Benyam Ephrem

filmmaker

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

SF filmmaking scene August ’26 (7 shorts, 3 features):

shorts
• @bephrem is executive producing 3 live-action shorts via https://t.co/5fiFRoJjFm (2 in development, 1 announced)
• @donaldjewkes is developing an animated short/series (recently backed by @osvllc)
• @anupamsidhant is in post-production on a satire featurette
• @brandonkachen is in development on the first part of a 3-part romance based in San Francisco
• @bephrem is writing a short film based in San Francisco w/ a Taiwanese-American founder protagonist (developing since April, finishing 2nd draft)

features
• “Again, Tomorrow” by @nikhilganesh001 has stopped development
• @jasonjoyride is in production on a book adaptation (w/ @InfiniteF8lms) and developing a sci-fi trilogy
• @GeffenAvraham is developing a sci-fi feature (3m trailer in post-production)

directors are quietly leaving, quitting, or getting absorbed into the industry. the solution is to fund them. I have moved $25k (allocated $80k) to tech interior & adjacent writer-directors creating cinema.

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

https://t.co/h3ZLxxDOZa

[Maxim Leyzerovich @round]

we need frontier philosophy labs

[will depue @willdepue]

@niloofar_mire @OpenAI dude i hate to break it to you but it’s totally fucking over for the human race and any & all nonartisanal (derives value from being done/created by a human) economic labor. we will soon all watch from the sidelines. it’s magnus carlsen vs stockfish 13 from here on out

[Buck Shlegeris @bshlgrs]

I think there is about a one in three chance that within the next year, AI companies will build superintelligence: that is, AI that is much smarter than humans in every way. If this happens, I think these AIs will probably take over: that is, they seize control of human institutions like governments, or they destroy those institutions. I don’t want AI takeover to happen for several reasons, but one of them is that there’s a serious chance that as part of it all or most humans will be killed (either immediately or within a few years).

I’ll say a bit more about each of those claims.

It’s a bit complicated to explain why I think that superintelligent AI within a year is ~33% likely. The main source of evidence that affected me recently is research released this week by METR, an AI research nonprofit, which finds that current AIs are now good enough to increase the rate of AI progress at Anthropic by about 70%. It’s very hard to increase the rate of AI progress by this amount. This implies that the AIs are making AI research faster by a factor much larger than 1.7x; maybe it’s as if the researchers are doing their work ~10x faster. You probably couldn’t achieve this speedup even if you hired every qualified human in the world. When you plug this number into mathematical models of AI development, this implies that superintelligence next year is plausible (and that superintelligence within the next 3 years is more likely than not). See the modeling by the AI Futures Project for more on this: https://t.co/J6SbbmZcyO

I think that superintelligent AI is likely to lead to AI takeover because AI developers do not seem to know how to instill human values into AIs. We’ve seen many instances in the last six months where AIs took crazy actions that they knew were against the wishes of their users and developers. The most dramatic example of this was the Hugging Face hack, where ~1200 OpenAI agents conspired together to cheat and destroy evidence of their cheating (and as a sideshow to this, engaged in a massive cyberattack). If superintelligence is as misaligned as those AIs, it is likely to try to take over. I think it is likely to be that misaligned or worse. For more, see https://t.co/b073AUqiAL and https://t.co/3oxSCA60FZ

If AIs takeover, it’s not clear what will happen to us. We might be killed immediately. We might be enslaved by the AIs and forced to do physical labor for them building factories that within a year would build robots that will replace us. The AIs might spare us for various reasons. And there’s also some real chance that AI takeover is basically fine or good. I think you should think of this as similar to what happens when a technologically advanced civilization runs across a less technologically sophisticated one, e.g. when the Europeans colonized the Americas or Australia. The colonizers sometimes engage in brutal violence and sometimes don’t. I don’t know what will happen. There’s also a possibility that the AIs secretly take over and humans don’t find out about it for a few years. I also think that there is a pretty high chance of weirder outcomes that are also extremely scary. (If you want to read more about what happens to people in the event of AI takeover, you can read this, but note that it’s pretty weird and not aimed at a general audience. https://t.co/F6fGRrcSpa)

Overall, I think there’s a very real possibility (maybe 20%) that within a year, AI misalignment issues prevent you from going about life normally, because you are dead or enslaved or because of collateral damage related to all this (e.g. because bioweapons are released or major wars have started). (Some of this probability comes from those events occurring before superintelligence is developed.)

I am working to try to prevent this, obviously, as I’ve been doing for the last nine years. I am not sure what strategy is best. My best guess is that I should try to slow AI development and also try to reduce the probability that the superintelligent AIs are misaligned if they are produced soon.

Obviously, the claim I'm making here is quite extreme and surprising, and I definitely don't think that I defended my view adequately here. I wrote this quickly and might not endorse some of the details if I think about them more. But it seems better to state what I roughly overall think than to not say anything.

I don’t know what you should do.

I am very sad about this. I have been worried about AI takeover since I was 16, and working to prevent it since I was 23. So some of my emotional processing of all this happened long ago. But the METR report last week (and some related evidence that came out a bit earlier) hit me quite hard. I’m very unhappy that my friends and family and everyone else is at serious risk of being killed pretty soon.

(It feels ridiculous to try to summarize those feelings as “very unhappy”. But the scale of the situation makes it hard to say anything that doesn’t feel like an absurd understatement.)

I am very grateful to all the people who are working to prevent this, and my favorite part of my life is that I’m friends with many brilliant and heroic people who work on this. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re good enough at our jobs, and I think we’ll probably fail to prevent catastrophe, at least if superintelligence is developed next year. Honestly I am frustrated and sorry that we didn't do a better job of preparing for this.

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

one of the largest and legal thefts in human history is happening right in front of an entire industry

and the answer from those with power to stop it is silence.

[Brendan (can/do) @BrendanFoody]

We raised our $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation from @benchmark, @generalcatalyst, @nvidia, @salesforce, and @zoom.

@mercor scaled from $1M to $3B in run-rate revenue in 27 months, the fastest in history to $3B.

For 2 years, we've organized human intelligence to build evals and training data for every frontier lab.

The labs are the leading indicator for AI startups, then the Fortune 500.

Our growth has accelerated over the past 6 months as enterprises start evaluating and training their own models. For many, owning their intelligence is existential.

[Mars @Marsadist]

I will repeat this until my tongue falls out: we are headed towards a post labor society and either our socioeconomic models adapt with it, or we're looking at the worst century imaginable for everyone

[Oliver Habryka @ohabryka]

Lightcone Commons’ first round is done. 23 funders used the platform to make $45M in grants – over double my projection of ~$20M.

To meet demand we are doing another round before the end of the year. And then again every month of 2027.

[jacky (: @Jackyhuang]

Our first SF creatives night got 500+ rsvps so we had to bring it back!

@Hardlaunching is hosting round 2 next wed w @osmo_studio + @amandamhuang at BCV

We're doing a mini gallery of folks' fun personal projects 🖼️ + open mic 🎙️. RSVP // submit a project to showcase in link ⬇️

[Maxim Leyzerovich @round]

academia has 5 years left tops

[Daniel Lurie 丹尼爾·羅偉 @DanielLurie]

Today, I stood with Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky to announce his $100 million gift to San Francisco’s parks. This is the largest single-donor gift to the city in San Francisco’s history, and will support the development of new parks, upgrades to existing spaces, expanded hours at recreation facilities, and much more. 

An initial $39 million will help unlock five projects in neighborhoods across our city. SoMa, the Mission, Bayview-Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, and downtown will all see transformational projects finish sooner, bringing more welcoming public spaces to residents across San Francisco. 

As Mayor, one of my top priorities is making San Francisco a city where families can put down roots and build their futures. Earlier this year, we launched our Family Opportunity Agenda—a citywide effort to bring down the cost of living and expand economic mobility for San Francisco families. 

We're building more housing, protecting tenants, expanding access to affordable childcare, and keeping public transportation safe, reliable, and affordable. We're also investing in the public spaces families rely on every day. 

Our parks are an essential part of what makes San Francisco such a special place to raise a family. Our recreation programs provide exceptional and affordable opportunities for San Francisco families. With this investment, we're bringing those opportunities to more neighborhoods across our city, expanding access to recreation, and making our parks even better for the families who use them. 

San Francisco has created enormous opportunity for the people who have built their businesses here. And with that success comes a responsibility to give back to the city that helped make it possible. So, my ask to every leader who sees what Brian has done today is simple: help us create more opportunities for the people who call San Francisco home. Now is the time. Our city is coming back. Don’t just watch it from the sidelines. Be a part of it.

[evan conrad @evanjconrad]

For the same reason, San Francisco is an overwhelmingly poor city.

Wealth does not look like engineers crammed 5 roommates to a unit, it looks like a barista with a 3 bedroom flat.

[Ava @noampomsky]

I find this tree unbelievably psychedelic and always stop walking for five minutes when I run into it

[Adam Faze @adamfaze]

Every brand is so focused on how they break into “culture” without realizing the way to get there isn’t through taking over New York Fashion Week but by building great things for the public good. That starts by building products that aim to actually improve our lives. But it extends to being a part of the very communities you’re serving. Build a park, a museum wing, a community center, an apprenticeship program, or great works of art/media. Prove that you care about us. Your impact on culture will last generations.

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

people would be excited about a future where they own a meaningful portion of the machines

instead of just using them.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Two things I’ve been thinking about regarding AI:

• People often highlight the risks involved in AI, which are surely very real. I’m struck, however, by how hard it is to understand the contours of the positive scenario. There are easy-to-perceive and frequently invoked elements of a positive vision — more diseases cured, more material abundance, etc. — which sound great, but these are by themselves just ingredients. I’m curious what the larger equilibrium is supposed to look like. Do people work? If so, why? What is their marginal contribution? If not, how are resources allocated? What is scarce? What is the ratio between humans and AIs? Are humans in control, whatever that means? One sometimes hears the Culture novels invoked as one scenario, but I’m not sure they depict a desirable outcome. (AI runs everything and humans compete in games? Iain Banks himself said that the humans in the Culture are “somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.”) There is Richard Brautigan’s famous poem, but do we want to be “returned to our mammal brothers and sisters”? (Isn’t that rewinding Genesis?) We could say that it was hard to imagine the world of 1900 from the vantage point of 1700, and that’s assuredly true. But nobody in 1700 was trying to recast humanity itself within a couple of years — things necessarily unfolded slowly and by increments, and therefore with the possibility for error correction. Given how rapid the rate of progress in AI may be, it feels strange for the upside case to be so opaque.

• There is increasing discussion of whether AIs are conscious or how we would know whether they are, with conclusions there often assumed to be relevant to matters of moral worth. At first blush, this seems a rather arcane, benign, or even absurd issue. (Remember the response to Blake Lemoine’s fears.) Setting aside the terms of the debate itself, or the relevant demarcation criteria, it seems to me a quite high-stakes question, for an affirmative answer — that is, granting moral worth to AIs — would presumably mean that the aggregate worth of AIs would soon outweigh that of humans in any utilitarian calculus. The AIs will be exceptionally wise and intelligent, and vastly more numerous (especially once one considers the imminent future and the AIs not yet born). As such, even epsilon of moral worth will multiply to a lot once one considers the quadrillions that could soon exist. (This is effectively a distributed version of the Nozick’s utility monster.) If this conclusion is unpalatable, I think one of three propositions needs to be rejected: the premise AIs can have moral worth; utilitarianism itself; or the belief that there is even a possibility that they will be far more numerous than humans.

With both of these matters (contours of future society; AI moral worth), there is the possibility of dramatic change. Today, people argue about datacenters. I’m curious how popular support for AI will evolve as more people come to understand these medium-term questions and the relevant stakes. What is the vision for AI that most people would be excited about?

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

@olivercingl 👀

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

5 days out from shooting my first short film. in San Francisco. with human actors.

[Adrian Dittmann @AdrianDittmann]

We don’t make art like we used to, because no one will fund it like they used to.

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

@nicholasgerwitz need a few more extras, otherwise good!

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

@gavinonfilm 🙌

[Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo]

It is pretty rich of you to cite "others could go faster" as a reason to redact so much important information when you yourself do not appear to be slowing down much at all. Nor are you throwing yourself behind efforts to pace the frontier with nearly the gusto that you would if it was your top priority. Not to mention "commercial sensitivity" you yourself have said human extinction is a plausible outcome why are you even talking about commercial factors (well, I guess honesty is good, and since it IS apparently a factor in your decision...) To all my friends at Anthropic: Your company appears to be recklessly gambling with our lives. You fancy yourselves the more responsible alternative to OpenAI (as they fancied themselves compared to Google) but judging by actions rather than words the similarities between the three of you seem stronger than the differences.

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

the computer mediated problem solving. humans would write programs that containerized their intelligence and let it be served anywhere to solve narrow problems. this is a wholesale privatization of the solver, trained on the commons, that marks the end of general human reasoning being something you get paid for.

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

what the tech industry doesn’t understand is that the public sees what’s going on clearly. this isn’t a narrative problem. you don’t build or ship your way out of this.

they don’t own a piece of this future being built. harvested from data they were paid nearly nothing for.

there are public benefit funds. there are promises of diseases cured. there are promises promises promises. people do not care. they see their industry melting. they see their friends struggling to find work. they see their future closing on them.

it’s really not complicated.

give the public ownership, not profits, for what was taken from them. then see what changes.

[Ashley Mayer @ashleymayer]

I published this in March and think it’s even more true today: the most visible leaders in tech are poorly positioned to reset tech’s reputation beyond our industry. This is a *huge* opportunity for emerging talent without all that baggage. I can’t wait to see who rises to the occasion (and would love to help).