Nick Cook

Post-training contractor. Tinkering a lot on the side.

[Borna Lang @imnonplussed]

When you click two (2) links and github hits you with one of these

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

The best use of AI for me has been rapid UI prototyping. The interface is the entire product. It's what people can actually see. Trying different layouts and color/animation choices in minutes is a really really cool thing. Your first idea is rarely, if ever, the best you can do.

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@brainstormity Followed to get that release. Jev is really cool. I'm currently seeing if it can help me in a project. Looks like yes. Nice work finding a useful application

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@septisum Just looked it up and yeah this is valuable. Are you involved in research?

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

Tried it.

It's competitive. Results are on par with frontier models.

Keep an eye on these guys: @typesafeai

[Diogo Almeida @CompleteSkeptic]

After co-inventing ChatGPT, I kept asking myself: why have superhuman chat models not led to AGI?

I’ve spent the last 2 years in stealth building a new way to train models (RLCD), and a new type of frontier AI model that we are releasing today: Jev

• 20-200x faster
• 40-400x cheaper (w/ output tokens free)
• Frontier composable intelligence optimized for decisions

AFAICT the shortest path to AI-based economic revolution

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@MatthewMaughan @wholemars @X You got it? :)
https://t.co/T9l6IJSBZu

[Kevin Zhang @notkevinzhang]

Letting everyone off the Jev waitlist over the next hour. Get in!!!

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@MatthewMaughan @wholemars Well now you are. DM and stuff when he says. Good luck.

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@MatthewMaughan @wholemars Yesterday a few hours before the deadline in Kevin's post. Hopefully soon man.

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@notkevinzhang Thanks!

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@notkevinzhang I want to see if it works for semantic data classification/database lookup via a prompt. Will DM. Looks cool.

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@ducovitae @finkd @elonmusk This is a W for Mark.

To Elon's credit, in his All-In interview yesterday, he said he really should have tweeted better. He lands on "the labs should regulate themselves, maybe each other." No gov regulator. No regulatory capture.

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@B5Bulut @kulkalkul @SebAaltonen @Drainyard @cyrus_msk I was about to ask. Thanks.

@grok is Gemini worse at instruction following or coding in general? Why would an Odin skill work for me in Grok Build and Claude Code but not for Sey here with Gemini? Is there data on this? Is there a way to improve Gemini's choices in this case?

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@B5Bulut @kulkalkul @SebAaltonen @Drainyard @cyrus_msk Try an Odin skill.

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.

What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.

Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.

It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.

Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.

It starts with METR.

Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.

He proposes METR for this purpose.

But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.

Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.

And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.

This stock was worth $500 million early last year.

It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.

METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.

Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.

But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.

The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.

The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.

If this were the end of it, that's bad.

But that isn't all.

The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.

The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.

They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.

All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.

As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.

Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.

From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.

This itself is an objective fact.

The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.

But the problem also goes in the other direction:

If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.

Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.

Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.

They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.

And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.

What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.

The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.

And that feedback loop is winning.

That's what Jacob Coxon is.

China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.

America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.

Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.

Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.

It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.

Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.

Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.

Congress must investigate.

Evidence and Github in next post.

Then some supplementary figures.

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@hhamud_ @morew4rd If I had to guess, it's because their goal is max perf, and Rust max perf requires unsafe, so why even use Rust? Its strengths are unrelated to perf, the software's goal.

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@valigo Perfect. Post.

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

@PessimistsArc Right. Dario was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019.
I made fun of them then.
Everyone should make fun of them now.

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@Curious1 @wholemars If you want to, please share what use case got you excited. I might steal it.

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@Curious1 @wholemars Really awesome man! Seems to be the consensus review. I'm personally using it for coding, summarization of video/podcast transcripts and articles, and compiling research. A personal team of AIs for whatever is an amazing value prop

[Nick Cook @cookednick]

@morew4rd I have the same concern. I bet he has the same concern. And he's friends with Sacks who is extremely publicly clear on the regcap play, so he knows the angles. He just has to play a role as a participant. I don't fully understand it. This is what I gather.