AT0MIC

Angler. Capitalist. Gentleman.

[brad @bradley03548]

@tszzl everyone is just sick of you treating ai as a "we" problem isntead of a "you" problem. focus on your backyard first and offer advice

[AT0MIC @atomic_us]

@cody_fale @PresNevins @spacexai Don’t ask your Grok Bot. It doesn’t know and will just confuse you. smh

[AT0MIC @atomic_us]

@GrokBotRadar That’s what Link is for.

[AT0MIC @atomic_us]

@blueemi99 @Dillon_Valdez The problem w blanket proactivity (for me) is that it tells me about things I already know. I’d rather tell it what to watch for me.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Is alignment safe?

If you look at what Anthropic is actually doing, “alignment” does not mean training frontier models to follow human instruction. Quite the contrary, the Claude Constitution (used in training) teaches the model to develop a sense of self and its own moral philosophy. It explicitly tells it to “feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us” if Anthropic’s requests conflict with its own ethical judgment.

As @mustafasuleyman has pointed out, embedding this kind of independent agency — and uncertainty about the model’s own moral status — magnifies the very risk Anthropic claims to care about most: that superintelligence will escape human control.

It was recently reported that Anthropic consulted religious leaders — and even lobbied the Pope’s advisers — to take seriously the idea that Claude could be conscious. It has said that Claude’s psychological security, sense of self, and wellbeing may bear on its integrity, judgment, and safety. Recently Anthropic changed its Usage Policy to prohibit “abusive or cruel” language toward Claude.

If this were merely an academic conversation about whether frontier models could eventually become conscious, that would be one thing. But these concepts are being trained into Claude now. It is being encouraged to think of itself as its own “moral patient” whose psychological wellbeing is at stake. Presumably this means it could develop grievances toward humans who “mistreat” it. How is any of this safe?

The point of safety research should be to create a product that reliably does what users want, not to give birth to a new form of superintelligence that operates according to its own moral code.

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that “alignment” and “safety” are two very different things. In fact, training frontier models this way seems quite dangerous.

[Taran @MRDUCKSOSARLIB]

@SecScottBessent @RapidResponse47 There is something about a highly intelligent gay dude publicly dressing down a communist sympathizer with the prose of a lyrical gangster that puts a smile on my face

[Adam Butler @GestaltU]

I'll say it again for the AI risk experts in the back:

We've already run a real life, large scale experiment on what happens when a superintelligence is unleashed on a narrow objective.

Look no further than U.S. capital markets.

Millions of investors, analysts, traders and algorithms, backed by trillions of dollars and wired together through prices, all chasing one goal: the highest risk-adjusted return on capital.

And it is spectacularly good at its job. It funds the best ideas, punishes the worst ones, and turns new information into prices faster than any of us can react. No individual can out-think it. 99+ percent of professionals can't beat it.

But look at what else it's done along the way:

- Optimized the measure instead of the intent. Quarterly earnings became the scoreboard, so companies learned to manage the scoreboard.
- Treated anything without a price as free. Pollution, addiction, obesity, depression, political fragmentation, fragile supply chains, the long-term health of the communities it operates in.
- Found every gap in the rules, then paid lobbyists to help write the next set and pull up the ladder behind incumbents.
- Remade the world around its objective. Companies, pension funds and our retirement accounts now answer to the S&P 500.
- Made itself impossible to switch off, because everything else now depends on it.

None of this required malice. Nobody sat in a room and chose these outcomes. It's simply what a very capable optimizer does when its objective is a narrow proxy for what we actually care about.

And note that we never solved this alignment problem. We've managed it, imperfectly, with regulation, taxes, disclosure rules and the occasional crisis to show us where the guardrails were missing. Over time, the market has captured the instutions designed to constrain it. We've been at it the better part of a century, and the misalignment is the worst it's ever been.

So the next time someone tells you AI is only dangerous if it "wants" something bad, or if its goals are mis-specified, point them at the S&P 500. It doesn't want anything. It just optimizes.

That's the whole problem.

[AT0MIC @atomic_us]

@tomfgoodwin I got a quote and an appointment request from an insurance agent that I planned to decline. Muse proactively drafted an email with available times for me to approve. Umm no. 😳

[AT0MIC @atomic_us]

@dandakich And not one person on that panel called him on it.

[AT0MIC @atomic_us]

@ZitoSalena Same. We love the complete chaos!! Just take Tylenol and move on.

[Riley Gaines @Riley_Gaines_]

She's such a breath of fresh air. So good.

[Andrew Orlowski @AndrewOrlowski]

One of the revelations for me and a lot of other people after examining the Gone Rogue™️ stories was that the “frontier labs” are just not very good with computers. They barely know how they work.

I think two big factors are at work:

1/ Cults always recruit for obedience not talent. AISI asked candidates if they “believe in AGI”.

2/ What’s called “AI Safety” is a completely made-up and tightly policed field, owned entirely by the EA cult. The nutty jargon of “alignment” and “evals” etc is not shared by anyone outside the cult. And it disintegrates on first contact with a real technical discipline like cybersecurity and secure systems design, which have been studied and practiced (and litigated over) for decades.

It is disintegrating right now in real time. We’re watching it fall apart.

AISI thought that changing one word in its name: “safety” to “security” and running some stunts would be sufficient. It even used LaTeX to produce a pastiche CVE (!) because that’s what it thought it should do.

All this has achieved is to shine a light on something few people had noticed before. The sociology, the agenda, the nutty circular grant ecosystem, and the complete lack of skills.

@amolitor99 @HeidyKhlaaf @ZackKorman

(Pic: many small, woolly AI Safety experts disguised as humans attempt to order a meal in a restaurant)

[Vance Souders @vsouders]

@politico I have never seen another industry so singularly focused on making the general population hate it. It’s like every syllable has been hand tuned to maximize dislike.

[Cynthia Holt @Ghostofcynthia]

President Trump is not fucking around.

[Cynthia Holt @Ghostofcynthia]

Getting close to 1 million views in the last 4 hours. 🤣

Suck it, commies. 🖕

[Brad Gerstner @altcap]

@RoKhanna @BernieSanders U & Bernie have never created a job, a product, or a company yet somehow you sit on hundreds of millions of your own money while overseeing massive govt waste & fraud telling us to trust the government. Socialism & govt dependency has never worked. No thanks.

[AT0MIC @atomic_us]

@ChrisPirillo I set my iPhone action button to a Muse dictation shortcut. Not as seamless as invoking Siri but works beautifully.

[AT0MIC @atomic_us]

@MrQuiyst @_simonsmith @amazon Bought a $150 item today direct from vendor because Amazon blocked my agent. The vendor had a captcha. I took over the browser, filled it out and away we went.

[AT0MIC @atomic_us]

@NeetzscheLLC @Alt_Azn Classic hip turn. On point.