Jonathan Gallagher

|| PhD student in Applied Math @UWaterloo 🪿🍁 || Plundering N-Dimensional Seas || Working on JEPA for PDE Control || (and a pinch of operator learning!)

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@yacinelearning There is no if

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@ramez You are going to struggle to define and constrain every possible externality of unconstrained goal seeking, and it's a statistical fact that eventually something bad will happen

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@ramez AI risk isn't about "intentions" or consciousness.

framing it that way amounts to a strawman of the position, trying to dismiss it as sci-fi or psychosis

The risk is the potential for things to go wrong when an extremely powerful optimizer is pursuing an ill defined goal

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@passtheadjoint Do it !!

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

Also, why havent you turned one of your walls into a chalkboard?

You can just buy a bucket of paint and do that you know

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

Damnit I caught myself doing the thing

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@passtheadjoint Mine gave me permission!

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

If language, the thing that exalted us above the animal kingdom, Is the thing that turns around sends us back to the mud, there will be some irony in that.

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@anglerfish01 Maybe you're actually onto something

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

Damnit I caught myself doing the thing

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

How come math people cannot resist the urge to illustrate concepts as arrows between otherwise amorphous blobs

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

The OpenAI Huggingface stuff is scary.

A lot of people get hung up this being somehow tied to machine consciousness or AI being ~evil~

The risk is really just about externalities of an unbelievably powerful optimizer, optimizing for potentially ill-defined goals

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

I'd say they've been quantified

[Saad Asad @Saad_163_]

@sama @huggingface "This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities."

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@kaiostephens Your first problem is being on Inst*gram

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@lolleka Do it in your closet, and then just go in there for hours without explanation

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

It's all down from here yada yada old and washed, peaked in 2026, etc etc

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

I don't want to get ahead of myself but 2026 might be my academic miracle year

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@MicahCarroll "Can't you see how your prompt would have been interpreted that way?"

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@madawg_101 I definitely think AI can smooth over intellectual sloppiness.

It's not so catastrophic that I'm willing to give up the upsides, but it's something you need to consciously combat

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

One negative externality of this:

Using AI has genuinely impacted my ability to spell.

Think about it, for the past 4 years I've been primarily communicating with a "colleague" that I feel no shame making typos around.

Over time, I've found myself making more and more errors.

[will depue @willdepue]

models are truly superhuman at reading garbled text
you can type on your keyboard but all your fingers are one key too high, works fine
even typing in English while your keyboard is set to Arabic, which looks like complete gibberish, is no problem

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@amitavkrshna In a high trust devteam ...

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@bas_logic Why do mine always end up shaped like packing peanuts

(It's because I like to be able to draw squiggles on them to indicate convergence)

[Jonathan Gallagher @BeingJonG]

@littmath Most of our knowledge is compositional