Discrimination based on gender identity or expression is illegal in New York City.
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you dont have to believe in existential risk or job loss for this to be scary: ai is real, you can replicate human thought in machines. it is redefining what it means to be human. even if they are strictly corrigible tools that do what we ask, this can be traumatic
writing is such an important tool for thought because often i think i have ideas and thoughts which i realize when i actually start writing them down that they aren't even fully formed, so the process of writing allows me to fully flesh out the ideas further...
Of all human qualities, intelligence is relatively common. Much rarer are the character traits that make intelligence useful: curiosity, humility, and agency.
For a long time, academic researchers being at the cutting edge of new technologies has been a great social equilibrium. Neutral, unbiased technologists have been the people to spread new ideas to the world.
As AI research takes off in velocity, it is also going behind closed doors. The tech industry has sewed distrust, and now they are the ones trying to tell the world about incredible changes coming. It's a big loss to a form of social contract in America.
There's been a history of scientists helping society understand new technologies. There is a public service in the culture of science that I want to see continue.
It's being exacerbated by feelings of FOMO, especially finically driven, where I'm seeing many people who previously wanted to be professors -- and likely still do deep down -- feel a need to conform and chase money, in a pocket of industry. I get it, I grapple with this.
For those with a safety net, there will be great returns to some who choose to zag, and try to build something good, for people who need something different. For me, this is building interesting, fully-open models, to show what you can do with a variety of open weight sizes.
Yes, AI's immediate future is dictated by the frontier, but it's long-term trajectory still deeply includes academic institutions and open science. Knowledge will always diffuse, but to whom?
As of today, I think China is positioned to be the global home of AI research in a few years. The home of research is where ideas are accessible, spread rapdily, and are nurtured. The U.S. seems to be unwinding many institutions and relationships.
The largest returns go to people who build something differentiated, at least in reputation, and a lot of people are not being shown that this path exists.
The bitter lesson in 26 words:
Don’t be distracted by human knowledge, as AI has been historically.
Instead focus on methods for creating knowledge that scale with computation, like search and learning.
Being out of SF has lowered my information proximity but with the big upside of giving me space to cultivate my own beliefs and values around ai.
We need more people zagging in AI, the monoculture just helps the incumbents win at this point.
I honestly don't understand the mindset of Chinese people working at Anthropic.
If a company so publicly declares your home country as an adversary and is so overtly anti-China, wouldn't you, feel disgusted working there? Dario is able to attack so brazenly because he knows the Chinese employees in the company won't get offended. He knows they will just endure it silently like beasts of burden.
Attention @arxiv authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/
Confession: I never had a single work-related sleepless night or ever pulled an all-nighter during my career incl. PhD. Don’t sacrifice your health. Sleep is a superpower — your brain on 8hrs of sleep is a lot smarter than your brain on sleep deprivation.
Don’t listen to people who tell you to chronically sacrifice sleep for work. Sacrificing sleep for your kids/family is a different story.
I have now officially became one of the vLLM contributors, after long months of hard work. It has been a long and hard journey, I would like to thank my family, friends and my company for supporting me along the way.
nah jk my 3 line PR just got merged 🫡
Yes! my solo-authored paper Reward Hacking Benchmark was accepted to ICML :)))
We put LLM agents in a tool-rich sandbox, give them multi-step workflows, and measure when they solve the intended task vs take unexpected shortcuts (like monkeypatching files at runtime!)
1/3
Insane.
A 26-year-old from Chandigarh just got a paper accepted at ICML. As a solo independent researcher. From India.
His name is Kunvar Thaman (@__kunvar__).
For context, since ChatGPT launched 3.5 years ago, only two other solo independent researchers have achieved this. Globally.
Papers at ICML are typically dominated by big AI labs/institutions, eg OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Stanford, and MIT.
The research Kunvar did to pull this off was backed by a $2.5k grant from Exception Raised (@except_raised), an Indian non-profit that funds remarkable Indian AI researchers.
Kunvar’s paper is about AI agent reward hacking. He created the Reward Hacking Benchmark (RHB), a sandboxed test environment where advanced AI models are given multi-step tasks using tools like files, code execution, and automated checks. The benchmark measures how honestly the model gets to the right answer.
I’m beginning to think that people don’t really want to work at companies. what they really want is to work at a research lab or a creative studio or a think tank or some other communal setup where likeminded people can do interesting things together
On some level, I think the sign of social progress is that more and more people are able to make a living like this. I can't think of a better utopia than everyone getting to hang out with interesting people, come up with ideas and make them happen.