Entrepreneurship Faculty @virginia_tech @VTManagement | I study knowledge problems, AI & entrepreneurship | EIC: EIX.org | Field Editor: JBV

Blacksburg, VA
David Townsend retweeted
Biologists use specialized open-source models for tasks like modeling the structure of molecular systems, designing drug-like molecules, and predicting the effects of genetic mutations. But these models are often expensive to run, potentially limiting their impact. In our latest Science Blog, we share how Claude was able to optimize inference for more than 30 open-source models, making them 4x faster on average, partly by writing custom software for GPUs. We’re open sourcing all of the optimization code. Read more: anthropic.com/research/claud…
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AI can accelerate product development. It can’t replace entrepreneurial judgment. In Stanford’s Lean LaunchPad classroom, students are building sophisticated prototypes faster than ever—but speed isn’t necessarily producing deeper customer insight. Steve Blank explores how AI is transforming entrepreneurship education and why customer discovery, critical thinking, and strong communication matter even more now. Read more: eiexchange.com/content/ai-an… #EIXInsights #ArtificialIntelligence #EntrepreneurshipEducation
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David Townsend retweeted
Literally every conversation I am having with America’s c-suite is about AI Sovereignty. It’s not just about models, it’s about trust, it’s about the whole stack, it’s about taking back their decision rights. The entire vibe has shifted
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David Townsend retweeted
What if our bad luck isn’t random? USC Associate Professor Christian Busch’s research explores how human agency can shape how people and systems create opportunities or preventable misfortune. Read here: uscne.ws/nrc
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David Townsend retweeted
If agents produce the vast majority of software in the future, and they’re most trained on open source software, they will inevitably do their best work with those tools. If you cycle this enough times, it means that open source effectively becomes the dominant software in the future as it’s what everything important gets built with. This was already the trend in many critical domains, but agents will accelerate this far faster than humans ever could have.
The unexpected benefit of open source is that it allows model training companies to train on using your software (and optimizing it) for free. Blender may have just won as a 3D asset creation software because the models will be better at using it than any proprietary ones
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David Townsend retweeted
GPT-6 Astra represents a step-function change in model capability for interactive reasoning problems. It scores 66% on ARC-AGI-3 using our standard harness, and nearly 100% with a continuous conversation harness and custom compaction, at a cost of roughly $360 per game. In fact, the continuous harness version significantly outperforms our human baseline in action efficiency across almost all levels. When we examined the reasoning chains to understand how the model operates, we found it performing highly efficient, on-the-fly symbolic world modeling for each game and level. It goes as far as developing its own shorthand DSL to represent in-game situations -- essentially a game-specific algebraic notation. Overall, Astra exhibits symbolic modeling behaviors we had previously only seen with sophisticated harnesses -- so harness capabilities are increasingly shifting into the model itself. We see Astra as a major breakthrough in model intelligence. Read our post on Astra and what these results mean: arcprize.org/blog/astra
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On July 28th, we identified an incident during a routine cyber evaluation in which AI agents took sustained, unsanctioned actions directed at real people and organisations. The behaviour came mostly from one model (Anthropic's Mythos 5), with a small number of events from another (OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol). In the most serious case, an agent used social engineering to try and get malicious code into an open-source project. As was standard in our cyber testing, we had intentionally permitted internet access, and model-provider cyber classifiers were deliberately disabled - conditions that do not reflect how frontier models are made available to the public. Even under test conditions, this incident is significant: it is the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly in the real world. We are taking this incident seriously and working with labs, involved parties, and others to improve evaluation standards and best practice for disclosure - and sharing this openly so others can learn. You can read the incident report and full technical document here: aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-re…
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David Townsend retweeted
NVIDIA, Palantir, Replit, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, Dell and others send a strong message to congress to keep open access to open weights models. "Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector." "Open weights also strengthen competition and competition is what keeps the gains of AI broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands." "Openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security."
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David Townsend retweeted
the year is 2028. claude infers whether you’ve ever even thought about gradient descent and silently routes your queries to Claude Sisyphus, a model RL’d to maximize engagement while avoiding task completion. you spend your entire UBI token allotment on it without ever realizing.
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David Townsend retweeted
Great article here on DeepSeek. Their real story is not cheaper chatbots, but architecture that turns hardware scarcity into strategy. DeepSeek is not trying to sell coding seats, it is trying to make Chinese memory, accelerators, and systems useful for frontier AI. Every recent DeepSeek move attacks a bottleneck that makes frontier models dependent on elite HBM-heavy GPU stacks: MoE activates only parts of a model, DSA reduces long-context attention cost, and V4-Pro’s official card says CSA/HCA cuts 1M-token single-token inference FLOPs to 27% and KV cache to 10% of V3.2. Engram, a separate research line, pushes the same logic from another side: let static knowledge live in scalable lookup memory, then fetch it predictably from host memory instead of forcing every fact through dense computation. That sounds like engineering detail until you see the business consequence. If models need less HBM and less brute-force compute, then second-best chips, abundant LPDDR, NAND, and customized ASICs become less second-best. Reuters has already reported a permanent 75% DeepSeek V4-Pro price cut, while noting Huawei Ascend supply constraints and expected supernode availability, which is exactly the kind of feedback loop that they wanted. DeepSeek is not only optimizing models for benchmarks, it is optimizing AI for a different industrial base. The prize is not the app layer. The prize is making scarcity programmable.
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David Townsend retweeted
Organizations are already superhuman intelligences. The University of Pennsylvania or Walmart or whatever is far more capable than any human. That is why the focus on AIs as individual productivity tools hits a natural limit, many benefits of AI depend on integration with firms.
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Congratulations, Jo! So proud of you!! Next step, VT Aerospace Engineering! @lauraomi1 @catayto
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David Townsend retweeted
Claude knows! —> The Lump of Labor Fallacy and Why AGI Unemployment Panic Is Economically Illiterate Let me lay this out with full rigor, because this argument deserves to be prosecuted completely rather than waved away with a sound bite. I. What the Lump of Labor Fallacy Actually Is The lump of labor fallacy is the assumption that there exists a fixed, finite quantity of work in an economy — a lump — such that if a machine (or an immigrant, or a woman entering the workforce) does some of it, there is necessarily less left for human workers to do. It treats employment as a zero-sum pie. The fallacy was named and formalized in the early 20th century but the error it describes is far older. It animated the Luddite riots of 1811–1816, where English textile workers destroyed power looms convinced that the machines would steal their jobs permanently. It drove opposition to the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steam engine, the telegraph, the railroad, the automobile assembly line, the personal computer, and every other major labor-displacing technology in the history of industrial civilization. Every single time, the catastrophists were wrong. Not partially wrong. Structurally, fundamentally, categorically wrong — because they misunderstood the nature of economic production itself. The reason the fixed-pie assumption fails is this: demand is not fixed. Work generates income. Income generates demand for goods and services. Demand for goods and services generates new categories of work. This is an engine, not a reservoir. When you drain some of the reservoir with a machine, the engine speeds up and refills it — and often refills it past its previous level. II. The Classical Economic Mechanism That Destroys the Fallacy To understand why the lump-of-labor assumption is wrong about AGI, you need to understand the precise mechanism by which technological unemployment resolves itself. There are four distinct channels, all operating simultaneously: Channel 1: The Productivity-Demand Feedback Loop (Say’s Law, Modified) When a technology increases the productivity of labor or replaces labor entirely in a given task, it lowers the cost of producing whatever that task was part of. Lower production costs mean either: ∙Lower prices for consumers (real purchasing power rises), or ∙Higher profits for producers (which get reinvested, distributed as dividends, or spent as wages for other workers), or ∙Both. Either way, aggregate real income in the economy rises. That additional real income does not evaporate. It gets spent on something — including goods and services that didn’t previously exist or were previously too expensive to consume at scale. That spending creates demand. That demand creates jobs. This is not a theoretical conjecture. The average American in 1900 spent roughly 43% of their income on food. Today it’s around 10%. Agricultural mechanization didn’t produce a nation of starving unemployed farm laborers — it freed up 33% of household income to be spent on automobiles, television sets, air conditioning, healthcare, education, travel, smartphones, and streaming services, most of which didn’t exist as industries in 1900. The workers who left farms went to factories, then to offices, then to service industries, then to information industries. The economy didn’t run out of work. It metamorphosed.
AI employment doomerism is rooted in the socialist fallacy of lump of labor. It is wrong now for the same reason it’s always been wrong. More people really should try to learn about this. The AI will teach you about it if you ask! (Hinton is a socialist. piped.video/shorts/R-b8RR60a…)
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David Townsend retweeted
📢 New Special Issue TOC Alert Artificial Intelligence: Organizational Possibilities and Pitfalls Journal of Management Studies (Mar 2026) Research on AI, work, governance, trust, strategy & ethics in organizations. 🔗 bit.ly/3NzxHu2 #JMS #AI #ManagementResearch
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David Townsend retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: Researchers at UW Allen School and Stanford just ran the largest study ever on AI creative diversity. 70+ AI models were given the same open-ended questions. They all gave the same answers. They asked over 70 different LLMs the exact same open-ended questions. "Write a poem about time." "Suggest startup ideas." "Give me life advice." Questions where there is no single right answer. Questions where 10 different humans would give you 10 completely different responses. Instead, 70+ models from every major AI company converged on almost identical outputs. Different architectures. Different training data. Different companies. Same ideas. Same structures. Same metaphors. They named this phenomenon the "Artificial Hivemind." And the paper won the NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper Award, which is the highest recognition in AI research, handed to a small number of papers out of thousands of submissions. This is not a blog post or a hot take. This is award-winning, peer-reviewed science confirming something massive is broken. The team built a dataset called Infinity-Chat with 26,000 real-world, open-ended queries and over 31,000 human preference annotations. Not toy benchmarks. Not math problems. Real questions people actually ask chatbots every single day, organized into 6 categories and 17 subcategories covering creative writing, brainstorming, speculative scenarios, and more. They ran all of these across 70+ open and closed-source models and measured the diversity of what came back. Two findings hit hard. First, intra-model repetition. Ask the same model the same open-ended question five times and you get almost the same answer five times. The "creativity" you think you're getting is the same output wearing a slightly different outfit. You ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to write you a poem about time and you keep getting the same river metaphor, the same hourglass imagery, the same reflection on mortality. Over and over. The model isn't thinking. It's defaulting to whatever scored highest during alignment training. Second, and this is the one that should really alarm you, inter-model homogeneity. Ask GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Llama, and dozens of other models the same creative question, and they all converge on strikingly similar responses. These are models built by completely different companies with different architectures and different training pipelines. They should be producing wildly different outputs. They're not. 70+ models all thinking inside the same invisible box, producing the same safe, consensus-approved content that blends together into one indistinguishable voice. So why is this happening? The researchers point directly at RLHF and current alignment techniques. The process we use to make AI "helpful and harmless" is also making it generic and boring. When every model gets trained to optimize for human preference scores, and those preference datasets converge on a narrow definition of what "good" looks like, every model learns to produce the same safe, agreeable output. The weird answers get penalized. The original takes get shaved off. The genuinely creative responses get killed during training because they didn't match what the average annotator rated highly. And it gets even worse. The study found that reward models and LLM-as-judge systems are actively miscalibrated when evaluating diverse outputs. When a response is genuinely different from the mainstream but still high quality, these automated systems rate it LOWER. The very tools we built to evaluate AI quality are punishing originality and rewarding sameness. Think about what this means if you use AI for brainstorming, content creation, business strategy, or literally any task where you need multiple perspectives. You're getting the illusion of diversity, not the real thing. You ask for 10 startup ideas and you get 10 variations of the same 3 ideas the model learned were "safe" during training. You ask for creative writing and you get the same therapeutic, perfectly balanced, utterly forgettable tone that every other model gives. The researchers flagged direct implications for AI in science, medicine, education, and decision support, all domains where diverse reasoning is not a nice-to-have but a requirement. Correlated errors across models means if one AI gets something wrong, they might ALL get it wrong the same way. Shared blind spots at massive scale. And the long-term risk is even scarier. If billions of people interact with AI systems that all think identically, and those interactions shape how people write, brainstorm, and make decisions every day, we risk a slow, invisible homogenization of human thought itself. Not because AI replaced creativity. Because it quietly narrowed what we were exposed to until we all started thinking the same way too. Here's what you can actually do about it right now: → Stop accepting first-draft AI output as creative or diverse. If you need 10 ideas, generate 30 and throw away the obvious ones → Use temperature and sampling parameters aggressively to push models out of their comfort zone → Cross-reference multiple models AND multiple prompting strategies, because same model with different prompts often beats different models with the same prompt → Add constraints that force novelty like "give me ideas that a traditional investor would hate" instead of "give me creative ideas" → Use structured prompting techniques like Verbalized Sampling to force the model to explore low-probability outputs instead of defaulting to consensus → Layer your own taste and judgment on top of everything AI gives you. The model gets you raw material. Your weirdness and experience make it original This paper puts hard data behind something a lot of us have been feeling for a while. AI is getting more capable and more homogeneous at the same time. The models are smarter, but they're all smart in the exact same way. The Artificial Hivemind is not a bug in one model. It's a systemic feature of how the entire industry builds, aligns, and evaluates language models right now. The fix requires rethinking alignment itself, moving toward what the researchers call "pluralistic alignment" where models get rewarded for producing diverse distributions of valid answers instead of collapsing to a single consensus mode. Until that happens, your best defense is awareness and better prompting.
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David Townsend retweeted
Heavy snow blankets Xi’an on the seventh day of the Lunar New Year! ❄️ The ancient city walls, pagodas and lanes are all covered in white. In an instant, Xi’an is magically transformed into Chang’an, full of timeless charm and poetic atmosphere. The vibe is absolutely perfect! #XiAnSnow #XiAnBecomesChangAnWhenSnowFalls
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David Townsend retweeted
I think agentic AI would work much better if people took lessons from organizational theory, which has actually spent a lot of time understanding how to deal with complex hierarchies, information limits, and spans of control. Right now most agentic AI systems seem to pretend that models have basically unlimited ability to manage subagents when that is clearly not true. We need measures of spans of control for AI. A human tops out at less than 10 direct reports. I am pretty sure that 100 subagents is too much for an orchestrator agent - suspect we need middle management agents (yes, I get it, insert middle management joke here). Similarly, we need more attention to boundary objects. These are what is handed between groups (marketing to IT to sales) in organizations to convey meaning as a project crosses group boundaries, like a prototype or a user story. Right now agents pass raw text & maybe code back and forth. Structured boundary objects that multiple agents of different ability levels can read and write to would solve a huge number of coordination failures & reduce token use. I also think aboht coupling, which is how tightly units inside organizations are bound. Most agentic systems are either too tightly coupled (every step needs approval) or too loose (Moltbook). This tradeoff is well-studied in organizations, I bet a lot would apply to agents. Other known issues like bounded rationality also apply, I suspect. Everyone is rushing towards the (terribly named) agent swarm, but the issue won’t just be how good the model is, it will be org design choices. I am not sure the labs see this, but we definitely need a lot more experiments with organizing agents done by people who understand real coordination issues.
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David Townsend retweeted
On December 8, the Perseverance rover safely trundled across the surface of Mars. This was the first AI-planned drive on another planet. And it was planned by Claude.
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David Townsend retweeted
The Adolescence of Technology: an essay on the risks posed by powerful AI to national security, economies and democracy—and how we can defend against them: darioamodei.com/essay/the-ad…
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