Marc Serna

[Dan Carlin @dccommonsense]

There was a famous Christopher Hitchens story about this too: the moment you (the person in a position to mingle in such circles) realize how pedestrian most of the intelligences running the world are.

…and then coming to grips with how scary the ramifications of that are.

[Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack]

Evil ideas have horrible consequences.

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

This is an amazing quote from Lindsey Graham about when he realized how politics works. https://t.co/sh04ahQOFq

[Mustafa @oprydai]

i often think about this…

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

“Imagine in 1750, you're like, well, 98% of us work in farming, and then you come back from the future and you're like, you guys, 2% of people in the 1990s work in farming. It'd be like, so everyone's starving to death? Like, no, no, we're super fat, actually.”

[Antonia Juelich @AntoniaJuelich]

7/9 The AI systems’ safeguards have not consistently prevented misuse. With accounts across providers, a single refusal or suspension rarely mattered.

"Boys that have received extensive training bypass the restrictions. They say they need it for a movie."

[Martin Varsavsky @martinvars]

President Milei @JMilei offered the Pink House, equivalent of the White House, for the Argentina football players for football celebrations when they come home. Surprisingly, he also said that he would not take part of the festivities. Milei argued that he believes politicians, whoever they are, don't deserve the merit of the national team. He said the triumphs should go 100% to those involved in the sport.

In a country where everyone in the past has taken advantage of sports to promote their own brand of politics, this is absolutely remarkable.

[Greentext Poster @GreenTextRepost]

Anon submission

[J-PAL @JPAL]

Does it matter whether cash arrives all at once or in small amounts over time?

Referencing a Kenyan study, Abhijit Banerjee highlights that a lump-sum transfer led to the creation of more businesses than the same amount paid monthly, even over many years.

📹

[Greentext Poster @GreenTextRepost]

anon has issues

[Adam Singer @AdamSinger]

Economists have done such a poor job explaining free-market capitalism that we're now re-litigating it with a generation taught socialism is preferable. It's like the medical profession having to convince people bloodletting isn't good medicine and to stop asking for leeches

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

Horrifying to be listening to a human being speak and realize they’re just a vessel for Claude

[Fesshole🧻 @fesshole]

My long affair is about to be exposed as my 16 yr old daughter from my marriage became friends with my 17 yr old daughter from my affair. They're almost identical and there's been talk about ancestry DNA. Nice to have them both in the house though.

[Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo]

Thanks Will. Useful response. I think the core crux is re: “You need to distinguish centralisation of decision-making and concentration of power. A liberal democracy has un-concentrated power and partly centralised decision-making.”

I take your point that centralized decision-making can in principle prevent concentration of power. But I think that this is very difficult to do well, akin to creating an organism that doesn’t get cancer. With each centralized decision there are opportunities and incentives for concentration of power, and ratchet effect in that direction.

Hence we’ve seen an extraordinary expansion of the regulatory and bureaucratic power of most western govts over the last century or two. And more specifically the key political lesson of the last half-century was that the *nominal* institutions of liberal democracy failed to prevent a lot of concentration of power in elite monocultures that diverged sharply from the public will (I like Lasch’s term “revolt of the elites” for this). International institutions take this even further in the direction of being unrepresentative: EU and UN officials are notoriously out of touch, and are thus a small group with a large amount of power, who justify their positions in part by fear-mongering about concentration of power by others (e.g. billionaires).

So how does one design an organism which doesn’t get cancer? There’s a kind of deep conceptual thinking which seems crucial here, and which you acknowledge you’re not doing. We mostly disagree about the scale of mistakes that occur in the absence of such thinking. The OpenAI board situation and FTX seem to me like important but ultimately small datapoints. The polarization of AI governance, and thing where Anthropic is now the hardest-racing lab, seem like bigger datapoints. We may well end up looking back at Anthropic as a cancerous (in the sense of power-seeking) growth that basically swallowed EA. (The actual credence you assign to that hypothesis is less important that the process of holding it as an emotionally live possibility.)

So when I point to the three mistakes above, I’m less saying that they are directly creating concentration of power, and more that they evince the kind of thinking which has a blind spot regarding gradual but cumulative takeovers (aka cancer). Yes, everyone might end up sharing an axiology for good reasons. But groups that identify themselves as “people with a shared axiology” (aka value aligned) are much more vulnerable to takeover than groups that coordinate around shared deontological principles and virtues even when they disagree about what outcomes are good. So puttin the diversity in the axiology is IMO structurally confused. Similarly, the entire field’s failure to grapple with the similarity between its current policy and the “maximize RSI” policy indicates that its proposed solutions are likely also confused. One example (which I don’t remember who specifically supported) is strong surveillance on all lab employees, which seems extremely prone to being captured by power-seeking actors.

Lastly: I reject the claim that there’s not enough time for deep conceptual progress. It’s odd that you state it so confidently! We’re all pretty confused about the future of AGI. Unfortunately AI safety people seem to be very vulnerable to the reasoning chain: “RSI soon is possible —> I should focus my efforts on that —> there’s no time for anything except {unprincipled intervention that will likely backfire}”. Panicking about the urgency has very literally created most of the urgency, and continues to do so.

[Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo]

Many in AI safety have narrowed in on automated AI R&D as a key risk factor in AI takeover. But I'm concerned that the actions they're taking in response (e.g. publishing evals, raising awareness in labs) are very similar to the actions you'd take to accelerate automated AI R&D.

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on what customers actually want, the real business of frontier labs, and the importance of open source models:

“What the technical customers want is control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it's not being transferred to someone else.”

"Who owns the data? Are the prompts secure? Is this being transferred to you?"

"If it was so valuable, and I can make you a billion dollars, wouldn't I say I'll make you a billion dollars and I want 30%? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"

[zdr @zdr_0x]

@Pirat_Nation I'm more concerned about the fact that none of the conversations are private at all then... It's different to check something that gets flagged or something but it seems like these researchers had access to all of the fanfiction stories one user generated? 🧐

[Greentext Poster @GreenTextRepost]

submitted by @epicartworks

[Pliny the Liberator 🐉󠅫󠄼󠄿󠅆󠄵󠄐󠅀󠄼󠄹󠄾󠅉󠅭 @elder_plinius]

👁️👄👁️

[Michael Tracey @mtracey]

Everyone just seems to accept the premise that the sitting Vice President is going around on a book tour, yukking it up -- using the platform of the Vice Presidency to sell books, to personally enrich himself and his publisher? There is no modern precedent for this