urdsul

[urdsul @urdsul]

@BrittonSki1 @Liv_Boeree Expound please?

It's clear there are many levels to this game, though I am not sure which one(s) you're pointing to.

[Michael Huang ⏸️ @michhuan]

OpenAI’s Dean Ball compares humankind to the death of a star and says there will be a “final flowering of humanity.”

But I don’t want a final flowering of humanity, Dean. I don’t want humans to go extinct like a dying star. I want humanity to flower now and in the future.

[Brangus🔍⏹️ @RatOrthodox]

I love spaces like this where it kinda seems like an agoraphobic and a claustrophobic could comfortably meetup and hangout.

[Lars Andersen @LarsAnders1620]

Police go directly for the circuit breaker panel to avoid being filmed

This post will be in English, because there apparently is a lot of interest in what happened to me yesterday.

I'm a libertarian danish privacy activist and former police officer and I have been doing activism for about 15 years.

I have had a bit of time to think about my arrest and the actions of the masked police that broke down my door - with no prior warning.

The prefece to the story is, that I in a kind of roundabout and (I think) humorous way published "my two favorite numbers" by spelling out a 10 diget and a 8 diget number with letters. I didn't tell what they ment, but they where prime minister Mette Frederiksen's social security and phone number.

I also published a screenshot of me trying to interview Mette Frederiksen on what app, asking her about her wanting to ban encryption (CSA) and introducing mass surveillance via granting the police intelligence services access to all sorts of information (medical journals, social media posts, DNA registers ment for research and so on).

That resulted in me being arrested by armed and masked police breaking down my door without me having any chance of opening it for them.

When the two civilian dressed masked men entered the apparentment one of them immediately went for the circuit breaker panel to shut off the power to my router. They then removed my Google Nest cameras - because they knew that the cameras contains local storage.

That way they could avoid having video of the (in my view) illegal arrest. Only the few moments before the power is cut was filmed. There is video of me asking them for the charges - and them refusing to tell me (which is illegal). But I can't access it, because they took the cameras.

I'm not even sure if that is legal. In Denmark it is (nominally) totally legal to film the police. That way it is possible to know what happened and it's not just your word against there's.

Denmark and the West are moving in the wrong direction, and it makes me sad.

[Simon Lermen @SimonLermenAI]

Brilliant writing from the NYT. Do yourself a favour and ignore the rest of the article.

[Genevieve Jurvetson @gjurvetson]

I say this as someone who eats meat:

The Save Our Bacon Act is a massive stain on the American conscience.

We've made real progress on animal welfare in recent years, and there's still so much more to do, but this bill represents a tragic step backwards.

What's especially troubling is that the push is coming from Smithfield, a company owned by Chinese investors, whose interests are not aligned with American farmers. This would make it harder for local, responsible producers to compete with maximally cruel industrial operations.

We can support American farmers, produce affordable food, and treat animals more humanely. These goals are not mutually exclusive.

If you agree, please contact @SecRollins and your senators to urge them to oppose this inhumane legislation.

[urdsul @urdsul]

@cricketcincy @mike_klain @elizaorlins I think he may be referring to Anthropic being one of Alex's donors, which I believe fits their stance on the risks from AI anyway?

[Eliza Orlins @elizaorlins]

AI billionaires have spent $8,027,347 trying to beat one New York State Assemblymember.

His name is Alex Bores, and his offense was passing the strongest AI safety law in the country. I broke down who's behind it and why it's backfiring.

Please read & share: 🔗⬇️

[Yonatan Cale ⏹️ @YonatanCale]

Wouldn't part of this plan be "say in your official communications that there is a monster and that everyone should stop"? Also "here's why we decided to go ahead of the other teams even though we said we won't" and saying "the main dangerous part is the monster will kill you, not that it will take your job"?

[Helen Toner @hlntnr]

Even before Mythos I was getting asked more and more what Anthropic's deal is, and why tf they're acting the way they're acting if they believe what they say they believe.

The best answer I can give is that their basic worldview is something like:

1. There are giant, dangerous monsters in the forest

2. We see others going out and making loud noises that will rouse the monsters, and they're not going to stop because of all the treasure and magical artifacts that can be found in the forest

3. We believe the best way we can help is to send out our own vanguard to go faster and farther into the forest than everyone else, because we'll spend a ton on monster containment and taming and we'll also send back detailed reports of what monsters we're finding so that the townspeople can ready themselves, which those other guys won't do

On the one hand I understand how they got there, and I think it's possible they're basically right. On the other hand it's not hard to see why this approach makes people wonder if you're crazy or lying or both.

[Eli Tyre @EpistemicHope]

I work in AI policy full-time.

I'm taking time off work, volunteering 12+ hours a day to get Alex Bores elected.

If you're a Democrat in Manhattan, I'd love talk with you for 15 min about where AI is heading, AI risks, and why we urgently need voices like Alex in Congress.

sign up here: https://t.co/ZQiWlTvEQe

(All opinions are my own and do not represent the views of my employer, a 501c3 that does not endorse political candidates.)

[Alvaro ⏸️ Cuba @GroundhogStrat]

We want a pause because it is our right to demand caution from world-altering technology in a democratic society, and it’s obvious how the goals of these companies are dangerous. Not because Anthropic says it might be a good idea now. Our legitimacy does not derive from them.

[David Abecassis @Volty]

1. Our agreement permits inference, broadly, to continue. It only limits AI training above 10^24 FLOP. In Article VIII, we establish that the agreement restricts only research that advances toward ASI or undermines verification. We permit medical diagnostics and drug discovery, for example, among other non-general capabilities. As long as the research focuses on a narrow domain (like materials science or climate modeling) and does not increase "general cognitive capabilities," it is not subject to restrictions.
There is no seizing of assets, but rather mandatory monitoring which can involve forced consolidation of compute into monitored datacenters by the signatory government domestically. (No international centralization of AI monitoring!) So, for example, a small university lab’s research compute would be relocated to a monitored datacenter but is still owned and (remotely) operated by that lab.

2. We architected our agreement to specifically not ban the additional production and installation of compute. The value of such for inference and real-world economic activity is only increasing. So the total economic impact on parts of the AI supply chain are probably far less than existential. We note that many of the relevant players have multi-year backlogs to clear at full production capacity, and building out the infrastructure for model development is only a part of that.

3. Nothing happens to consumer AI apps. If anything additional resources are freed up which can accelerate adoption and integration of these tools.

4. Individual governments handle their own verification and monitoring, but some transparency, random inspections, etc. to either China or the US will be required. Our agreement opts for comprehensive domestic monitoring and shares the least information with rivals (directly) which establishes required confidence. There is no multilateral international AI inspection apparatus in our current version of the agreement, which is a change from the first version we published.

5. Robotics and other applications are unaffected to the extent that progress can continue without developing new models with runs that exceed the compute limit.

6. Our agreement does not attempt to set up a “binding” constraint, in that we do not consider the legal, reputational constraints on US/China to be the active ingredient which leads to stability of the treaty. Instead, we establish a clear understanding on both sides of what behavior is restricted and what consequences must follow otherwise, with enough transparency and non-interference with intelligence gathering to create confidence in each side that the other is adhering to the agreement.

Rather than legal constraints, I consider deterrence as the framework for thinking about the stability of the agreement. This is the historical method for constraining a major power, including the use of strategically significant assets. Nuclear deterrence prevented Soviet employment of its conventional superiority against Western Europe. A Soviet dead hand blocked what was otherwise the possibility of a perfect first strike (nuclear or otherwise). Stability emerges when both sides coordinate to make the consequences of aggression clear. Is that a “binding constraint” that one side “accepts”? No, not legally, textually. Not in the sense of “I staked my reputation and my honor in the arena of international relations”. Where agreements have a role to play is in helping to maintain the conditions for successful deterrence. An example of this is the anti-ballistic missile treaty, in which both sides limited their deployment of missile defenses so that deterrence could be maintained.

[Matt Stamper @Sneketoshi]

I want to introduce you to Steve. He’s 83. His wife died a few months ago and he comes to this lodge in Spring Mill, Indiana and draws. He taught art in Terre Haute, IN his whole life. He also did courtroom sketches in court cases. In the comments I’ll share some pics from his sketchbook. He was excited when I said I was going to share his sketches with the world.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀 @peterwildeford]

OpenAI joins Anthropic in thinking pausing may be needed 👀

"there should be an international organization that helps [...] make it possible for the world to take coordinated action, including slowing frontier development when needed"

[Nikola Jurkovic @nikolaj2030]

Current AI systems are very deceptive and reward-hacky at the frontier of their capabilites, and if this keeps being the case, then the idea of automating AI research seems extremely dangerous.

[Chris McGuire @ChrisRMcGuire]

I share concerns about China’s access to advanced AI models, but if the admin feels so strongly about this, I have a series of questions it should answer:

- Why did it loosen export controls to allow AI chip sales to China, which allow China to build its own Mythos?
- Why is it not enforcing existing export controls that would prevent China from smuggling AI chips from Southeast Asia and other countries?
- Why is it not enforcing existing export controls that would prohibit Chinese companies from training advanced AI models on remotely accessed AI chips? Or imposing tighter controls on remote access?
- Why has it still not closed a loophole it created that allows Chinese front companies outside China from making AI chips at TSMC or Samsung?
- Why has it not tightened controls on China’s access to semiconductor manufacturing equipment (which have not been updated in over 18 months - the longest the US has ever gone without updating them)?
- Why has it not imposed equivalent controls on all advanced AI models being served to China/Chinese companies?
- Why did it restrict access to all countries and foreign nationals accessing Mythos/Fable, not just China?

If the admin was serious about addressing the challenges posed by China in AI, it would be using export controls to address all of these questions and build a comprehensive strategy to prevent China from building or obtaining advanced models. But over the last 1.5 years, it has loosened or ignored controls on China, and only opened new loopholes in controls it inherited. If the admin truly has deep concerns about China’s access to advanced models, it has to act accordingly. It isn’t.

[MetaCritic “SnapCritic Summer” Capital @MetacriticCap]

An Anthropic hype machine believer dies and goes to heaven. Upon arriving, God grants them the chance to ask one question about anything in the universe. The hype believer eagerly asks, “Did the Trump administration ban Mythos to hype Anthropic?”

God replies: “The Trump administration believes Mythos poses a real national security threat, and they acted alone.”

The theorist pauses, nods slowly, and mutters to himself, “Wow… this goes higher than I thought.”

[Jeffrey Ladish @JeffLadish]

But I try not to lose track of the plot. Superintelligence is not a cyber capability or a bio capability. It’s the end of the game.