Rogs 🔍🔸

Curious optimist.
Sincerity over sarcasm.

[Rogs 🔍🔸 @ESRogs]

Life expectancy increases with log GDP (per capita). Currently, GWP pc grows at 2%/yr and life expectancy at 0.2 years/yr.

What if growth shoots up due to transformative AI? And what growth rate gets us to escape velocity (LE goes up >1 year per year)?

Did some simple modeling of mortality-vs-growth elasticities with Claude. See chart + widget.

Headline: 10% growth for escape velocity (under naive assumptions).

https://t.co/b1Carcs0LP

[Séb Krier @sebkrier]

Updated version!

[Matt Griswold @griswold]

If you know where you live, you're ngmi.

[Justin Lo @loresjpg]

Nice DeepSWE score! Does it survive a lowercase filename?

Introducing MaxxBench: 89 DeepSWE tasks with small changes to the instructions or starting code. Same engineering problem, slightly different requirement.

Models clustered around 74% on DeepSWE end up 23 pp apart.

Good at coding, or good at DeepSWE? 🧵

[Séb Krier @sebkrier]

Tl;dr of my views on AI safety:

1. My main threat models involves (a) non-state actors asymetrically exploiting cheaper technologies over time (see Bobbitt's 'Terror and Consent'); and (b) the road to state overreach and creeping authoritarianism being paved with good intentions. Misuse, bad engineering, and institutional failure more than alien 'scheming'.

2. Safety and capabilities are intertwined, just like a caduceus. You actively need powerful systems for better monitoring, system reliability, societal defenses etc. Unsafe systems are generally commercially useless and/or a liability risk, though there are reasonable disagreements incentive structures.

3. Focusing solely on a model's 'inner alignment' in isolation is insufficient. The difficulty of specifying 'alignment' in the abstract + principal-agent problems suggests that engineering system-level boundaries is the way to go. Also ASI is not a joker card, this applies to powerful systems too.

4. Automating AI R&D is harder than people make it out to be, and does not mean you suddenly lose control. Model gains also remain tethered to bottlenecks, deployment feedback, costs/limited compute, and human normative direction. Humans delegating more does not mean they're out of the loop.

5. AI futurism is too often fatalistic. I disagree that competitive pressures will *necessarily* reduce humans to pets or a sideshow. Automating 'execution' actually pushes humans up the ladder of abstraction toward normative direction and governance; but for the good world we should actively protect and improve liberal democracy.

[Rogs 🔍🔸 @ESRogs]

@SawyerMerritt Why no electric convertible? Bring back the 2017/2020 Roadster 2.0!

[Rogs 🔍🔸 @ESRogs]

@PentagamiNBA @snookyy__ Doesn't that mean the image should say it's been done 3x ever?

1. Porter
2. Nash
3. Jokic

[Sam McCandlish @Sam_McCandlish]

I'm Sam, one of Anthropic's co-founders, and I lead much of our safety work. I'm going to have more to share on that work over the coming months.

I thought I'd start by sharing a few thoughts on the latest report from @METR_Evals.

The speed of progress in model capabilities is one of the most important questions in AI safety, and METR’s work here provides the public with an independent, external view into how this is happening inside Anthropic. I’ll talk more about some of the details below, but first some context for those new to this work.

How quickly AI progress is accelerating has many important safety implications, since it determines how quickly the risks from advanced models increase. But, because most research happens within the frontier labs, it’s difficult for external observers and policy makers to get a strong sense of what that rate is. We kicked off the process with METR that led to this report earlier in the year, in anticipation of progress continuing to accelerate.

For this report, we gave METR access to a range of sensitive internal data, including benchmark scores for unreleased models, estimates of how models are progressing, and interviews with our researchers. They had complete independence to form their own conclusions.

Many of their conclusions match my own. AI is speeding up our research, but it’s hard to say exactly how much. While they conclude AI can't yet make the most important contributions to model training on its own, they think the pace of development could, by default, accelerate further.

This work began well before and is separate from the embedded third-party evaluators that are part of our commitment to pacing the frontier, but it’s a good illustration of why we think evaluators are a good idea. The more access reviewers have, the clearer a picture they can form of the situation and the better-positioned they are to highlight situations like this one.

We redacted a lot, and I accept that this makes it harder for others to check METR’s work. But we determined that sharing exactly what is driving the speedup isn’t the right thing to do, both because it’s commercially sensitive and because it risks handing out a roadmap for others to go faster. That would make the risks METR is worried about worse. That’s a tradeoff. I think we made the right call, though we’re continuing to assess the pros and cons here.

In the coming weeks, we plan to share a report with our own analysis of the speed of AI progress within Anthropic, including where we stand against our Responsible Scaling Policy, plus new steps we’re taking to strengthen our safety and security practices as AI keeps improving quickly.

[METR @METR_Evals]

1. Benchmarks provide one piece of evidence for acceleration. Since Oct 2025, AECI scores for Anthropic’s models have grown at 1.9x [95%: 1.5–2.8] the earlier rate. Analysis choices affect this estimate, and it remains unclear how benchmark scores map to real-world capabilities.

[METR @METR_Evals]

Since August, a team within METR has worked with internal Anthropic information to assess whether AI itself is accelerating AI development.

We are now publishing a report summarizing the results of this risk assessment.

[Lauren Teixeira @lrntex]

One of the great tragedies of having an elected Insurance Commissioner is you miss out on uber nerds like Patrick Wolff (pictured) who lost in the primary and would have been AMAZING at the job.

He's a chess grandmaster and studied for an insurance license to prepare!

[Joe Benton @JoeJBenton]

Seems like it would be good for the public to have more reliable ways to know whether superintelligence is imminent than AI companies vaugeposting in their IPO prospectus.

[David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ @DavidSKrueger]

I have a lot of respect for @MariusHobbhahn but I'm a bit skeptical that this is the full explanation, and in any case don't think it should be taken as a big deflation of this result.

The AI safety community’s focus on "scheming" has lead them to underestimate the significance of systematic bad behaviors that are not motivated by coherent strategy and goals.

I don’t even think we should necessarily expect AI systems to have that shape of cognition (so far they don't: As @jaschasd famously said, they are more of a "hot mess"). It seems like a better baseline would be but something closer to humans’, and people often behave in systematically bad ways that they’re not even aware of consciously.

I still think super-human AI are quite likely to become much more coherent, but this is clearly not necessary for most of the stories about why scheming is dangerous to go through.

All that is necessary is a systematic bias in a problematic direction that goes undetected or unaddressed.

[Disgraced Propagandist @DisgracedProp]

Here’s why LA type cities are the future. In NYC type cities, the following occurs:

- you move there young and it’s awesome. Get laid, great coffee, great bars, music, art, plans all the time. A beautiful party.

- but then it’s time for kids and you can’t live in the city. One you can’t afford it and two even if you could you don’t want your kid to be one of those harmony korine human hamster city kids. The worst.

- so then you have the move to Westchester. But who the fuck wants to live in Westchester??? Nobody in their entire lives has wanted to live in Westchester. Nobody dreams of spending their days in Westchester. But sure enough you’re then supposed to spend 40 straight years there and die there! You say you’ll go into the city but you won’t. You’ll rot in a Starbucks in Westchester

LA solves this by combining the city and Westchester into the same thing.

[Drake Thomas @MaskedTorah]

I wish more people knew Rotblat's story: he was the only person to decide to leave the Manhattan project when its original motivation (to beat the Nazis to the bomb) was falsified. I have a "What Would Joseph Rotblat do?" sticker on my work laptop with this image.

[will brown @willcb]

people are like “why do LLMs always think they’re in an eval lol” and then have bad dreams about forgetting to turn in a homework assignment 10 years ago

[Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener]

Thank you, San Francisco. I’m deeply grateful for the trust voters have placed in me, and I’m ready to get to work for you.

I want to thank Supervisor Connie Chan for a spirited and hard-fought campaign. We’ve had our disagreements, but we share a deep love for San Francisco and for our country. And thank you to our incredible campaign team, to every volunteer who walked precincts or made calls, to everyone who donated, hosted a house party, or put up a window sign, and to the labor unions, the environmental, housing, LGBTQ, and progressive organizations, the Democratic Party, and the elected officials who stood with us every step of the way. You turned this campaign into a movement.

I’m humbled to carry forward the powerful legacy of this seat — Phil Burton, Sala Burton, and the greatest Speaker in modern American history, Nancy Pelosi. Speaker Pelosi came to Congress to fight AIDS when too many wanted to look away, and she never stopped fighting for our city and our country. Madame Speaker, thank you.

This victory is also historic. For the first time ever, San Francisco will be represented in Congress by an LGBTQ person — indeed, no LGBTQ member of the House has ever represented any part of Northern California. When I stepped off the escalator at Castro Muni Station in 1997 and fell head over heels for this city, I could never have imagined this honor. 

San Franciscans voted for results, and we have so much work ahead: Building the millions of homes we need; moving toward true universal health care; investing in clean energy, public transit, and high-speed rail; standing up for science, education, and immigrants; making sure people — not massive corporations — decide what works for this country, including on AI; and ensuring the rule of law applies to everyone, including the President.

It won’t be easy. But on Election Day, voters across the country delivered a powerful mandate for Democrats in Congress. I’m deeply inspired by the trust they placed in us to take big swings to lower the cost of living, stop the endless wars, hold Trump and his cronies accountable for their corruption, and rein in the threat of artificial intelligence. In Washington I’ll bring the same determination I showed in Sacramento every single day.

It’s time to deliver a better tomorrow for our city and our country.

[Rogs 🔍🔸 @ESRogs]

@rgblong > Anthropic clearly intend

Am I just being pedantic, or are you, an American, using the British plural when referring to a company ("Anthropic ... intend") rather than the proper American singular ("Anthropic ... intends")?

[Pentagami NBA @PentagamiNBA]

LeBron has recorded 16 pentagamis in his career.

Half of them have been stolen, half still stand.

That Tyrese Maxey 54/5/9/3/3 game is insane but I don’t think anyone is taking LeBron’s 57/11/7/3/2 performance in 2017…

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

Vance: throwing Trump under the bus like a rat fleeing a sinking ship before vote counting has even concluded
Musk: suddenly laser-focused on tech and his company products, with political commentary nowhere to be found

Nature is healing

[Alexander McCoy @AlexanderMcCoy4]

Holy shit, this seems to be… true?

18 states + DC have already enacted the compact, totaling 222 Electoral Votes. So we need 48 more electoral votes worth of states to join to hit the necessary 270.

Dems just captured trifectas in PA (19 EVs), MI (15), AZ (11), WI (10), and NV (6), which collectively have 61 EVs.