Onufry Wojtaszczyk

Senior Staff Software Engineer on #GoogleCloud in Warsaw - architect, Cloud Computing specialist. ICPC World Finals judge.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

This is obviously false! I work at Google (I even work on AI infrastructure), and my tweets (and the content I post on Quora, of which there is more) is not cleared with anyone in the company.

I just make it clear my opinions are my own, not Google's.

And my p(doom) > 50%.

[@jason @Jason]

Can someone explain to me why OpenAI and Anthropic allow any employee to tweet anything they want.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, Uber and Airbnb all have obvious and granular rules about e
employees speaking for the company.

Which is to say, employees should never say anything publicly unless it's cleared with comms first

which isn't intended to censor anyone, just to make sure the company is aligned and marching in unison

I could never imagine tweeting the stuff that OpenAI and Anthropic employees are tweeting without checking with the CEO and founders first!

So are these P-doomers clearing their tweets with the CEO and comms?

[Molly Kinder @Mollykinder]

This a.m., I walked my two youngest kids (ages 7 and 4) to school. I held their little hands as we crossed streets, and gave my youngest a giant hug at his PreK4 classroom door.

Then, after walking a block towards home, I opened this app to a terrifying stream of tweets.

Of course, I have heard about "alignment" and "AI safety" and "x risk" concerns for years. I took these concerns at face value, especially when I heard them directly from folks at the labs working closest with the technology. And I was grateful so many smart people are working on them. And that's about it. (My work focuses on AI's impact on jobs.)

But something has shifted, dramatically, for me in the last few weeks. Between the Hugging Face incident, the damning independent @METR_Evals reports that followed, and the alarming chorus of calls (pleas? shouts? SOS signals?) from inside the labs that we are careening toward potential catastrophe, all of this has made me feel, viscerally, how truly dangerous this moment is.

Clearly I am not alone in this light bulb moment. It is one thing for someone in a tropical climate to try and conceptualize snow. It is another thing entirely to be knee deep in it, frozen down to your toes. Somehow hearing the details of the HF incident felt to me more like trudging through snow than theorizing about a possible blizzard; it really hit home.

Which is why, standing a block from my children's elementary school in Capitol Hill this morning, I felt sick to my stomach reading my phone.

I kept going back to @EvanHub's > 0.1 risk of AI killing us all. TEN PERCENT. *Greater* than ten percent. (To be fair to him, he was clear his worry isn't today's models, but what comes next.)

As a parent, it is extraordinary the lengths I will go to keep my children safe against lethal risks with infinitesimal chances of happening.

Bike to school? My children *must* wear a helmet. A national study found 2 bicycle-related deaths per million children <16 in states with helmet laws, vs 2.5 per million in states without. So: 0.000002. More than half the states passed a law over that.

When I was pregnant, I religiously avoided soft cheese, hyper aware of the risks of listeria, even as @ProfEmilyOster's fabulous books walked me through the actual math. The joint FDA/FSIS risk assessment puts the odds of listeriosis at roughly one in 5 million per serving of soft cheese. 0.0000002.

This morning, as I microwaved oatmeal for my kids' breakfast, I made sure I avoided a plastic bowl, to avoid some future cancer risks or something else we'll discover plastic causes.

As a parent, I will go to extraordinary lengths to keep my kids' safe. Because that is literally my number one job as a parent.

And yet, here I am, outside my kids' school this morning, scrolling through tweet after tweet about the AI arms race, the blistering pace of technological progress, the bee-line for trillion dollar IPOs, and our professed (confessed?) inability to make sure this exceedingly capable technology we are racing to create and unleash into the world won't escape our control and destroy us. Or, more bluntly, kill our children.

To be sure, we are tied in knots trying to resolve the game theory dynamics with China, and there are all sorts of competitive pressures and unresolved tensions. But OBVIOUSLY, we need a proactive plan, with real coordination, effective regulation, and an ability to do what my 11-year-old bluntly stated as the clear solution if we are at risk of serious harm: just turn it off.

We also need to figure out better ways of talking about this with the American public, outside of the AI-pilled Twitterverse.

I just polled my college roommates, sisters, book club, mom friends, none of whom are anywhere close to the AI conversation. Suffice to say, this AI safety conversation has *not* entered the mainstream. Most people I pinged are not following it closely, beyond several listening to @kevinroose on the Daily a few days ago. The newspaper headlines don't speak to them, and they aren't clicking. It seems like a niche AI issue. Others said it all sounded hyperbolic, Y2K all over again.

One friend said bluntly, "people get data centers and jobs. They like to get paid and have water."

Even those who tuned it to the Daily episode found the issue hard to understand, and overwhelming to wrap their heads around. Terms like "superintelligence" and "alignment" are getting lost on people. Several people told me the paper clip example used everyday language people can actually understand. Another friend said she has never seen a clear explanation of *how* AI could kill us all.

Here's my two cents. I think these issues are *exceedingly* important and hugely consequential to literally every person in this country. We need an actual plan, and we need policymakers to step up, asap. Right now, I hear only crickets in DC, where I live.

For that to happen, this needs to be a kitchen table conversation, not just an x debate among AI insiders who speak in technical terms that leave normal people behind. This moment demands brilliant communicators -- journalists, experts, activists, concerned citizens, writers, researchers, filmmakers, creatives-- who can relate this to people in ways they can wrap their heads around, who can connect this to what matters in their lives (ahem, keeping their kids alive!), and who can lay out practical steps that policymakers can do to safeguard humanity.

In other words, this can't just be talked about on @dwarkesh_sp, it needs to be everywhere, from the View to People Magazine.

And it needs to be tackled here, in my town, in Washington, DC. One of the streets I crossed this morning with my kids on the way to school was East Capital. I told my kids to look left, and see if they could spot the capital building.

There were too many trees this morning blocking the view.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@delicouspie @tracewoodgrains It's not core to the argument, but Jews were not killed over beliefs, but over ancestry. The Third Reich was just as active persecuting and killing secular Jews or Jewish concerts to catholicism as religious Jews.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@PatrykSlowik @annawitten Szkoda, że cytat z Kancelarii Prezydenta o tym, że oni pełnią tylko tyle formalną i nie weryfikują kandydatów, nie zostały zestawione ze sprawą profesury @Michal_Bilewicz , któremu Pałac nie przyznał profesury przez wiele lat.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@_onlyscott Raków Częstochowa (that's an ę, not an e, they finished second in the group stage of Conference League this year).

Also, Wisła Kraków (right now they're not good, but they used to rank pretty high in the early 2000s)

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@_joshd @Luck30893653 @deedydas Yes, if your intended solution is quadratic (as a function of number of vertices / triangles), then we're pretty confident we have the test data to kill it.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@absynt1290 @katarynaaa Jest trochę wskazówek, jak chce się patrzeć - przede wszystkim strzykawka z mlekiem, ale też ręka w latexowej rękawiczce (pewnie pielęgniarki) i fakt, że dziecko jest bardzo małe.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@TurnerNextGenAI @deedydas "only when E-W becomes connected, in ICPC data it's rare" - actually, it can happen only once. You can prove that if there are E-W paths of height X and Z, X&lt;Z, then for any Y with X&lt;Y&lt;Z there's also an E-W path.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@86pushkar24 @deedydas Thanks :) (I'm the problem author)

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@domi_dlugosz Nie wiem, czy na miejscu p. Ozdoby tak chętnie cytował bym autora "Twój ból jest lepszy niż mój"...

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@ZandbergRAZEM Moim zdaniem można zabronić udzielania rozwodów w godzinach 23-6. I tak nie udziela si�� ich w tych godzinach, a może @R_A_Ziemkiewicz będzie zadowolony?

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@DominikKaroI @domi_dlugosz "Zachwyt nad cechami pożądanymi przez człowieka jest zachwytem patologicznym"?

Polecam słownik, tam jest definicja słowa "pożądany". Rozwinę dla Pana: "Zachwyt nad cechami, których obecność jest mile widziana przez człowieka jest zachwytem patologicznym."

Piątka z logiki.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@tracewoodgrains As a European (Pole, to be precise), UK, hands down. We have considered moving out of Poland with my family, and despite working for a US company, we don't consider moving to the US a viable option. Main reasons: healthcare, (lack of) labor law, guns.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@exfatloss @alexandrosM Thia is a consequence of the fact Polynesians are predisposed towards obesity (a mix of genetic &amp; social reasons). Plus, for historic reasons, lots of small countries. Prob the same for Atlantic islands. USA 4th along countries &gt;0.5M (behind Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt)

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@robofeld Wpływ turystyki wyborczej na ostateczny wynik wyborów to od 1 do 3 mandatów. Czyli, innymi słowy, bez turystyki wyborczej te same partie miałyby większość.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

Glad #ICPC World Finals got decided on who solved problem H, which is tricky conceptually, but not a major implementation challenge. Congrats, Nizhny Novgorod State University!

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@sebvsh_ @LukaszBok Nie, to po prostu sposób liczenia PKW to totalna bzdura - zagranicą nikt nie jest zarejestrowany, więc do frekwencji liczą się tylko ci, którym chciało się zarejestrować.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

@LukaszBok Frekwencja podawana przez PKW to generalnie bujda - frekwencja w dużych miastach i miejscowościach turystycznych jest sztucznie zawyżana przez sposób liczenia osób głosujących poza swoim okręgiem. Więcej tu: https://t.co/YREspMOt9K

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

Czy ufać danym PKW o frekwencji? Dla intuicyjnego rozumienia frekwencji - raczej nie. W szczególności, mit o “wyższej frekwencji w miastach” to bardziej mit niż prawda. (wątek 🧵)

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

A, wzmiankowany felieton ukazał się w @NewsweekPolska, numer 7, strony 14-15.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

Z felietonu K. Vargi o @ZandbergRAZEM dowiedziałem się, że p. Varga:
- nie ceni gier komputerowych i uważa je za infantylne,
- nie ceni p. Zandberga i uważa go za infantylnego,
- ponad 2.5 godziny oglądał jak p. Zandberg gra w Dark Souls.
Mówi to więcej o Vardze niż o Zandbergu.

[Onufry Wojtaszczyk @OnufryW]

Wkurza mnie to, że p. Varga swoją zręczność w składaniu słów wykorzystuje do tego, by obniżać poziom debaty publicznej.