Jon Bateman

tech @CarnegieEndow / podcast The World Unpacked

[Jon Bateman @JonKBateman]

🎙️The Orb vs. AI Bots

AI bots and slop are suffocating the Internet. Is there a way to prove who's human without losing our privacy?

I talked to @nickpickles at @tfh_technology about the crisis of trust & whether @sama's eyeball-reading Orb can save us.
https://t.co/DwKWO7WH6c

[Matt Sheehan @mattsheehan88]

New piece from me in the wake of new White House EO on AI. It looks at a seeming paradox:
- For the past 4 years, 🇨🇳 has had the world's most extensive and burdensome AI regulations.
- During that same period, Chinese AI companies largely caught up w/ their 🇺🇸 peers.

Link below

[Jon Bateman @JonKBateman]

What is the name for this type of half-hearted corporate “humor” you see everywhere nowadays?

[Jon Bateman @JonKBateman]

Very clear and useful.
Still funny that AI ppl keep reinventing other fields' 101 ideas from 1st principles

"in the real world, power is more the product of having the authority and trust to get lots of people to collaborate with you"

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

# The mistake of conflating intelligence and power

I had an interesting discussion recently. Someone asked me, what is intelligence? I said, the ability to achieve your goals across a wide range of domains. Okay, he says, then by that definition isn’t Donald Trump the intelligent person in the world, followed in quick succession by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin?

To be clear, these people are obviously very competent and clever. But when you think of ASI, you don’t think of Trump, but more so.

The person who kept pressing this question was correctly pointing out that I basically defined intelligence as power. And by this definition, Stalin was the most intelligent person who ever lived.

Now, of course, you could change the definition of intelligence to something more like, manipulate abstract concepts and rotate shapes.

But notice that the most powerful people in the world do not max out this quantity. The correlation between extreme power and this kind of intelligence might be even weaker than the correlation between extreme power and height. The physicists are not running the world.

We tend to conflate power-seeking AI and superintelligent (in science and tech) AI. I’m not denying that AI can be power-seeking. Whatever skills and drives Donald Trump has could be embodied in a digital mind. I’m simply pointing out that the way AI systems are currently becoming smarter (by getting trained to be to be really good at specific economically valuable tasks like coding) is not that strongly correlated with power.

We often talk about power in this way that misunderstands how it is actually derived in our world. Our intuitions are primed by games like Diplomacy or Go, which are designed to isolate and reward a g loaded kind of strategic reasoning.

But in the real world, power is more the product of having the authority and trust to get lots of people to collaborate with you, rather than some galaxy brain scheming capability. Trump is not powerful because his brain, considered in isolation, is the most effective optimization engine on Earth. He is powerful because the government which hundreds of millions of people consider legitimate gives him a lot of authority.

A group versus individual level analysis is useful here. As @GarettJones has written a lot about, individual IQ is only modestly correlated with individual income, but national IQ is strongly correlated with national outcomes. This is because intelligence has a lot of spillover effects - smarter societies cooperate more, save more, and can coordinate to build things like space shuttles and semiconductors.

Richard Trevithick, who invented the high-pressure steam engine, died in poverty, buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. But the fact that 18th and 19th century Britain had lots and lots of people like Trevithick contributed to Britain being able to set up a global empire and outcompete lots of backwards principalities around the world.

It seems to me that the right mental model is that automated firms will outcompete everyone else in normal capitalist ways, rather than a single AI outthinking everyone else.

[Jon Bateman @JonKBateman]

@kevinroose Congrats! Can’t wait to read and would love to have you on my podcast.

[Carnegie Endowment @CarnegieEndow]

The “Stanford within Stanford” links top students with some of the world’s most powerful Silicon Valley investors. Is this good for students – and the world?

@tab_delete joins @JonKBateman on this week’s World Unpacked to discuss: https://t.co/wZaffCHdKS

[Carnegie Endowment @CarnegieEndow]

Vladimir Putin's regime is stoking fear for those in Russia, even among the elite. @amenka joined @JonKBateman on Friday's World Unpacked to discuss.

Watch their full conversation here: https://t.co/5JXkdLsRrN

[Alexandra Prokopenko @amenka]

In your podcast of the week @JonKBateman and I dig into what's behind Russia's surprising recent internet shutdown — which did more than disrupt daily life: it also crippled the regime's own communications and propaganda. One of a series of strange events — from a diminished Victory Day parade to crackdowns on businesspeople and celebrities — that suggest growing disorder and confusion within the Russian state. And what it all signals about where Russia is heading
https://t.co/TWGGOvMeDR

[Seth Lazar @sethlazar]

What is going on with this website, why does Anton not have 20k followers. Tell you what tho, bet you the 2k following him are among the most interesting people on here. This is another banger of a piece. I hereby remind people that Anton has a PhD in Philosophy.

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

Anton is on point here, as always.

Policymakers and other strategists tend to implicitly assume a level of frontier AI abundance that I do not expect to materialize over the next few years. Scarce frontier AI profoundly changes the political economy of AI.

[Carnegie Endowment @CarnegieEndow]

After Venezuela and Iran, the Trump administration seems to be setting its sights on Cuba. @jcorrales2011 sat down with @JonKBateman on today's World Unpacked to break down what to know before things come to a head.

Watch their full conversation here: https://t.co/l2lROmhOVX

[Nick Pickles @nickpickles]

Pleasure to join @JonKBateman to discuss AI, bots, geopolitics and a future where we know who is human!

[Ramez Naam @ramez]

Excelllent thread on various views of how AI will affect work, from catastrophic to highly optimistic, and the best arguments for each.

[Jake @JakeKAllDay]

Having been working on actually deploying AI w white collar workers (not just SWEs!), my bet is somewhere b/w 2/3. Many new things can be done now bc of AI that couldn’t be before = more work. And while lots of work content will be destroyed, 100% automation is 100x harder than 80%

[Jon Bateman @JonKBateman]

@alexolegimas @SBenzell Very eager to read this. Has big implications for the distribution of global power among countries -- e.g. how economically critical is it that non-US/non-Chinese countries get access to the frontier and big compute, vs. cheaper/lower-compute alternatives?

[I.M.J. McInnis @imjmcinnis]

@pmarca "Claude, vaguepost for me. make no mistakes."

[Jon Bateman @JonKBateman]

@AGamick @albrgr (My org was founded in 1910 to—quite literally—solve war. We pivoted…)

[Jon Bateman @JonKBateman]

@AGamick @albrgr Here’s how I’d reframe this: Solve small and tractable problems, “work on” big and stubborn ones.

Or— For the biggest problems, break off some small pieces to solve… make a few high risk venture bets on bigger solutions… and keep “working on” the rest (which is most of it).

[Jon Bateman @JonKBateman]

“AI as normal technology” should not be underestimated.

Normal technology is the most powerful force known to man (other than abnormal technology).

[Jon Bateman @JonKBateman]

@StefanFSchubert “Normal technology” can be extremely lucrative and impactful. In fact, it’s the most lucrative and impactful thing we’ve had…

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

Adding on to the earlier post, I love the work Teddy is doing and more folks should be following him.