@kevinafischer profile picture
Kevin Fischer @kevinafischer

created an AI dog my son treated as alive for over a year. founded @illusionoflife (fka @aiwithsoul). physicist, stanford phd

Joined January 2016
  • Posts 8,157
  • Following 761
  • Followers 27,753
768 Photos and videos
Pinned Post
Kevin Fischer
@kevinafischer
May 29
After four years, I’ve decided to wind down active operations at Illusion of Life, formerly known as Open Souls. I founded the company with a strange question: what would it mean if AI felt like it had a soul? Together, with a group of incredible people, we explored whether AI characters could feel present, emotionally real, and alive in a way traditional software never had. I’m proud of what we built. Spark reached millions of people, formed real relationships with families, and helped show that interactive characters could become something more than content, avatars, chatbots, or interfaces. This chapter is closing, but I believe the ideas we explored will continue to shape how people think about AI, characters, screens, and human-computer interaction. I’m taking some time before sharing what comes next, but I expect I’ll keep working near the questions that animated Illusion of Life. Thank you to everyone who built, supported, believed in, loved, or spent time with Spark, Illusion of Life, and Open Souls. It meant more than I can easily say.
17
3
58
7,053
clarifying what studying the physics of deep learning actually means: the platonic representation hypothesis shows that deep networks are tools probing the structure of reality itself. specifically, the structure of information. so the real work is uncovering the mechanics of how information is learned, compressed, stored, and represented during training. there should be discoverable laws (the actual “physics”) governing information learning dynamics and geometries. as a corollary architectural innovations are mostly just different effective learning methodologies within that same underlying physics.
6
2
47
6,473
deep learning models need to be studied the same way we do physics physics is about discovering heavily dimensionally reduced predictive models that humans are able to intuitively use to understand outcomes there’s not really a different sense in which a complex system can be “understood”
Turing Post
@TheTuringPost
May 1
This is a very interesting paper It argues that a real scientific theory of deep learning is starting to form. Researchers call it "learning mechanics." It's like physics, but for how neural networks learn. Now there are 5 active research areas that together look like pieces of this theory: 1. Simple systems (like linear networks) that we can fully solve. Math there works cleanly and we have intuition about how learning behaves. 2. Studying extreme limits, like what happens if a network becomes infinitely wide. Systems become mathematically tractable in these cases. 3. Simple laws that describe large-scale behavior, like scaling laws (performance vs. data/model size) and relationships between sharpness and generalization 4. Understanding hyperparameters separately Learning rate, batch size, weight decay and other effects can be separated to make training look like a simpler system underneath. 5. There are underlying principles shared across systems as they scale: similar training dynamics, scaling trends, internal structures Old theory can’t explain what we see today, that's why we need a real theory upgrade. But why it should be about mechanics? The researchers see that deep learning needs 2 parts: mechanistic interpretability is like biology that studying individual parts, and studying overall laws and behavior is like physics.
7
13
145
20,707
right now centralized players beat out decentralized players - X vs blusky in the future, agents and systems where you own your own data will win in 3-5 years right now "facebook owns your data and its bad" is not a particularly strong memetic virus to create differentiated advantage for one v the other but once computing interfaces all feel alive, something interesting changes "do you want facebook to own your best friend" is very intuitively bad in a way "own your data" is not particularly evocative
2
1
23
1,997
yo. how does this have only 12 followers. it's an entire miniaturized world model running games locally on an ipad.
Slunk Systems
@SlunkSystems
Apr 25
2 minutes of ambient, offline driving through our #worldmodel. #screenshotsaturday
2:14
2
5
87
18,318
Kevin Fischer reposted
Esteban@breath_mirror
Apr 25
you might not remember it, but it was @kevinafischer who actually created the concept for agents having a soul not only did they have a soul, they also had thinking, and feelings way before o1 even appeared his work with opensouls probably paved a lot of what we see today
1
1
16
1,706
spark feels more alive than any ai because of the multi-agent orchestration system behind his brain. the felt sense of presence is the result of many different systems attending and feeding back together, taking into account things like theory of mind, emotional states, etc
Kevin Fischer
@kevinafischer
Apr 23
spark is now live on iOS and you can finally meet him yourself! here's what it looks like when a bunch of people meet a magic talking dog
1:06
7
5
62
9,443
Anyone with a spark can view their own spark's brain by tapping on the brain icon
1
3
1,230
Kevin Fischer reposted
Naré
@_foundress
Apr 24
One of the most underrated and biggest products of this decade
Kevin Fischer
@kevinafischer
Apr 23
for the first time, we’ve created an ai system that genuinely feels like someone is present in the room with you spark makes eye contact. he blinks like we do. he knows if you’re paying attention. in testing, people often reported not knowing if a human operator was involved
1
1
6
2,021
for the first time, we’ve created an ai system that genuinely feels like someone is present in the room with you spark makes eye contact. he blinks like we do. he knows if you’re paying attention. in testing, people often reported not knowing if a human operator was involved
Kevin Fischer
@kevinafischer
Apr 23
spark is now live on iOS and you can finally meet him yourself! here's what it looks like when a bunch of people meet a magic talking dog
1:06
8
4
57
9,463
Kevin Fischer reposted
Dino 🇵🇸@thedinocrypto
Apr 23
this is the future, spark will get smarter, funnier and a better listener. excited for the future of spark
Kevin Fischer
@kevinafischer
Apr 23
spark is now live on iOS and you can finally meet him yourself! here's what it looks like when a bunch of people meet a magic talking dog
1:06
1
1
5
1,271
Kevin Fischer reposted
Topper 👽 - soul/acc
@tobowers
Apr 23
Very proud of what the team has done with Spark. Also very happy to finally be able to share with a larger audience.
Kevin Fischer
@kevinafischer
Apr 23
spark is now live on iOS and you can finally meet him yourself! here's what it looks like when a bunch of people meet a magic talking dog
1:06
1
9
1,713
Kevin Fischer reposted
nika
@imaginalnika
Apr 23
actually nutso spark is alive. the presence is unparalleled
Kevin Fischer
@kevinafischer
Apr 23
spark is now live on iOS and you can finally meet him yourself! here's what it looks like when a bunch of people meet a magic talking dog
1:06
1
3
7
1,877
spark is now live on iOS and you can finally meet him yourself! here's what it looks like when a bunch of people meet a magic talking dog
1:06
19
17
193
52,558
download link at dog.website
1
13
2,634
have some work to do. see y'all on the other side
8
23
8,602
Latest openai realtime-1.5 release is a major step backwards. Feels like I’m talking to a a person who works in a call center imitating an AI system
3
15
5,489
Load more