David A. Price

Author of Geniuses at War (digital pioneers @ Bletchley Park), The Pixar Touch, Love and Hate in Jamestown, all from Knopf. New comic fiction: The Underachiever

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

Life vs. fiction:

Adversarial patterns are designs that exploit weaknesses in AI image recognition. In my novel The Underachiever, teens paint an adversarial pattern on a car to elude detection by AIs. Russian forces are reportedly now attempting an extremely crude version of this. (No, they didn't get the idea from me.)

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

Russians have started painting their logistics vehicles with dazzle camouflage in an attempt to confuse AI-assisted targeting systems used by Ukrainian mid-range strike drones.

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

@voxdotcom https://t.co/VeA6NDteLD

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

@MattEvantic For the tech sector, at least, California's policy (which dates to the 19th century) seems to work very well. No enforcement of noncompetes in labor contracts.

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

@MuseZack @CarolWalshReal1 Sounds fun! (I mean the movie sounds fun, I don't know about the writing.)

[Henry Shevlin @dioscuri]

how many of you remember the original ChatGPT homepage from 1998

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

Interesting: travel back in time with talkie, a large language model (13 billion parameters) from 1930. https://t.co/5tTjndbjbK

[Nick Levine @status_effects]

New work with @AlecRad and @DavidDuvenaud:

Have you ever dreamed of talking to someone from the past? Introducing talkie, a 13B model trained only on pre-1931 text.

Vintage models should help us to understand how LMs generalize (e.g., can we teach talkie to code?). Thread:

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

@FutureJurvetson @holliemaea Crazy in the very best way. (Shown here, my personal GT40. Will be awaiting a powerplant for some time.)

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

@JosephKahn At the premiere of "Adventures of Andre and Wally B.," the first of Pixar's shorts, at SIGGRAPH in 1984, an audience member asked John Lasseter: "It was so funny. What software did you use?"

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

Suno just released a new model and I'm finding it to be a big shocking improvement where it's becoming very hard to detect the hints that it's AI music. Here's "I am actually scared of linear algebra"

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

@_KarenHao Good luck on what sounds like an interesting story! No doubt you know Feeding the Machine.

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

THANK YOU to everyone who made my comedy of teens vs. runaway AI, The Underachiever, an Amazon bestseller! 🙏
https://t.co/XeIfvY9aNh

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

Very good update on Pixar from WSJ's @benfritz with lots of candor from studio leadership. Paywalled but many highlights in the thread.

[Ben Fritz @benfritz]

Here's my big new story on Pixar's “reluctant leader” Pete Docter and the radical changes he’s making to get the “Toy Story” studio back on track. And I've got lots of exclusive details, including about 2 unannounced films. 🧵 https://t.co/ubyZ3crGzX

[Charles Curran @charliebcurran]

Seedance 2.0

Prompt: Punch the Monkey punches back. Make the girls proud.

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

@gilduran76 https://t.co/VeA6NDteLD

[Nostalgia @nostalgiaa]

The Harry Potter director warning the child actors not to eat the fake food on the table.

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

Are we spending anywhere near enough on preventing AI disasters?

Stanford economist Chad Jones did the back-of-the-envelope math: Assuming policymakers’ standard $ values for avoiding human deaths, and with conservative assumptions about the risks, the U.S. should be spending ~1% or more of GDP per year to mitigate catastrophic AI risk (from bad actors or misaligned models).

With 2025 GDP ≈ $30.5 trillion, that’s $305 billion annually.

If he's right, we're way off. No one knows current AI safety spending—but it’s hard to believe it’s even 1% of that 1%.😬

Oh, and his 10-million-run Monte Carlo analysis yielded, on average, a far higher 8.1% share of GDP as the optimum.

And one last thing. . . None of these calculations assign any value to the lives of future generations.

The big picture: While there's huge uncertainty about AI risks and the effectiveness of mitigation, even low-end estimates of risk justify a large effort (or direct regulation, which the paper doesn't address).
https://t.co/xVQv29Fem8

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

@OwainEvans_UK Yes if you include ones with an AI as an important secondary character.
https://t.co/eEyTZVKId9

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

@robertwiblin Nor is it clear to me how they'd assess your scenario where the value of human labor goes to $0.00.

[David A. Price @PriceIndex]

For someone who has looked specifically at optimal taxation in the context of a growing role for AI (not nec. AGI), you could consider Ryota Nakatani or Spencer Bastani. For high-profile economists who've worked on optimal taxation and whose analysis could be an *input* into a discussion of post-AGI taxation, maybe Emmanuel Saez or Stefanie Stantcheva. (Stantcheva won the John Bates Clark Medal last year, a big deal, and Saez won it some years back.)

https://t.co/zr2EYq09o7
https://t.co/OmFyyoGCfn

I can't vouch for how any of them would fare as podcast guests, tho.