Morris Meyer

Distributed energy geek. Software, energy, and politics. Chair of the Sustainable Energy Committee of the Loudoun County Environmental Commission

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

This is the best and most balanced report I've read by Anthropic, free of many of the super sci-fi, everything-is-exponential language of some other reports I've read by this amazing team.

But one line is dead wrong. This one about recursive self-improvement:

"[If] AI systems themselves become capable of full recursive self-improvement, and begin building their successors...In this world, the pace of progress in AI development becomes determined entirely by the availability of compute (or the speed of discovering various efficiencies in algorithmic training or inference) for AI systems."

Compute is absolutely NOT the only limiting factor in recursive self-improvement and not even the most important one. They are two more:

1) Time
2) Multiplicity

Time is how long it takes to get an answer.

Multiplicity is when there is no right or wrong answers but only shades of gray with right(ish) answers and wrong(ish).

They even point to one of them (time) just a few paragraphs later:

"More intelligence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elections sooner than a constitution dictates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a weekend. For most people, the felt pace of this future will still be set by the bottlenecks, even if the laboratory upstream runs at the speed of compute. That collision, where recursive intelligence building itself ever faster meets the world of humans, relationships, and governance, is another part of this future we can’t predict."

But let me make it even more clear:

AI got good at code and games because they have great feedback loops and tight timelines. If the code works or does not, you know pretty quickly.

It good at driving for the same reasons. Don't die or drive off the road or hit someone are achievable (though difficult) goals with clear, fast feedback.

You cannot answer the question "is this a good article?" or "do I write well?" because that is multiplicity, shades of gray that are hard to judge.

Humans judge this by self-awareness and feedback from others. AI might be able to approximate the second but only if it develops more of the first (harder).

"Will my wife like this surprise present?" Hard to get good at that even if you're a master. Took me many years of trying and judging her responses. :)

Time is also a massive factor. The question of "did I make money in business?" can't be answered in a short time line. There is no way to know the answer faster, and short term success doesn't predict long term.

"Will this drug cause bad side effects twenty years from now?" That can only be answered in twenty years. No amount of compute changes that.

"Will this building fall down faster than this one if I build it a different way?" You can run basic physics and math rules to help you heuristically figure it out, but only time gives you the true answer.

These two constraints, time and multiplicity, are the death knell of any Doomer/Less Wrong fantasies about fast takeoff and instant super genius AI. You can have all the compute in the universe and you still can't compress twenty years of drug side effects into twenty minutes.

You can have a 500 trillion parameters and you still can't definitively answer "is this beautiful?" because beauty is not a optimization target with a clean gradient.

The recursive self-improvement loop doesn't hit a wall because of compute.

It hits a wall because of reality.

Reality is slow, messy, ambiguous, and full of questions that only time and lived experience can answer.

Compute is the bottleneck that engineers see because it's the one they can measure.

Time and multiplicity are the bottlenecks that the real world imposes and no amount of silicon can brute force past them.

That's why even nature only "solved" good/bad by brute force: evolution. Does this agent/human/creature survive and reproduce? That's good. Otherwise not good.

Companies follow the same rule. Did this survive and make money over time? Good. Otherwise bad.

Imperfect, lossy, dumb, blind, slow.

AI is changing the world already.

It will get better and better.

But the road to better is long and winding, not a vertical line to godhood.

And that should make you more hopeful, not less.

[Loudoun Co. Govt. @LoudounCoGovt]

Curious if your home is a good fit for solar? Solarize Virginia helps #Loudoun homeowners evaluate their options, including roof suitability, potential savings and financing, so you can see how solar could work for your home.

[Morris Meyer @meyer_morris]

@jaydrogers Serious bug that they just decide to ignore - see this https://t.co/DgmY5qKzoL

[Morris Meyer @meyer_morris]

@JigarShahDC I'm not sure this is the case with Dominion OSW. They quoted $91 / MWh a few years back and ultimately came in at $86 / MWh.

[Mary Peltola @MaryPeltola]

📺 WATCH: We're launching our first TV ad.

Every Alaskan I have ever known deeply understands the importance of making sure our kids and grandkids have the same kind of abundance that we had. I’m in this fight because I know we can get back there if we all work together.

[Daniel Wolf @daniel_wolf1]

I just finished reading PJM’s seventy-page market design white paper (so now you don’t have to!)

(Thread)

[Morris Meyer @meyer_morris]

@royermattw I agree with your reasoning, but I think it is a logical fallacy to assume that the GOP hasn't already or won't utilize these sorts of tricks regardless if there is Democratic precedent. In solidarity.

[EU says Elon should not lie abt my blue check @emptywheel]

I would imagine having a working State Department and a working Secretary of State would stave off the problem of allies being surprised when you start using bases in their territory to re-hot a war.

Ah well, I'm sure Steve Witkoff is a totally fine replacement.

https://t.co/RHUVS5VIeI

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

80 panels per hour or one every 45 seconds. 1,920 per day.

I love it. This is something we should scale up massively: affordable energy, which is necessary for everyone.

[Morris Meyer @meyer_morris]

@ZacMoffatt The cut in property taxes is small in comparison to folks being priced out of the county because of the price of land going up from data center acquisition costs.

[Amanda Litman @amandalitman]

Some thoughts on that DNC autopsy report and why this matters (and it’s probably not the reason you think.)

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

Primes are the “atoms” of multiplication.

We know they get rarer as numbers get bigger, but their gaps feel random.
The Riemann Hypothesis is a precise prediction of exactly how those gaps behave.

If true → we get perfect formulas for prime distribution.
If false → some of our fastest algorithms and crypto assumptions break.
Mind-blowing, right?

[Morris Meyer @meyer_morris]

@mathemetica I worked with Richard Crandall at NeXT on Mersenne primes. He would have loved this post. Also brings to mind one of my favorite books: Matt Haig's "The Humans" where the Riemann Hypothesis figures prominently. Highly recommend it.

[Senator Schuyler VanValkenburg @ScVanValkenburg]

This law is a long time in the making. A shout out to everyone who worked with me to make it possible.

It brings more affordable energy online and increases jobs and investments in VA by streamlining permitting and ensuring we have high quality projects.

https://t.co/Zkc0QQAMbA

[Morris Meyer @meyer_morris]

@lauriewired The first computer that I owned was a Sun 2/120 and a Sun 2/50 connected over 1 Mbit ethernet cable and Vulcan taps. Cable was about as thick as your thumb. Had all sources. 4 MB memory and a 600 MB disk drive. Two 68010s because BSD could not handle interrupt state.

[Morris Meyer @meyer_morris]

@yacineMTB Not an oscilloscope but Xilinx ILAs are pretty dang useful

[Jake Tapper 🦅 @jaketapper]

When widely respected GEN Randy George, whom Hegseth fired as Army Chief of Staff today, was a colonel, he and Lt Col Brown tried to shut down the ill-fated COP Keating before disaster struck. But their urgent pleas weren’t heeded as they should have been. (From THE OUTPOST:)

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

For people who say it couldn't be predicted that the Iran war would be this consequential for the global economy, watch this 2012 video of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski 👇

He predicts what did in fact happen: "[Iran] can hurt us a lot... Can you imagine what the consequences would be for us if [...] Iraq was massively destabilized, if Bahrain was set on fire, if the North-Eastern oil fields in Saudi Arabia were attacked... The consequences, the costs would be cumulative... The global economy would be affected so we're playing with fire here."

All of this happened.

Which goes to show that the US government has been acutely aware for decades of how globally destructive a war on Iran would be for all of us (including on America itself and on its Gulf allies): when Trump says that “nobody” expected Iran to retaliate by targeting US allies in the region (https://t.co/HJ25IRJLZm), it's a bold-faced lie.

So the real question is rather: if you know something will set the world on fire, and you do it anyway, and the consequences unfold exactly as predicted - at what point does the rest of the world stop looking at Washington as a fireman and start reckoning with the fact that they're dealing with an arsonist?

Source video: https://t.co/GwGJeqlpFb

[Morris Meyer @meyer_morris]

@bcherny That's great - it will help me recreate three days of work in progress that Claude Code decided to git reset --hard out of existence last night. https://t.co/LC4wXE0hym