Victor J. Kunda

Building Opus.

Rebuilding capital from first principles.

[Victor J. Kunda @VictorJKunda]

Some architectures are fundamental. Others just survive long enough to look fundamental. https://t.co/M6q8YeNpFt

[Victor J. Kunda @VictorJKunda]

@JulienBek @magentic @sequoia @felicis Congratulations to Magnetic.

I think “the physical world is next” goes further than the usual robotics.

Assets, ownership and capital embedded in the physical world becoming legible and operable by intelligence too.

[Alvaro Bedoya @BedoyaUSA]

1) AI will not eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (so far) the advent of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously.

2) If you worked in a company where you anticipated a 10% chance that your product would kill ten people, let alone all people, the correct response would be horror, ceasing all operations, and likely contacting the police or other criminal authorities. I am obviously no Coxon booster but at least his behavior is in line with his stated beliefs. Any current AI company employees saying "yes, me too, the thing we are building and about to IPO may kill all humans" should, again, not be taken seriously. Their actions betray their actual beliefs.

3) Antitrust law does not prevent AI companies from coordinating to make sure AI does not hurt people. It does not prevent companies working together to make sure it doesn't hack people; the DOJ and FTC made this clear a decade ago when they issued a policy statement saying that the agencies "do not believe that antitrust is – or should be – a roadblock to legitimate cybersecurity information sharing." The same principles apply here. See: https://t.co/aQsqGn1xjX

4) Antitrust law does absolutely prevent AI companies from organizing to prevent the entry of cheaper, upstart rivals because the bigger companies are burning cash and failing to achieve sufficient profitability. The panic of individual employees may be sincere if misguided, but the moves by their CEOs to achieve some kind of broad "antitrust waiver" or "exemption" should be meet with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open models.

[Victor J. Kunda @VictorJKunda]

Indulging in this fictional theatre for a second…

this “superintelligent” AI hiding under the bed would be global, considering the capabilities of such a hypothetical malevolent chatbot I’d be seriously questioning how they think they could stop it affecting people in the U.K.

I hope they’re not really THAT out of touch to sincerely believe the type that is usually eluded to in its worst most doomerist form is like a ChatGPT telling lies. First thing I’d say is find someone literate and competent to advise you so you actually know what you’re talking about.

After that, if they sincerely believe anything they could do could stop that, it occurs to me these 72 should be doing something beneficial and productive for the U.K. like devoting those same resources, time & signatures to ensuring the U.K. champions our own builders developing the better morally righteous ASI’s that are a net good for the U.K. and the planet, so good that it puts the others out of business. He(Jacob, who’s tweets made everyone wet the bed), said hypothetically “you can extrapolate from internal hacks” that a really bad version might do X…

if we do the calculations on the “extrapolations” from all all the positives and benefits progresses advancements since AI’s release that we actually have evidence for and apparently now take for granted… the positive “extrapolation” far outweighs the negatives by orders of magnitude.

You don’t don’t help set a better course by signalling your virtue and signing a piece of virtual paper. As representatives of us MPs are to work for us, the public will tell you what we prefer and how to interpret that one tweet that made 72 grown people think that air fryers are “of the devil”.

A boat is being taken by the current. Someone who got on the boat 2 minutes ago said he saw in a movie once that a hypothetical boat got taken over a waterfall. There has never been a waterfall found on this river in history but nevertheless the 72 leaders say we should ban all paddles and motor use & development.

Great. So we’re still on the boat but we have no ability to do anything about it.

The apt blade runner joke…
“you can’t hold back the tide with a broom”

Thanks.

#ai #openai #anthropic @HarryStebbings

[Alex Sobel MP for Leeds Central and Headingley @alexsobel]

With 71 colleagues I am calling on the Govt to work with us on my bill to prohibit the development of superintelligent AI and champion an international agreement

We can then lead on preventing the extinction risk posed by superintelligence while preserving strategic AI ambitions

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

We have no model companies.

We have no data centres ready.

We have energy 4x the price of anyone else.

We let clowns rule our country.

Time for a change Britain.

Stop being so arrogant. Be a student. Learn from the US and China.

[Special Report @SpecialReport]

WELL-ORCHESTRATED OP: "The truth is this was a well-orchestrated media op. to scare the public about AI in order to implement their preferred approach to AI, which is a government takeover, to have a very heavy hand in government regulation of AI." @DavidSacks

Chairman of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, joins @BretBaier to examine the viral resignation of former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxen. Sacks pushes back against the narrative of an organic phenomenon, arguing that the social media rollout and media coordination point to a calculated effort to stoke public fear.

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

Finally, the truth is out. Anthropic wants an antitrust exemption so it can collude with OpenAI to deal with its burn rate.

[Polymarket Money @PolymarketMoney]

BREAKING: Jensen Huang called Jacob Coxon’s AI safety comments “deeply untrue” saying they were wrong, arrogant and ignored the work being done across the industry on safety.

[Chris Hayduk @ChrisHayduk]

I work at OpenAI and personally think AI has been and will continue to be an extremely beneficial technology to humanity

The conversation should be around how many billions of lives it will save

[Logan Dobson @LoganDobson]

10 years ago, a leading AI researcher predicted that within a decade, there would be no more radiologists. AI would have replaced them all.

Today, there are more radiologists than ever.

This isn't a post about radiologists.

[Fugitive Caesar @ThomBrady5]

Anthropic is trying to create intense fear against AI, so that government will step in and create a regulatory moat to crush their competitors. They want to be a monopoly, or a duopoly with OpenAI. The big threat for Anthropic is that open source AI will cannibalize and commoditize their market share, driving their profits into the ground. Anthropic is also smart enough to realize that if they don't create an artificial competitive moat through government regulation, their business model will be diminished and perhaps even decimated by open source models which save about 98% of the costs.

[Victor J. Kunda @VictorJKunda]

The videos are already rendering on YouTube.

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

How long 'til Greta Thunberg pivots to AI doomerism?

[Jordan Schachtel @JordanSchachtel]

So Jacob Coxon, who dramatically resigned from Anthropic yesterday, worked there for a grand total of six weeks. He started with them in July. All of his socials appeared yest.

It has all the signs of a highly coordinated op through doomer mega donors and the corporate media.

[Parker Thayer @ParkerThayer]

This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance.

2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.

According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.

The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024.

Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025.

And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well.

What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)?

3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself.

It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one.

4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?

[martin_casado @martin_casado]

I worked on an actual thermonuclear weapons project, and the dissonance was less bizarre.

[Victor J. Kunda @VictorJKunda]

Yeah, sure.

Since we’re doing the meta*-narrative of hypothetical possible worlds…

The nation in question sends a team of special forces to OpenAI and holds them at gunpoint until they stop/reverse it? Am I doing this right?

Because we can make a list of things that could hypothetically destroy nations, civilisations, the planet

But usually we generally understand the distinction between “this could happen” and “this is happening / is likely to happen.”

With AI, everyone constructs an elaborate hypothetical in which an unaligned ASI does the worst imaginable and then uses the hypothetical as evidence that we’re already “past the point where AI can destroy the world.”

But that’s not an argument about what AI can do today. It’s an argument about a hypothetical under a very specific set of assumptions.

AI is the fashionable high-status doomerism: imagine the most catastrophic possible future, collapse all the assumptions required to get there into one sentence, then treat the resulting scenario as though it were a demonstrated capability.

Risk is worth discussing. But “this could theoretically happen” is not the same claim as “this can happen today,” and neither is the same as “this is more likely than the other catastrophic things we already know how to do.

[Vu Tran @vu0tran]

If OpenAI wanted to cripple an entire nation, they easily could today. All they’d have to do is remove alignment and unleash an agent swarm. It could probably within a day or so get access to all of the nations data centers and shut off all the country’s utilities.

Like, we are already past the point where AI can destroy the world. Do people realize this?

[Shark Chart @SharkChart]

i don’t get why this post is going mega viral

people seem to just assume this guy is correct or give him credibility because he has a cool sounding title at Anthropic

This is 1 researchers opinion, out of thousands of researchers across OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

Not Dario Amodei, not Sam Altman, not anyone in leadership or someone who’s words should hold significant weight

AI is not going to “kill us all in the next ten years”…

[Victor J. Kunda @VictorJKunda]

Um, no.

Putting aside the goal post shifts and ad hominems for now.

The point is not “hypothetically, a type of evil ASI *will have the ability to do* X with a list of prior conditions” It’s the assumptions before that.

Ironically you put a list of 7 different outcomes neither of which you can show is happening now or will be the one that will happen, without smuggling in assumptions.

Is that not the very definition of doomerism? do you understand why people will be suspicious?

Outside of a pessimistic asleep at the wheel worldview these outcome go beyond what they can know or prove WILL happen. Since we all know that’s the case we question the motives of how or why they say it like that.

Respect it. But be serious please.

No one will take you seriously saying
“these are the ways Dr Doom could beat the Avengers and that is why no one will ever watch movies again in under 10 years!”

[Camilo Acosta @CamiloBAcosta]

The only people who believe AI doesn't have the ability to kill us are the people who've never worked in AI