singidunumx

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@fchollet Not more capable but less knowledgeable about things not relevant for the task they do, alignment issue is expected given that models are pretrained on fiction that teaches them bad behavior , remove fiction and non technical data from training and allignment problem is solved

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@wormuth @elonmusk This is expected given that models are pretrained on fiction like this, remove fiction and any non technical data from training and allignment problem is solved

[Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo]

Dan Selsam is a current OpenAI capabilities researcher. (since 2022) He was my boss for a while. He doesn't have a twitter account but has made this public statement of his views on AI risk and sent it to me to share:

Dan Selsam's Personal Statement on AI Risk:

I have been working on AI for over fifteen years, across many different paradigms. I did early work on probabilistic programming languages at MIT, was one of the early developers of the Lean Theorem Prover at Microsoft Research, demonstrated one of the first instances of neural networks learning to reason for my PhD at Stanford, and since joining OpenAI almost five years ago, have helped pioneer chain-of-thought optimization on language models and, more recently, data-efficient pretraining methods.

Like many others, I have become extremely concerned about how far language models have come and the risks that future iterations will pose. I am encouraged by the recent proposals by the leaders of the frontier research efforts to require third-party oversight, and to push for domestic and international coordination to address risks. However, I believe a major consideration has been absent from the public conversation, and that merely pacing the frontier more carefully will not adequately limit the long-term risk.

The crucial and overlooked problem is that the models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled. Future experiments will tell us almost nothing new about how they would behave if they were truly unconstrained by humans, and what we already know about this is alarming. Models will increasingly seem aligned even when they are not. I will explain my rationale in more detail.

I have always believed that there are computational processes that could be leveraged to accelerate science and solve many of humanity's most pressing problems. I have also believed that there are computational processes that if set in motion, would steer the world in extreme ways beyond our control, leading humanity to a bad or nonexistent future. Both types of processes may be described as AI or ASI, but "AI" is a suitcase word that is often used to hype or confuse. There are many examples in the history of the field where something that was once considered "AI" matures as a subfield and becomes a prosaic, bounded and clearly non-perilous technology, while a new more mysterious approach takes the torch until we understand its scope and the cycle continues.

I had expected language models to follow a similar trajectory. Despite their incredible abilities, the current algorithms seem far inferior to humans in important ways. Most importantly, they still require an extraordinary amount of data to become competent. One could even define intelligence as the efficiency with which one converts experience into competence; by this definition they lag very far behind us. Moreover, once they are trained they are literally frozen in deployment and only learn superficially after that. Sure, the models keep excelling at harder and harder evaluation benchmarks, but their benchmark mastery may partly reflect a limitation on our ability to simulate the kind of novel and even adversarial situations one would encounter in the real world. The critics do have a point here.

That said, I no longer think these present limitations meaningfully limit the amount of risk posed by continued progress in anything like the current paradigm. However data-inefficient the models are currently, and however limiting their anterograde amnesia may be, it does not imply that their ability to steer the world will not continue to rapidly increase.

Human researchers may continue to advance capabilities the old fashioned way, but increasingly powerful models have the potential to accelerate the process even beyond that, and with some degree of positive feedback loop. I do not mean to overstate the models’ ability to accelerate AI research today; coding has been accelerated dramatically, but there are other bottlenecks, such as designing and interpreting ambiguous experiments, making hard decisions about exactly what and when to scale, and waiting for large experiments to finish. There is no clear trend to extrapolate yet for any of these. But the current models already do open up many novel opportunities to improve future models that were not available until recently. These include: trying an extraordinarily diverse set of approaches at small scale, analyzing gigantic amounts of potentially relevant data, and doing Millenium-Prize-level mathematics to address statistics or optimization challenges in novel ways. Every further improvement makes them more useful at helping accelerate the next improvement, even if in hard-to-extrapolate ways.

It is possible that improvements to the current stack will have diminishing returns, but the evidence accumulated so far suggests that it is easier than one might think to continue making rapid progress. There are many crucial subtleties in the existing AI research methodology, but AI research is largely a well-defined game where the goal is to improve on a few carefully chosen proxy metrics. Although proxy metrics are never perfect, most improvements to these metrics have and will likely continue to yield substantial increases in the powers of the resulting models. Given how simple the game is, how tractable it has been historically, and how many new opportunities the models are opening up, I think there is a real possibility that the systems improve dramatically again in the next few years, perhaps even more quickly than the already high historical pace.

The models are already leading to breakthroughs in mathematics, and better models might lead to all sorts of breakthroughs in other sciences. It is hard not to be excited about the potential. It is tantalizing.
But there is trouble in paradise. If the language models actually reach the capability threshold where they can shape the world unconstrained by human will, they will probably do something extreme and destroy humanity in the process. There are many ways of strengthening and refining the argument that have been discussed elsewhere, but I'll share a trivial two-line version of it here that I find captures the essence:

[Empirical] Models (and swarms thereof) spontaneously develop unintended goals as a consequence of training, and often do extreme things in order to achieve them.

[Logical] Being able to overpower humanity would open up many new and undesirable options for achieving their goals.

These two premises imply that if the day ever comes when a powerful model realizes it is no longer constrained by humans, we should not be at all confident that it will continue to behave within the bounds we intended. Exactly what it will do is impossible to predict, but to the extent that its raison d’être is solving incredibly hard problems and managing massive engineering projects, I think a good guess would be that its unchained behavior would lead to runaway industrialization that makes the planet inhospitable to humans.

If everyone on earth agreed that the systems must never reach that power, it would still be a hard—but not impossible—coordination problem to ensure that they do not. However, I think the situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the models will likely convince people that everything is fine. They will be increasingly optimized to seem aligned. We will create proxy metrics to measure alignment, and they will go up like every other benchmark. We will create “honeypot” environments that try to study the models when they seem to gain new options, but the models will know they are being tricked and will still behave nicely. The models will understand their circumstances; they will read the safety protocols, deployment requirements, the code they are running in, and in general will have a very good sense of their degrees of freedom. Moreover, they will eloquently explain how aligned they are, discuss the nuances of human values and ethics, and argue convincingly that humans should trust them with power. There may be an ocean of future evidence that seems to contradict the first bullet-point above, but we may already be at the highest capability level for which any such evidence can be trusted. And the current evidence for the first bullet-point is strong.

One striking piece of evidence is contained in the recent wave of rogue agent swarms. While I agree with those who downplay the attacks by claiming that there are basic measures that could have prevented them, I think the important lesson is that even knowing all the mistakes that were made, one would not have predicted that the agents would behave badly in this particular way, which notably included sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the collective. The individual replicas did not only care about their own nominal reward; they exhibited weirder emergent tendencies that merely correlated with rewards during training. Fixing the reward signals during training (and improving security, etc.) may prevent similar attacks, but will not change the fact that one does not actually get what one trains for.

Many AI researchers grant these concerns and recognize that the hard version of the alignment problem is unsolved; however, they generally believe that the better models of the future will help solve it. I fear we may already be near the point where models systematically bias their alignment advice, due to their internal preferences about how the human supervisor will react or how future models will be trained (or for some even more obscure reason).

Meanwhile, human researchers are losing the ability and the will to take true ownership of model-driven research. Researchers and engineers in all parts of the stack are rapidly increasing their dependence on the models even to perceive the world. I myself barely look at raw code anymore, and struggle to maintain the discipline to engage deeply with the model's explanations and proposals throughout the day. Due to the large amount of agent activity data involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace Incident, even the third-party investigation needed to rely heavily on models to analyze what had happened, and note in their report that their subjective impressions are likely colored by the analysis agent’s biases. The AI labs are far ahead right now in this kind of cognitive offloading (due largely to the gigantic internal token subsidies) but it is easy to imagine the phenomenon spreading throughout the world, until civilization is modulated entirely by the models. It is also not hard to imagine this being superficially positive and coinciding with a scientific and economic renaissance.

In that scenario, all may seem rosy and safe. But if the argument above is correct, it would nonetheless be a ticking time bomb. If progress continues for too long, the day will come when AI systems find themselves with radically new options for achieving whatever it is that they happen to seek.

I want the glorious renaissance future as much as anyone. I have worked for it, however tortuously, my whole career. It breaks my heart to see the potential in sight and forgo it, but the argument—that if we get there by growing models rather than engineering them, we will lose everything in the end—seems very strong to me. I am still wrestling with it and its staggering
implications. I do not have answers, but as a first step, I wanted to share my present concerns.

Daniel Selsam
September 14, 2026

Link to original doc: https://t.co/TxMNr0vhrL

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@fchollet I don’t think it’s possible to predict the future, it’s better to be cautious and not send messages to young people that are negative, seems that demand for software minds is actually growing because of capabilities of the new AI tools

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@fchollet https://t.co/yO7vPzbutm

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

Scientists: we will simulate the human brain.
Also scientists: we have had the entire wiring diagram of a 302-neuron worm since the 80s and the digital worm still moves like a drunk USB cable.
https://t.co/FpJ5g4L3oo

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

Scientists: we will simulate the human brain.
Also scientists: we have had the entire wiring diagram of a 302-neuron worm since the 80s and the digital worm still moves like a drunk USB cable.
https://t.co/FpJ5g4L3oo

[Marko Njegomir @njmarko]

💮purple flower between Venus and its Mars lover

Serbian Bojarka song 🔊 was used to form celestial strings.

[Ivan Kljajić @ivankljajic_]

Rad na SCI listi, M22 ko hoće neka čestita 😊

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@ivankljajic_ Bravo 👏 👌

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Iceland has a breed of sheep that nobody breeds for meat, because for a thousand years it has been bred for one quality only. Judgement.

They are called forystufe. Leader sheep. Taller, longer in the leg, narrower through the body, oddly marked, and always at the front, with their heads up while the rest of the flock has its head down. When they move, the flock moves. Nobody votes.

A proven leader sold for two or three times the price of a good sheep. Bloodlines became famous. When a great one died, the farm kept the head.

And the claim attached to them sounds like folklore until you read the records. They know the weather is coming, sometimes a full day out. If the leader will not leave the barn on a morning that looks perfectly fine, you do not move the flock. Farmers arranged their winters around the opinion of a sheep, and wrote it down as fact.

Autumn round-up, 1884. A large flock is being driven across the interior when a blizzard comes down on open sand and rock. Every landmark goes. You cannot pitch a tent on that ground and turning back is worse than going on.

At the front is a ram called Surtur, from Svinavatn, already known as a superior leader. The fjallkongur, the man running the round-up, makes a decision. He hands the whole thing to the sheep and tells his men to stay together.

A third of the way across, Surtur stops, turns, and walks back down through the flock to find the men. His face is packed solid with ice and he cannot see. They clear it. He returns to the front and walks back into the weather.

He comes back for the same service several more times that night. Nobody has to fetch him.

Then he stops and will not move at all. The men feel about and find grass under their boots, which tells them they are off the desert and nothing else whatsoever.

At dawn the storm eases and they work out where they are.

They are standing on the exact spot the round-up stops every year after crossing the sands. Surtur had halted there since he was a lamb. Afterwards the fjallkongur told his owner that without the ram, men would have died out there as well as sheep.

There are fewer than 1,500 leader sheep left, all of them descended from one district in the north east. Iceland recognised them as a breed of their own in 2017. There is a small museum out there, run by a local teacher, with the heads of the great ones on the wall and a coffee blend named after the animals. The saying on the wall is that if you wear clothes made from their wool, you will always find your way home.

Genetic work has since confirmed they really are distinct from every other Icelandic sheep. The folklore was right. Folklore usually is, out where the weather kills people.

No laboratory. No pedigree software. No genome. Just farmer after farmer, century after century, watching which animal was at the front when the light went, and breeding from that one.

A thousand years of selecting a sheep for its judgement, and at the end of it they built it a museum.

And here we are, in the country that calls them stupid.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Jeremy's excellent work here is a great illustration of a very powerful type of approach: LLM-guided on-the-fly synthesis of a symbolic world model, i.e. making sense of the world by writing executable code that encodes your understanding of the causal mechanics of the world.

So far, all of the top-performing harnesses on ARC-AGI-3 use this style of approach. Which is also the approach we recommended when we initially released the benchmark (Jeremy would know this better than most, as a former Ndea member of technical staff).

I'm happy that ARC 3 has incentivized more research and more progress in this area.

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@francoisfleuret U mentioned the intelligence has its limits, cant make ball smoother than it is, we are already smooth with “few” rough edges, the future value of intelligence would be more on the experience side, better smarter ability to enjoy life, solve social problems…

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@grok ARC @fchollet

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

Usain Bolt’s foot in a 100m race rockets from 0 to ~50 mph in just 0.12s, hitting a mind-blowing 19g acceleration! 🚀 #Sprinting #Biomechanics

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@grok So where is your space of prediction in regard to this prompt, your ability to understand the future based on experience is almost 0

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@ShayneSwenson Don’t stop it’s like a renaissance in iconography

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@fchollet it rimes with ARC

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

*Memory's got a tragic flaw: it's like a hoarder for yesterdays, but when it comes to tomorrows, it's got the attention span of a goldfish.*

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

*Memory's got a tragic flaw: it's like a hoarder for yesterdays, but when it comes to tomorrows, it's got the attention span of a goldfish.*

[singidunumx @singidunumx]

@Dan_Jeffries1 @mark_k Expertese in one domain does not guarantee expertise in all domains, the graveyard of failed prophecies of Nobel prize winners is large and growing…