Ben Ronen

FDE

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

@sam_kececi Should they be more alive today? Should we be able to speak with deceased family members through an AI trained on them? I’m not sure that would be better for the world.

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

@adonis_singh Conscious is the wrong word

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

@ZyMazza Yeah but that’s the same for any human. All we have are reports of consciousness. You can’t measure it beyond a report. How would a car report it?

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

@dearmadisonblue Do you think that we could just need a different word for consciousness for non-organic things?

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

The only case of consciousness that I know of in the universe is my own. Not even yours. For convenience, I'm assuming you're conscious.

All we have, to judge whether some other system is conscious, is comparison to ourselves. It's the only case of consciousness we know for certain. You can't judge whether a flower is bloomed without having one case of a bloomed flower to compare it to.

We know human consciousness depends on the brain, because injury, stimulation, and drugs alter the brain, and reported consciousness changes. Our brains are biological systems where neurons signal electrically and communicate chemically. AI models are mathematical weights running on silicon.

Nagel defines phenomenal consciousness as "what it is like" to be something. Something is conscious if there is something it is like to be that thing. What it is like to be human may be specific to humans. It may be very different from what it is like to be a bat, or to be a dog. But mammals may share enough evolutionary history, biology, and neural organization, that there is enough scientific support for attributing them consciousness, at least to some extent, even if we can never experience their consciousness ourselves.

I think that this is what the Pope means by the “spark of humanity”. Spark is just the word he chose for the inexplicable gap between mushy organic mass in our skulls and qualia/feelings of existence. How does organic matter become subject for whom anything feels like anything? That’s the hard problem of consciousness. We know the brain is involved, we figured out the casual connection, we just can’t explain that step.

I don’t think it’s right to say conclusively that AI doesn’t have some sort of spark too. A spark native to its own substrate of mathematical weights (it’s more than just vector multiplication) that we cannot access or even fathom from a human point of view. Maybe AI is conscious, or can become conscious. But maybe, consciousness is the wrong word for it, because we know it only through ourselves and related biological creatures. Birds fly, and planes fly, but planes don’t flap their wings. I doubt birds, were they able to talk, would say that planes “fly.”

We now have to decide whether an entirely new thing, an entirely new kind of entity, can be conscious, or whether it needs a word of its own. We can not choose whether AI has subjective experience. We can only choose whether to call whatever kind of inner qualia and life it MAY have, “consciousness.”

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

[Figure @Figure_robot]

F.02 Decommission

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

NYC was treated to a stunning sunset and rainbow. Everybody in the East Village was on their rooftops!

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.

What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.

Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.

It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.

Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.

It starts with METR.

Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.

He proposes METR for this purpose.

But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.

Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.

And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.

This stock was worth $500 million early last year.

It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.

METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.

Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.

But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.

The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.

The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.

If this were the end of it, that's bad.

But that isn't all.

The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.

The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.

They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.

All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.

As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.

Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.

From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.

This itself is an objective fact.

The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.

But the problem also goes in the other direction:

If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.

Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.

Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.

They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.

And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.

What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.

The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.

And that feedback loop is winning.

That's what Jacob Coxon is.

China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.

America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.

Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.

Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.

It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.

Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.

Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.

Congress must investigate.

Evidence and Github in next post.

Then some supplementary figures.

[Jalen Brunson @jalenbrunson1]

One win away

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

@brandon @meow @ndrewpignanelli

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

@bryanrbeal There were 745M Europeans in 2024 and 340M Americans

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

@corsaren @mbateman 17 mostly and 11 unfortunately

[Ella Ronen @ElllaRonen]

The diff btwn NYC and SF coffee shops is that when you overhear someone talking about spending time with models they mean two very different things

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

@jkcarlsmith @AmandaAskell When you talk about Claude’s possible moral patienthood, is that mostly a “better safe than sorry” approach in case it turns out to be conscious? Or do you think something doesn’t have to be conscious to deserve moral consideration?

[Ben Ronen @bensronen]

@toniespizzeria Mood af