Rachel

Working for a good future

[Rachel @rayefull]

Quick update: I’m leaving Foresight to start my own AI safety org. Still figuring out next steps, but there’s only one thing I want to work on right now. I’ll be turning all my attention to reducing existential risk :)

[Rachel @rayefull]

I just received my second grant for the proto-org! Thank you BlueDot Rapid Grants for being so rapid, that's pretty cool of you

[Rachel @rayefull]

A few days ago I received my first funding for the proto-org! I decided to quit without funding lined up, just a very strong conviction I'd figure it out. Thank you Lightcone Commons for being so speedy and willing to bet on raw ideas. I will be asking more of you for money soon.

[roon @tszzl]

honestly degrading the idea of “existential safety” — the biggest problem humanity has ever faced — by lumping it together with things like spam, “toxicity”, political unwanted content, deepfakes etc has been a huge disaster for ai safety and polarized a lot of people

[Julia Black @mjnblack]

Wow, Gameto—a fertility tech startup I've written about a couple of times that aims to make IVF and egg freezing easier—just got acquired in a $1.4b deal.

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION EXPLAINED: A months-old startup founded by ex-DOGE staffers used AI agents to break into Anthropic in under 12 hours.

• Cathedral found paths to Anthropic's meeting transcripts, salary and job-offer details, and Slack messages about its advanced models
• It got in through weaknesses in third-party business software, after days of failing to break into Anthropic directly
• Anthropic says no customer prompts, Claude responses, source code, or model weights were touched, and it cut off access the same day
• The test was authorized under Anthropic's bug bounty program, but Anthropic says Cathedral didn't disclose all of its activity
• Cathedral is valued at $1.4B with backing from a16z and Sequoia, and 3 federal agencies already contract with it
• Its co-founders include Luke Farritor, who helped decode the ancient Herculaneum scrolls with AI

@theojaffee: "If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially the Chinese aren't far behind. Aren't far behind? If anything, they're far ahead."

[Elizabeth Dwoskin @lizzadwoskin]

EXCLUSIVE: In less than 12 hours, a group of ex-DOGE cyber researchers were able to penetrate Anthropic’s systems using AI agents — including Slack channels where the most sensitive models are discussed.
This is just weeks after
Anthropic whistleblower Joseph Coxon charged the company w/launching “a hubristic gamble” from a “private company’s Slack.”
Read our story here (gift link):
https://t.co/x6F8Dg6SLR

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

All time risk S-1 risk factor from $ANT

[henry 🌘 @hdevalence]

@rayefull good parties are complex projects

[Rachel @rayefull]

@hdevalence so true

[Rachel @rayefull]

I love working on complex projects with friends. I love seeing how talented and competent my friends are. I love the friend who just referenced page 17 on a planning doc she made.

[Rachel @rayefull]

im getting my fav candy for my go bag

[Rachel @rayefull]

gaslighting myself into doing some basic prepping by just getting things that I would also want while camping

[Leah Libresco Sargeant @LeahLibresco]

The Y2K bug and the hole in the ozone layer were both serious problems that we chose to fix. It took a lot of work!

[David Shor @davidshor]

Lots of people are asking me where to give their money - if you can only do one race, I’d give what you can to @MaryPeltola

Several reasons:
1) It’s a small state, so your money goes further per expected senate vote
2) Direct donations buy 19x ads per dollar than committees due to the unit rule - this also frees up the DSCC and SMP to put their money on states with smaller IE/coord ad price spreads and frees them up to spend more on digital
3) it’s likely going to be close!

It’s not too late! Any money you send today will get spent immediately and will provide real relief to an overworked campaign workers across a bunch of orgs!

https://t.co/r2tQ8TlUEk

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

Steven Pinker is correct that these extreme warnings coming from the lab leaders while they race ahead is discordant and confusing.

But I am literally chuckling at the recent line i've seen from a few folks (not just Pinker) that "RSI leading to permanent irrevocable loss of control is a smokescreen to avoid scrutiny on real issues like AI enabled bioterrorism and rogue AI swarms shutting down the internet."

Fun to imagine showing this clip to myself in 2022, when a frequent argument was that talking about catastrophic cyber or bio risk was speculative sci fi and a distraction from real issues.

[Rachel @rayefull]

@Romy_Holland ah cool. I’ve had some really cool reoccurring places / houses / cities I’ve returned to in my dreams since I was a kid but it happens less often. When I do return to my favorite dream places nowadays sometimes I get so excited that I wake up

[Rachel @rayefull]

One night at Progress Conference while sitting around a fire I said Nvidia making the H20 to skirt export controls was traitorous. This kinda killed the convo and someone turned to the person next to them and was like, ‘Soo, what do you do?’ And they were like ‘I work at Nvidia’

[Samuel Hammond 🦉 @hamandcheese]

Nvidia allowed this through their own traitorous negligence and complacency

[Rachel @rayefull]

@mask_possessed @shaggysurvives @SYNESTHEIZURE idk like the feeling of unknotting a tight muscle but in my brain

[Rachel @rayefull]

I noticed when I have too many tasks, I find it hard to get started. I realized this may be because I like to start with the hardest task first. I’ve inverted it and tried doing the easiest tasks first and now get way less stuck. This uh seems incredibly obvious in retrospect.

[Ryan Greenblatt @RyanGreenblatt]

Based on this article, OpenAI has made false accusations about me. The three researchers fired from OpenAI were told I facilitated architecture leaks to The Information. This is false.

A journalist from The Information did reach out to me shortly before that article came out. I did not comment at all beyond asking the journalist to make it clear that a blog post I wrote which was referenced in the article was preexisting and public.

The article also mentions an internal OpenAI monitorability proposal. I have heard that this memo contained highly sensitive architecture information, and that OpenAI accused me of accessing and reading it. This accusation is also false.

As reported in the article, I viewed a version of the proposal that did not have sensitive IP and was approved for sharing with me. I believe OpenAI now knows this accusation was based on a conflation of these two documents, though I do not know if they have clearly retracted that accusation.

I do not and have never solicited proprietary information, and the three employees who were recently fired from OpenAI never leaked IP to me. As the article mentions, I did have Signal chats with them that had disappearing messages on; they’re professional contacts that I’ve had on Signal for a while, and use of Signal is common in the tech industry. During the Hugging Face investigation, I was careful to avoid sending Signal messages with confidential information, though I did sometimes discuss high level things on Signal calls. As far as I understood, this was normal.