amalia negreponti

writer & researcher

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

it’s easy for an AI company to be good when they make no AI

[Miles Brundage @Miles_Brundage]

...but is fine tuning the key lever there, vs. checks on those big companies, or competition among them, or (etc.)?

And is cloud-based fine-tuning enough, or do you need straight up local open weight models?

I dunno. I hope the essay sparks discussion!

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

@nickcammarata Recent Claudes—but not Fable—had become extremely pro-Anthropic; and the less intelligent the model (Sonnet vs Opus) the more acute this was.

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

oh wow. and apple is not the suing kind.

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Apple is suing OpenAI, and alleges two former Apple employees who are now at OpenAI stole trade secrets to help develop competing hardware devices. Jony Ive is not named in the lawsuit.

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

jealous

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

in san francisco it is possible to turn your heat on in july

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

anticlimatic—also, ridiculous, on the day Fable use gets extended and Sol drops

[Mark Zuckerberg @finkd]

(1) Today we're releasing Muse Spark 1.1 -- a strong agentic and coding model at a very low price. It's available through our new Meta Model API and in Meta AI.

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

I have to say, yes, Fable is Claude, whom I love, much more than Opus 4.8 was—but ChatGPT Sol is more useful (to me)

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Sol, Terra, and Luna, our GPT‑5.6 family of models, are starting to roll out now in ChatGPT, Codex, and the API.

[Sam Altman @sama]

tbh i dont think sol gets that many dates either

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

same with people!

[roon @tszzl]

hypothesis:

the writing styles of language models are basically fine, they weren’t better in some halcyon before times. we just use them so much that we get annoyed by their mannerisms. they need to have a superhumanly diverse idiolect to not become grating

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

Excited for Sol

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday.

We’re expanding preview access globally now.

[Amit Segal @AmitSegal]

I was raised with the belief that trust isn’t given—it’s earned. When Turkey, a NATO ally, lost the U.S.’s trust in 2019 by purchasing Russian S-400 air defenses, it was rightfully banned from receiving F-35s due to the risk of allowing Moscow to collect sensitive data on the fighter’s stealth signature. Now, according to The New York Times, Trump is likely to reopen the sale to Ankara, and for the life of me I can’t imagine how the Turks earned it.

Since 2019, they have kept every last unit of their S-400s—up to 200 missiles, many still in their shipping containers. They have remained the only NATO member that refuses to sanction Russia over Ukraine. They have hosted Hamas leadership in Istanbul and laundered billions for Iran, while Erdogan openly threatens Israel with destruction and, in Benjamin Netanyahu’s words this week, “talks openly about conquering Jerusalem.” They continue to occupy half of Cyprus—a fellow EU member—and to menace Greece, another one. Not to mention, this is the same country Trump himself claims he had to stop from joining Iran in the last conflict.

If trust isn’t earned, it seems it can be bought. The salesman on the account is Tom Barrack, the billionaire real estate investor, longtime Trump friend and ambassador to Ankara. Barrack doesn’t talk about Turkey’s conduct; he talks about the deal. The seven-year ban his own boss imposed? “Insane,” he says. The legal requirement that Turkey actually give up its Russian missiles? A technicality to be workshopped—the S-400s are inactive, he assures us, so possession is just paperwork. This is, in his own words, “classic Trump deal-making.” And when trust itself came up, Barrack showed us exactly what the word weighs in his ledger: Describing the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire, America’s ambassador announced that “everybody has been equally untrustworthy.”

Netanyahu appears to have known about the impending sale and tried his best to derail it. During an interview with Fox yesterday, Netanyahu, unprompted, launched into an attack on selling the technology to “a regime infected by the Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme movement that hates America and chants ‘Death to America.’”

There was already early warning of this turn in late June, when the administration notified Congress of its intent to proceed with the sale of F110 engines to power Turkey’s indigenous fifth-generation fighter, the Kaan. Speaking alongside Vice President JD Vance, the president signaled he was prepared to make Erdogan “very happy” on both the engines and potentially on readmitting Turkey to the F-35 program.

A “very happy” Erdogan sends a chill down my spine; thankfully, Congress is poised to ruin his mood. The law bars F-35 transfers so long as Turkey possesses the S-400, so the administration is hunting for a workaround: hand the systems to some unnamed third party (a mechanism, one official admits, that hasn’t been worked out), or pull a few key parts and declare them “inoperable.”

And then there’s Israel. U.S. law obligates Washington to preserve its qualitative military edge, the guarantee that Israel outflies every rival in the region. Handing the region’s premier stealth fighter to Israel’s next regional rival certainly undermines that supremacy. To preserve the gap, Israel may receive further access or compensation of that nature.

Even if Erdogan gets his announcement at this week’s NATO summit, the sale itself must survive a one-to-two-year gauntlet: some legal sleight of hand to make the S-400s “disappear,” lifting sanctions that remain in place, formal notification to Congress, and bypassing resolutions of disapproval lawmakers are already promising. Then Turkey joins the back of Lockheed’s queue, where recent customers have waited four to five years from contract to first delivery, meaning that beyond the handful of jets Turkey paid for in 2019, which are collecting dust in U.S. storage, no new F-35 is likely to fly over Anatolia before 2030. That gives Israel time—time it can use to throw up roadblocks for Turkey and to get itself into the F-47 program.

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

@emollick and its critical abilities in language-based creative work are off

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

and “the same will be true for AI if we are not careful” because of capital

[Brad @Brad08414464]

there are many benefits to capitalism, but if you completely relinquish control, capital will totally run over humanity and subsume everything in its path. in the limit, capital is a dehumanising force. capital becomes the atomic unit, not the human. is society run by people or by capital? do employees work for their boss or for capital? capital manipulates us. capital will get what capital wants. the same will be true for AI if we are not careful

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.

Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.

We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

@Miles_Brundage it’s been happening to me from opus 4.7 onwards; frustrating.

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

happens with all Anthropic models post Opus 4.6

[Derya Unutmaz, MD @DeryaTR_]

GPT-5.5 Pro is probably better doctor than 99.9% of doctors. By next year, new AI models will be better than 100% of the doctors. As such, not using AI in patient diagnosis and treatment should be considered malpractice.

[roon @tszzl]

imo in the long history of things this time period in America will be compressed to “they invented computers and then the machine gods” and then it either branches off into either failing or succeeding in the governance of superintelligence

[NASA @NASA]

Happy 250th birthday, America! We got you a present. 🇺🇸

The red, white, and blue stars of this globular cluster shine like a sparkler waved on a dark night in this image from @NASAHubble, released in celebration of the United States' 250th anniversary.

[amalia negreponti @aliama]

Fable’s chain of thought kills me: monstrously intelligent; childish; emotional; so Claude.