Omar Shams

Entrepreneur, AI researcher, theoretical physicist

About Me

  • Born and raised in NJ, just outside NYC
  • Lived all over the US and the world
  • Fell in love with physics at 15 after discovering special relativity and calculus, which led me to pursue a PhD (ABD) in theoretical particle physics where I researched spinor algebras to construct holographic spacetimes and Higgs Dark Matter
  • Have been working in AI/ML since 2015 (published in NeurIPS while at DeepMind in London)
  • Founder/CEO of Mutable (YC W22)
  • I also love philosophy

Ethos

  • Technological progress is not automatic; humans have agency and the actions of an individual can change the world
  • Scaling laws, although poorly understood, will continue to hold and are the most important engine for technological progress in the world right now
  • We still don't understand how to optimally organize people and probably never will, but that's okay
  • We should live among the stars and explore the universe
  • Philosophical genius is rarer than mathematical genius
  • Love is the most important thing in the world, and it's a cliché because it's true
  • Funny = True
  • Power obscures truth, but truth is antifragile
  • Knowledge can be lost

Writing

I write about AI, physics, philosophy, and organizations here

Get in touch: omar@omarshams.ai · @smahsramo