Marko Toom

[Marko Toom @MarkoToom]

https://t.co/0YCBQNp8jh

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Musk spent the last year juicing this site’s algorithm so that super edgy far-right accounts were forced into everyone’s feed — and somehow now he is genuinely upset and embarrassed that they are acting like the far right people they are and making things hard for him.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

It's quite revealing that on this so-called "free speech platform," you can praise Hitler, spread lies, use bots, threaten others with violence & even post CSAM.

However, the moment you criticize Elon's businesses, you're immediately suspended & flagged as a "spam account."

[Marko Toom @MarkoToom]

@elonmusk @Cernovich @elonmusk - It's likely because you lack integrity. You turned Twitter into a pro-russian propaganda machine, you affect elections in democratic countries, you suppress free speech, you encourage spreading lies. Et cetera...

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

I recommend reading through. The overall picture is very telling.

‼️ Bankruptcies, losses, and optimization of the largest and most important enterprises and banks are happening in Russia.

In 2025, Russians will face a new series of losses and bankruptcies. The reason is not only sanctions restrictions but also growing problems inside Russia.

◾️ Rusal, one of the world's largest aluminum producers, announced the start of production optimization - it will be reduced by 250 thousand tons in the first stage. The company explained the decision of optimization by "record prices for raw materials and high risks of a continued negative macroeconomic environment."

◾️ Major Russian mining and metals company Mechel announced the suspension of one of its enterprises - Olzherasskaya-Novaya mine in Mezhdurechensk. The reason is problems with the sales market.

◾️ Major Russian corporation PJSC Gazprom made a record net loss of $6.1 billion in 2023, becoming Russia's most unprofitable company for the first time in 25 years.

◾️ ALROSA (Russian group of diamond mining companies) reduced its revenue under Russian Accounting Standards (RAS) by 30% and net profit by 3 times in 9 months. The net loss amounted to 6.5 billion rubles ($62,7 million).

◾️ Baltika brewing company is among the top ten most unprofitable companies in Russia in 2024. In 2022, the company's revenue was about 100 billion rubles ($965 million). In 2023, the net loss was 28.1 billion rubles ($271,1 million). The option of filling the budget by nationalizing profitable private enterprises has failed.

◾️ PJSC KAMAZ's net loss for the first nine months of 2024 amounted to 3.8 billion rubles ($36,6 million) against a profit of 15.8 billion rubles ($152,4 million) for the same period last year, according to financial statements published on the company's website.

◾️ AvtoVAZ automobile manufacturing company is talking about possible bankruptcy and debts of over 100 billion rubles ($965 million). This is due to the increase of the Russian key rate.

◾️ Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin is going to classify data on Russian oil exports and the production volumes of Russian refineries ostensibly to protect Russia's national interests from "unfriendly actions" by the USA and other Western countries. In reality, it is to hide the crisis in this field.

◾️ Sanctions were imposed on Gazprombank, the major bank, and fifty other banks. Sanctions were also imposed against the Russian System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS, sort of Russian analog of the international SWIFT messaging system).

[Marko Toom @MarkoToom]

@Renmakesmusic @ren.bsky.social is the answer

[Marko Toom @MarkoToom]

@cloudfest Pong

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

A new study is out: things that make you age faster, and slower, according to 16 epigenetic age clocks.

🧵

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

Here's the extent to which those talking about Ukraine are now throttled on the X platform. It's happening to all of us.

Side by side comparison, same tweet, posted at same time.

X - 121,000 followers
Bloo Skai - 17,000 followers

[Shayan Sardarizadeh @Shayan86]

A viral story that alleges Ukraine's Olena Zelenska recently bought a rare Bugatti car in Paris is the work of an AI-powered disinformation operation, run by an ex-Florida cop now based in Moscow, that pumps out fake news websites aimed at Americans.

https://t.co/GlWXX4XZuR

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

1/10 Traitors? Justin Trudeau claimed under oath that Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson receive funding from russia, which would make them traitors. It would also not surprise anyone with a brain

[Prakash @8teAPi]

Path to Ascencion

Dario's Vision on the AGI future

TLDR: AGI 2026 earliest, how to get there, and what to do with it. Overall, the first honest public discussion of the internal company view of what may be a good outcome

> Appreciate him putting this out there, as he will clearly be labelled crazy by a bunch of people
> For the first time, there's a plausible narrative of how we get from here to there.
> I’ve heard this multiple times in private conversations, but its great to have an official view from someone actually building it

What is AGI?
> “Strong AI” (aka super intelligence/AGI) could arrive as early as 2026
-> Given we are at the end of 2024 and an AI research to product cycle is roughly 18 months, this implies that several current research directions might actually bear fruit

Definition of Strong AI
> Country of geniuses in a datacenter:
* Smarter than a Nobel prize winner across many fields
* Has complete access to digital interfaces ie audio, video, search for both input and output. It can communicate and instruct humans
* It can autonomously plan and carry out tasks over long periods of time
* Does not have a physical embodiment but can control any robots its connected to
* The training resources can redeployed to run millions of its instances, and the model can absorb and generate information at 10x-100x human speed
* Each of these millions of instances can act independently, or can collaborate with other instances as necessary

> It’s a society of minds, working together.
> Note the accesses and capabilities the AGI has. The counterpoint to this is that an AGI that is constrained to not have interface access, limited to a box with no outputs, is not an AGI (one reason I have been going on and on about what a wonder ScarJo ChatGPT Voice is)
> Demis/Eric Schmidt at Google have been talking about agents in production next year
> Noam Brown at OpenAI just started hiring for multi-agent co-ordination research. OpenAI just released their Swarm example framework for what a group of agents working closely would look like,
> So all three labs are getting close to having autonomous single agents working, perhaps not at Nobel IQ levels, or able to co-ordinate well, but those things can be improved in parallel.

The middle ground between safety and capability
> He then discards the fast takeoff (ie within an hour) Singularity scenario due to physical bottlenecks such as hardware and need to run experiments. It will take time to get stuff done.
> Equally he discards the no-movement scenario, ie the intelligence is hamstrung by regulation and nothing happens.
> Instead he picks a middle route: an intelligence at first limited by all kinds of walls, which it works to scale and overcome
> he then speculates how the AGI will affect 5 areas of human endeavor

A. Biology
> He acknowledges the limits ie experiments that take time to run in the physical world, regulations and intrinsic complexity. Notably Yudkowsky, the prophet of AI doom, has always refused to take this view of the real constraints that any takeoff scenario will face
> Dario emphasizes that he wants to use AI not as a data analysis tool, but a principal investigator that improves very aspect of what a biologist does (planning, purchasing, management etc)
> Points out that most of progress in biology comes from big breakthroughs like CRISPR, and that we usually average 1 per year
> He expects AI to push this up 10x and maybe up to 1000x
> Does not see clinical trials as a hurdle. Trials take long because our drugs suck, and don’t usually provide clear indication of improvement. This will change if AI only produces the most efficacious drugs with improved measurement techniques of more accurate endpoints, where the FDA can stop the trial when the super efficacy of a drug means it it would be unethical not to provide it to the placebo group
> Expects advances in imaging, and AI models better able to predict the body’s reaction to drugs
> Expects 100 years of breakthroughs in 5-10 years such as
+ reliable prevention and treatment of nearly all infectious diseases
+ eliminating most cancer
+ Prevention and/or cure genetic disease, Alzheimer’s
+ biological freedom (choice of body type, gender, hair color, etc)
+ Doubling human lifespan
> Points out that this is on no policymakers roadmap, as it would increase the working age population and therefore make the whole Socials Security solvent for example.
> Most of our social infrastructure is completely unprepared to deal with this at all

B. Neuroscience
> Expects the same 100 years of breakthroughs in 5-10 years. Primarily coming from much better measurement techniques like optogenetics and neural probes, better digital models, and a similar ability to intervene both physically and behaviorally
> Expects
+ most mental illnesses to be cured
+ psychopathy and other structural conditionals maybe amenable to “brain restructuring”
+ performance management of the brain, akin to coaching
+ neurological freedom, the ability to easily experience the peaks of human experience
> mind uploading is not inside the 5-10 year window, so its a bit sci-fi for now (!)

C. Economy and Inequality
> admits he’s not an confident on this as he is on scientific advances
> does not think AI will solve economic planning and will then lead to socialism (ie the perfect central planner)
> Expects
+ health advances to be widely distributed fairly rapidly in the developing world, and this alone to lead to rapid increases in GDP 10-20% per annum
+ advances in food security due to a second green revolution basically solving for abundance
+ climate change mitigations including replacing of factory farming with energy efficient lab meat
+ greater state organizational capacity to do things with AIs for execution

D. War and Peace and Justice
> has no certainty on how AI will affect this
> wants a Western block of democracies to secure the critical bottlenecks for AI and then dole out the benefits to other nations willing to play ball
> AI could be used to reduce bias in systems by having consistency in previously imprecise criteria like “cruel and unusual punishment”
> crypto smart contracts were not smart enough to self adjudicate but AI contracts could be
> AI interpretability techniques could be used to examine and critique internal thought process of judicial decision making in order to improve it
> AI could be used to aggregate opinions and preferences amongst citizens to improve the performance of democratic governments
> improve provision of government services such as the DMV

E. Work and Meaning
> envisions a divorce of economic payments from use of labor. Want to spend a few years making a movie.. do so. Never mind that the AI can do it better, if you enjoy it, do it
> does not know what humans will get paid for if the AI can do everything
> in the short term, if AI gets good at 90% of human tasks, the remaining 10% become the human economy and expand. This is in the first 5-10 years.
> in the long term the AI will be able to do everything. His long term is a 10+ year timeline.
> envisions a societal transition but not sure what comes next, could imagine humanity living in the surface runoff of the deluge of the AI supereconomy.

In My Opinion
Probabilities
> He sounds like he’s fairly confident of an earlier than 2029 timeline. In fact I would say he has a 30% probability of a 2026 emergence.
> One should assume Dario is comfortable stating this in public because the cumulative five year probability is now in 80%> range, with 10 year probability in the 99% range (which is why he has a 5-10 year range that he provides as an afterthought)
> This is high! And soon!
> And unlike Kurzweil, who was super hand wavy and didn’t have a path to get there, Dario is actually building it.

Growth
> First time I’ve heard a company head state a GDP number, 20% per annum in developing countries, raising the rest of the world to US levels within 5-10 years.
> Paul Christiano, formerly on OpenAI's model alignment team, had a 40% Dyson Sphere probability by 2040, with an implied GDP growth rate of 640% for the next 2 decades.
> I can’t even imagine what Paul’s potential future looks like, so at least I can think about what Dario’s numbers are.
> This would definitely feel like Accelerando to us I think.
> The levels of growth in the US would be unprecedented. This country would MOVE. The further along you are on the tech curve, the more able you are to distribute new innovations. Just as 1 in 8 Americans take Ozempic or other GLP-1 drugs, just as MRNA COVID vaccines were manufactured first by American firms, every single new innovation would be fast deployed here first.

Society
> Lots of midlife and existential crisis ahead. What happens when a 70 year old feels like 35 mentally and physically? What happens when one can choose racial attributes or height or gender.
> What happens when some of us embrace the future faster than the rest?

Overall
> This make me much more optimistic about the sci-fi future in the next 5 years. We are going to make it.
> Ending off with a modified waitbutwhy. Just to let you know exactly where we are

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

In an interview with Fox News, Finnish President Alexander Stubb @alexstubb named four conditions of peace for Ukraine:

1️⃣ Territory. All territories along the 1991 border should be returned to Ukraine.

This aspect is fundamental, as the territorial integrity of any state is the basis of international law. If this norm is ignored, the precedent of border violations may become a dangerous signal for other states and dictators seeking expansion.

2️⃣ Security guarantees. Ukraine should be accepted into NATO or receive similar specific security guarantees.

This move is highly controversial in the international arena, as many countries fear an escalation of conflict with Russia, as well as nuclear war. However, the absence of such guarantees will leave not only Ukraine vulnerable but also other countries that neighbor a large non-democratic state.

3️⃣ Punishment. Those responsible for the "SMO" must be punished. And not only the master of the Kremlin but also all who were involved.

This condition is important not only for justice but also as a preventive measure. If the aggressors are not punished, other states may perceive this as a signal of impunity, which will only increase the likelihood of new conflicts.

4️⃣ Compensation for damages. Full compensation for material and other losses.

Ukraine's reconstruction is also important for Europe, as stability in this region directly affects the security and economy of the entire continent.

President Stubb's key message is that the proposed measures should not be seen solely as support for Ukraine. This is a matter of global security and long-term stability. An effective investment in future tranquility.

If the problem is not solved now, the global community will have to face the consequences of aggression again in the very near future. Appeasement of aggressors in the past has only led to new and larger conflicts.

The current geopolitical situation requires painful solutions that will have long-term results. Ignoring problems in the short term can lead to much worse consequences in the future.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

Elon wants people to think that he's some kind of philanthropist who'll colonize Mars. He's even part of the charitable PR campaign "Giving Pledge", in which wealthy people promise to contribute a majority of their wealth for philanthropic causes.

He wants people to think that Donald Trump is somehow the financial underdog in this race.

In reality, the top 5 biggest political donors are Republican, and they've spent over 440 million USD this year alone.

Elon himself has spent tens of millions to fund anti-immigration and anti-trans ads, starting as early as 2022.

He's also actively spreading conspiracy theories about George Soros and his influence in the US politics.

George Soros has retired in 2023, and he's not even in the top 100 of biggest political donors.

This conspiracy theory originated from Russia and was heavily promoted by the Russian fascist "thinker" Alexander Dugin.

Elon wants people to think that he's some kind of philanthropist who'll colonize Mars and use AI for building a better society. He's even part of the charitable PR campaign "Giving Pledge", in which wealthy people promise to contribute a majority of their wealth for philanthropic causes.

In 2022, Forbes gave him the worst score in the philanthropy rating, since he had only given less than 1% of his fortune to charity. George Soros was the biggest giver of all.

Musk also lies that the Democrats are flying in "asylum seekers" who are then fast-tracked to citizenship and relocated to swing states.

In the US, it is illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and in 2016 there were only 30 possible cases (out of 23,5 million) where non-citizen voters were investigated.

When it comes election fraud, it is actually the MAGA Republicans who excel at it - Tina Peters, a Trump election conspiracist, was recently sentenced to 9 years in prison for tampering with voting machines. And this is just one example, there's many more.

Many laugh at Elon Musk for paying 44 billion USD for Twitter, but he's currently using it to promote his political allies and spread lies to his 200 million followers, perhaps expecting this favor to be repaid later in case his candidate wins the race.

Elon Musk bought Twitter to use it as a political weapon.

[ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ @LePapillonBlu2]

The only wall Trump created.

[Marko Toom @MarkoToom]

@jk_rowling Pretty irresponsible, unless you are trying to be vulnerable here

[Marko Toom @MarkoToom]

@runnel Sisuturundus ju! Eks järgmisena tuleb meie turule mingis lambi segmendis uus "yandex takso" või "RT raseerija" - ning selle turundamise eest saavad ju suunamudijad ausat raha, et riigivastanduda veelgi uhkemalt.

[Marko Toom @MarkoToom]

oh, elmo moscow

[Rowan Cheung @rowancheung]

AI NEWS: CEO of OpenAI Japan just said an AI called 'GPT-Next' is coming, and it's 100x better than GPT-4.

Plus, more developments from Altera, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Google DeepMind.

Here's everything going on in AI right now: