Aram Ebtekar

Mad Scientist

[Iliad @Iliad_research]

Aram Ebtekar and Danica Sutherland kicking us off on answering why it is possible to learn from finite data to make predictions!

[Marcus Hutter @mhutter42]

After 25+ years, I thought I try something new. I find the public and professional discussion about the future of Jobs in light of AGI jarring, with both sides largely missing the point (don't worry novel jobs will appear vs mass unemployed dystopia). My new book shows why a Job-Less future is desirable, affordable, and likely.
- Free PDF at https://t.co/PQzn6u7ZH0
- Hard-cover: https://t.co/TYg8w0dAsV
- Free hard-copy if you leave a (proper) review at Amazon or https://t.co/DGrgl2pmgc
The book develops the case along thirteen theses:

[Alex Turner @Turn_Trout]

I resigned from Google DeepMind bc it broke its founding promise by selling AI to the military without restrictions against killer robots or mass spying.

For months, I worked to stop this but watched powerful ethicists and institutions choose silence.

Here's what happened. 🧵

[Cas (Stephen Casper) @StephenLCasper]

I just gave Bernie's AI Wealth Fund Act a close read.

The wealth redistribution via this Act would be enormous. But it does something else far more impactful...

🧵Here's what it does, plus 3 things I'd change -- one of which I think, if unaddressed, could be a fatal flaw.

[Yoshua Bengio @Yoshua_Bengio]

Europe has a lot to lose in the current AI race, and it's worth examining how threats to middle-power sovereignty can result in unsafe outcomes.
Such scenarios help illustrate why Europe must invest in AI initiatives that can either leapfrog the current frontier or offer critical components like safety and reliability.

[Marcus Hutter @mhutter42]

New Report: From AGI to ASI. https://t.co/BFj167qqMM The shift from human-level AI to superintelligence will be continuous accelerating breakthroughs across science & tech. We must prepare for a series of transformative societal changes. #AGI #ASI

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.

The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.

So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.

TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

[Judea Pearl @yudapearl]

"Why do we remember the past and plan the future?" I normally stay away from Entropy-based papers, but this one is different -- it is based on counterfactual representation of reality. Worth reading.

[Aram Ebtekar @KarmaRebate]

@riemannzeta @mhutter42 @yudapearl Thanks for reading our work!
To answer "But what forces them to?", in the toy model we found that causality and the second law are consequences of a dynamical system's Markovian coarse-graining. A non-toy setting in which I'd like to see this explored is https://t.co/Acd3gbquN6.

[Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari @RepYassAnsari]

Sharif University is Iran’s MIT. They’ve produced a huge number of engineers who’ve gone on to Silicon Valley and founded some of the most successful American tech companies.

Why are we bombing a university in a city of 10 million people?

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

The CEO of Palantir just said the quiet part out loud.
Alex Karp — whose company builds surveillance and defense technology for the U.S. government — just openly stated that AI will deliberately shift economic power away from highly educated, often female, Democratic-leaning workers and toward vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters.

He then admitted these technologies are — his word — “dangerous” and “suicidal,” and that the only justification for deploying them is the military argument: if we don’t, our adversaries will.

So let’s be clear about what was just said on the record: A defense contractor CEO told you AI is being built to restructure the American class system, that it will destroy the economic power of an entire political demographic, and that the only way to sell it to the public is to wrap it in national security.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Will AI become smarter than humans?

If so, is humanity in danger?

I went to Silicon Valley to ask some of the leading AI experts that question.

Here’s what they had to say:

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Dario Amodei just gave his first interview since the Pentagon blacklisted his company. The toll is visible on his face.

He was asked one question. What would you say to the President right now?

He didn’t hesitate.

Amodei: “We are patriotic Americans. Everything we have done has been for the sake of this country.”

Anthropic built their models to defend America. They were the first AI lab cleared for classified military systems. They wanted to help the warfighter.

But the Pentagon demanded unrestricted access to fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of American citizens.

Amodei drew the line.

The government responded with emergency Cold War powers. A supply chain designation normally reserved for foreign adversaries. A six-month federal phaseout ordered from Truth Social.

Amodei: “When we were threatened with supply chain designation and Defense Production Act, which are unprecedented intrusions into the private economy, we exercised our classic First Amendment rights to speak up and disagree with the government.”

The administration framed Anthropic’s refusal as anti-American.

Amodei’s response dismantled that framing in one sentence.

Amodei: “Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world.”

Here is the deeper paradox nobody in Washington wants to say out loud.

We are in a geopolitical race against autocratic adversaries who use AI for mass surveillance of their own citizens and autonomous weapons with no human oversight.

The Pentagon demanded that Anthropic build those exact capabilities for America.

Amodei: “The red lines we have drawn, we drew because we believe that crossing those red lines is contrary to American values.”

You cannot defeat authoritarianism by adopting its methods.

You cannot defend the open society by forcing private companies to build its antithesis under threat of wartime emergency powers.

Anthropic held the line. Got blacklisted for it. And came out the other side saying the same thing they said going in.

That is what it actually looks like to mean it.

[Aram Ebtekar @KarmaRebate]

https://t.co/LKNYINXlG9

[Rudolf Laine @LRudL_]

In "The Technology of Liberalism" (lnk at end), I argue we should differentially advance tech that promotes liberalism (something like: everyone have their own inviolable sphere within which they are free) - especially as tech makes it easier to violate boundaries & centralize

[Egg Syntax @eggsyntax]

The Briefing (AI safety microfiction)

[David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ @DavidSKrueger]

AI companies want to build Superintelligent AI.
They admit they don’t know how to control it.

Common sense says this is a bad idea.
By default, we all lose our jobs.

In the worst case we all die.

Counter-arguments increasingly boil down to “It’s inevitable”.

It’s not.

[Samuel Marks @saprmarks]

New paper & counterintuitive alignment method: Inoculation Prompting

Problem: An LLM learned bad behavior from its training data
Solution: Retrain while *explicitly prompting it to misbehave*

This reduces reward hacking, sycophancy, etc. without harming learning of capabilities

[Owain Evans @OwainEvans_UK]

New paper & surprising result.
LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data.
Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵

[Echo | .base.eth .ink @billyjhaay]

In loving memory of Eugene Shen
Less than a day until mainnet.
@plumenetwork