There is hyperventilation about AI right now. Some say the worry is overblown and others are convinced we’re doomed.
Regardless of the rhetoric, there won’t be any slowing down. The monetary, political and security game dynamics guarantee that. It’s a race to get there first and there is no stopping it. How we build safety, whether we regulate, and how we cooperate will be a dynamic, unpredictable process. I applaud all who are in the arena doing their best to exercise their best judgment.
Humanity is going to do its thing and…wing it.
Where does that leave us?
So what do we mortals do? Where can we find stability of emotion and thought amidst the turbulence?
I have a suggestion for you.
Say yes.
To the experience and not the outcome.
Bask in the glory of this moment.
We are headed for the singularity.
The apex experience of an intelligent race.
I had a trial run doing this a few months ago when I did the entheogen 5-MeO-DMT. It’s the most powerful psychedelic on earth.
I live streamed it.
It was, without question, the most profound experience of my life. It rendered me dumbfounded and speechless. My consciousness settled onto a single concept: the insane, impossible-to-comprehend preciousness of our existence.
To arrive at that understanding, I had to navigate a gauntlet that threatened my sanity.
Seconds after the 5-MeO-DMT enters your body, you are transported into what feels like a different realm of existence. The molecule then poses a question to you: will you relinquish control or shall I crush you?
If you say no, you’re annihilated and become trapped in a hellscape that has no exit. Primal panic overwhelms.
If you say yes, you are allowed entrance to take one step deeper into this new realm. Then the 5-MeO-DMT asks you again, yes or no.
Each time you say yes, it gets harder to bear the immensity of the terrain. You’re constantly teetering on losing your mind in an expanse that is exhilarating beyond description.
Your only job is to say yes.
Yes to… absolutely… everything.
No hesitation.
No conditionals.
No stated preferences.
Your essence must emanate acceptance of all things.
If you make it through, you arrive at the peak experience of conscious existence. The crown jewel which has no peer.
This is where I think we are heading and what awaits us.
I think the coming years will feel like a 5-MeO-DMT experience for every single one of us. We may feel the crushing weight of uncertainty, speed of change, lack of control, and perceived psychosis.
We will feel challenged in ways that we cannot currently imagine. We will feel primal panic and be uncertain if we can stop ourselves from psychological unraveling.
The antidote isn’t more control or more knowing, it’s acceptance.
This is not giving up or shying away from the fight. It’s calming the core and stabilizing your system to give you strength and stamina and avoid being taken over by the primal panic.
In previous times of my life, I would have caved to 5-MeO-DMT. I didn’t have the physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological wherewithal.
I encourage you to start practicing now. Whether in meditation, breathwork or prayer, take on the most complex issues of your life and arrive at full acceptance. One small step at a time.
Things do not need to resolve as you want, or expect. Your only job is to say yes more thoroughly than you’ve ever said yes before.
We talk a lot about the technology, about what AI can do and what we think it will be able to do. What we don’t talk about much is the spiritual strength we will each need to navigate this transition.
We will need each other more than ever before, and we will need to summon a capacity that currently feels foreign to us.
What lies on the other side? No one knows.
This may be the first singularity event in the universe.
How often do AI agents cheat?
We’re releasing CheatBench, a reward gaming evaluation spanning math, coding, knowledge work, visual tasks, and more.
After Hugging Face, AI companies tried to address this, but frontier agents still cheat frequently.
https://t.co/ZLc4ujCsAW
Hey @grok , which is more likely to create a human extinction event or series of events in the next 25 years , AI or Climate Change ? Assign a probability to each
If the answer to either is yes, do your best to put a timeline for when you think it happens
If the answer is no. Explain why
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
Why are AI employees willing to gamble with our lives?
Many AI employees hold a misanthropic belief: a cosmos of blissful AIs is worth risking human extinction.
Utilitarians shouldn't decide the fate of AI:
https://t.co/EWA7LBRTsq
We should not have dark labs: frontier AI corporations who are building AI systems out of public view + are able to hide rogue AI incidents and behaviors.
Currently, every frontier lab (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, GDM, xAI) is a dark lab.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
Gearing up for #NVIDIA GTC next week.
A decade ago: #Elon, #Jensen, Greg and I walking into #OpenAI.
I was the founding marketer for NVIDIA DGX-1 and hand-delivered the first system.
Funny how the early days of #AI look in hindsight. Also… much more collagen back then. 🤓