Christian

Product Lead for @GroupMe at @Microsoft | Longtime Brooklyn-ite now giving the PNW a spin

[GroupMe @GroupMe]

the arena was loud. the group chat was louder.

we built digital bleachers on GroupMe for march madness👇

[Christian @xncroft]

sharp observation on where AI-era design is evolving:

"code and design used to move in parallel tracks..there's no common substrate to keep them in sync", @clairevo

here's to the tedium of old UX references being behind us.

how i ai ep worth watching👇
https://t.co/pzr8DlQdln

[Christian @xncroft]

lol i tried to run a team of PM agents and the Director got itself fired 🤣

[Christian @xncroft]

@jaredhecht @MarkDavisSays deserves a shoutout, too! He’s the engineer whose passion single-handedly carried the flame during that under-resourced GroupMe era 💪

[Matt Clifford @matthewclifford]

This morning I had my first visceral “🤯” moment with AI for ~2 years

🧵on o1 and cryptic crosswords:

My test for new models is a set of cryptic crossword clues that aren’t online (my granny wrote them). Every model so far has been completely useless at them… but o1 gets them

[Christian @xncroft]

NY state may have paved the road to teenage hell despite their good intentions with the "SAFE for Kids Act" that bans addictive feeds. I agree with battling screentime, but fundamentally cutting off algorithmic feeds is not the answer here.
https://t.co/DXxc47BL64

[Christian @xncroft]

#thingsilearnedtoday The domain https://t.co/xBzPPlS8JE is owned by and redirects to https://t.co/Md9wmFQUwE🤔

[Christian @xncroft]

Millions of human hours saved (on a task I don't know any engineer who likes to do)

[keith 𓅪 @keithsignal]

This AI generated SOP feature by @loom is a game changer. 🙏

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The effort to protect innovation and open source continues. I believe we’re all better off if anyone can carry out basic AI research and share their innovations. Right now, I’m deeply concerned about California's proposed law SB-1047. It’s a long, complex bill with many parts that require safety assessments, shutdown capability for models, and so on.

There are many things wrong with this bill, but I’d like to focus here on just one: It defines an unreasonable “hazardous capability” designation that may make builders of large AI models liable if someone uses their models to do something that exceeds the bill’s definition of harm (such as causing $500 million in damage). That is practically impossible for any AI builder to ensure. If the bill is passed in its present form, it will stifle AI model builders, especially open source developers.

Some AI applications, for example in healthcare, are risky. But as I wrote previously, regulators should regulate applications rather than technology.
- Technology refers to tools that can be applied in many ways to solve various problems.
- Applications are specific implementations of technologies designed to meet particular customer needs.

For example, an electric motor is a technology. When we put it in a blender, an electric vehicle, dialysis machine, or guided bomb, it becomes an application. Imagine if we passed laws saying, if anyone uses a motor in a harmful way, the motor manufacturer is liable. Motor makers would either shut down or make motors so tiny as to be useless for most applications. If we pass such a law, sure, we might stop people from building guided bombs, but we’d also lose blenders, electric vehicles, and dialysis machines. In contrast, if we look at specific applications, like blenders, we can more rationally assess risks and figure out how to make sure they’re safe, and even ban classes of applications, like certain types of munitions.

Safety is a property of the application, not a property of the technology (or model), as @random_walker and @sayashk have pointed out. Whether a blender is a safe one can’t be determined by examining the electric motor. A similar argument holds for AI.

SB-1047 doesn’t account for this distinction. It ignores the reality that the number of beneficial uses of AI models is, like electric motors, vastly greater than the number of harmful ones. But, just as no one knows how to build a motor that can’t be used to cause harm, no one has figured out how to make sure an AI model can’t be adapted to harmful uses. In the case of open source models, there’s no known defense to fine-tuning to remove RLHF alignment. And jailbreaking work has shown that even closed-source, proprietary models that have been properly aligned can be attacked in ways that make them give harmful responses. Indeed, the sharp-witted @elder_plinius regularly tweets about jailbreaks for closed models. Kudos also to Anthropic’s @cem__anil and collaborators for publishing their work on many-shot jailbreaking, an attack that can get leading large language models to give inappropriate responses and is hard to defend against.

California has been home to a lot of innovation in AI. I’m worried that this anti-competitive, anti-innovation proposal has gotten so much traction in the legislature. Worse, other jurisdictions often follow California, and it would be awful if they were to do so in this instance.

SB-1047 passed in a key vote in the State Senate in May, but it still has additional steps before it becomes law. I hope you will speak out against it if you get a chance to do so.

[Original text (with links): https://t.co/MOQqFF6cID ]

[Christian @xncroft]

New favorite album to float your way @flantz

Drop 7 from Little Simz https://t.co/Tz9g3pgLWm

[GroupMe @GroupMe]

Wherever, whenever, in the moment, always together 💙

Introducing video calls in GroupMe, by @MicrosoftTeams – coming soon

[Christian @xncroft]

Incredible to watch this moment as an employee inside Microsoft. I’m not on the Responsible AI team, but I’m glad they’re there and proud of my friends on it for solving the hard problems to keep these AI innovations safe

[Microsoft @Microsoft]

How much of your day is spent drafting emails, preparing presentations, or staring at a blank page? AI can help lighten the load.

Introducing @Microsoft365 Copilot—the next era of work: https://t.co/1DjXfsJvyj

[Jared Hecht @jaredhecht]

Bing and the AI’ification of MSFT is cool and stuff, but the most impressive thing Microsoft has accomplished this year is giving GroupMe a facelift for the first time in nearly a decade. Nice work @justinchando! Excited to see where this goes.

[Christian @xncroft]

Excited to share that @GroupMe just dropped a major update, that I feel lucky to be a part of! Interviewing college students about an app they use daily has been a career delight, and I can't wait to see these features light up group chats on campuses everywhere✨

[GroupMe @GroupMe]

Say hello to the new GroupMe 💙 
🪄 All-new design 
👄 Topics in group chats 
🤳 Expressive camera

[Christian @xncroft]

Love this analogy that references the classic Chipotle billboard, "Problem statements are like silver burritos. Everyone on your team has a unique version of the problem in their heads."

[Christian @xncroft]

@517CrunchTime would love to chat more about your investing group on GroupMe. Pls ping me on DM to discuss

[Christian @xncroft]

@framebridge NEVER AGAIN! I made an order on 9/26 that I’m still waiting on. I’ve contacted ur chat support 2x in 3 wks for status & all they say is my order will be framed “in a few days” w/ no ETA. I trusted you w/ family heirlooms & my money and no support is what you provide

[Christian @xncroft]

@xinroman https://t.co/q0MDJJd2D2

[Christian @xncroft]

@andreslib Yeah, it seemed like working backwards from the bias of a stilted theory and finding the data points to slot into it. @MKTWeconomics Room for improvement in your op-eds and the research partners (e.g, “Ned’s Research”) they cite

[Christian @xncroft]

@xinroman @chasing That’s also true. I get far fewer serendipitous moments than I used to. Would love to see your research!