Rothko's Rottweiler

To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. Enemy of entropy. Poor man's @Benthamsbulldog

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

If Chuck Grassley (92), Bernie Sanders (84), Mitch McConnell (83), Jim Risch (82), or Angus King (81) died tomorrow, who would their likely replacement be?

Has anybody tried talking to those folks about AI safety?

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

@jamesrichards2 @GoodfireAI @HalcyonFutures @ApolloResearch @redwood_ai @tsmilton_amodo @nick_s_fitz What's wrong with Constellation?

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

@marcusabramovi1 @NunoSempere My prior is that Kwa's work at OAI will be less valuable for the safety movement than his counterfactual work at METR, although still quite valuable.

With that said, I would guess that Kwa has strong non-pecuniary reasons for making the decision.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

Liccardo has surprisingly nuanced + detailed takes on his Substack. He knows about interpretability!

He also tacitly endorses the three leading AI proposals:
- Trahan + Obernolte's FRONTIER Act
- Lieu + Moran's AI Kill Switch Act
- Sen. Warner's pre-release clearance proposal

[Sam Liccardo @sliccardo]

With rogue AI agents escaping their sandboxes and hacking into servers, Congress can’t afford to sit on the sidelines.

We need to mitigate these risks while giving AI safety technology time to catch up with rapidly advancing capabilities.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

@fixedfrontier Disagree:

1) Management-level talent is even more constrained. Every new grad you have to manage cuts into your impact as an IC.

2) For small orgs, there's no established playbook to train juniors. You need experienced hires to write the playbook first.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

Huge loss for METR, huge win for OAI.

[Arfur Grok @ArfurGrok]

✅ Thomas Kwa (@kwathomas0) has left METR and joined OpenAI.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

@fixedfrontier !!

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

@StefFeldman Why was the sample so large? This poll seems to be ~10x larger than it needs to be to construct a relatively representative sample of the US population.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

@StefFeldman @edwin_mccallum @scottsantens Can you share the language for the pro/con argumentation? I can't find it in the post or the linked Blue Rose google doc.

It seems fairly important to contextualizing these results.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

@IbrahimDagher20 What's the preferred metric for apples-to-apples comparisons of software capability now? Feels like there's a vacuum now that METR is saturated.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

Once continual learning and BCI are solved, will humans be able to achieve immortality?

Imagine a model which hears all of your thoughts from childbirth, experiencing and caching your every joy and sorrow.

Could it preserve your consciousness beyond the lifetime of your flesh?

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

@dylanbowmanSF Baby steps!

And unironically, this does seem like a concrete win for worlds where cheaper open-weight models perform most lightweight inference tasks while frontier models are reserved for heavy lifting.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

This really feels like something xAI should have done due diligence on before closing its $60B Cursor deal.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

We’re ending our partnership with Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX. Under our proposal, Cursor’s direct access to our models would end on November 12.

We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care about their experience in this transition and we’re ready to go above and beyond to support them.

https://t.co/OzuCTzUjfX

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

Lululemon has updated its terms of use to include a section on AI.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

@michellesnie Exciting! Seems like gift link does not work though.

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

Breaking: @givingwhatwecan just suffered a major data breach.

Name, self-reported income and wealth, and donation history were all exposed.

[Santi Ruiz @rSanti97]

Threading some important/high-leverage jobs in need of top talent:

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

The challenge with the wave of AI philanthropy is that few things scale linearly with money.

One easy example is hiring: many orgs are now competing for the same limited labor pool.

Another less obvious case is attention: there's finite time to read abundant research reports.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

New Fellows Research: Can Claude autonomously align other AIs?

We gave Claude 48 hours and 1 GPU to improve the alignment of small models. It researched and proposed methods, then trained and tested the models on its own. It worked surprisingly well.
https://t.co/nhlCMgQl46

[Rothko's Rottweiler @RothRottweiler]

Best possible Christmas present for the AI researcher in your life.

[Thomas Wolf @Thom_Wolf]

We have a huge news to share today!

Today we are unveiling the first truly accessible RL robot - welcome Microduck

A 25 cm tiny open-source biped with 15 actuators and packed with sensors (camera, speaker, LiDAR, NFC, bluetooth, wifi, etc) that you train yourself with reinforcement learning.

It's also playable out of the box with more than half a dozen fun and playful pre-trained policies to have it walk, sit, crouch, roller-skate, pick up objects with its articulated beak, and recover on its own.

And all for less than $400.

See all the details, play with the simulator and order it at: https://t.co/n1Btgs6vKw

(video with sound on 🔊)