platforms establish a base by which innovation occurs in the future.” ([Location 3155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=3155)) - Belief in AGI required a leap of faith. But it drove some researchers forward in a very real way. It was something like a religion. ([Location 3989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=3989)) - Altman personally invested in some companies, too, becoming very wealthy, very quickly. He felt that any monkey could run YC, but he also felt that in running it, he developed an usually sharp talent for evaluating people, not to mention the skill and opportunity needed to raise large amounts of capital. During his rapid ascent, he was motivated first by money, then by the power over the people and the companies in his orbit, and then by the satisfaction that came from building companies that had a real impact on the larger world. ([Location 4024](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=4024)) - he, too, was someone who lived as if the future had already arrived. This was the norm among the Silicon Valley elite, who knew, either consciously or unconsciously, that it was the best way of attracting attention, funding, and talent, whether they were inside a large company or launching a small start-up. Ideas might fail. Predictions might not be met. But the next idea wouldn’t succeed unless they, and everyone around them, believed that it could. “Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion,” he once wrote. “If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.” ([Location 4032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=4032)) - For him, this attitude was encapsulated by an oft-repeated quote from Machiavelli: “Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth.” ([Location 4042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CD1M43L&location=4042))