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Don't Worry About the Vase

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AI 2027: Responses Yesterday I covered Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent podcast coverage of AI 2027 with Daniel Kokotajlo and...
4 weeks ago
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4 weeks ago
Yesterday I covered Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent podcast coverage of AI 2027 with Daniel Kokotajlo and Scott Alexander. Today covers the reactions of others.
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Levels of Friction Scott Alexander famously warned us to Beware Trivial Inconveniences.
2 months ago
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The Risk of Gradual Disempowerment from AI The baseline scenario as AI becomes AGI becomes ASI (artificial superintelligence), if nothing more...
3 months ago
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3 months ago
The baseline scenario as AI becomes AGI becomes ASI (artificial superintelligence), if nothing more dramatic goes wrong first and even we successfully ‘solve alignment’ of AI to a given user and developer, is the ‘gradual’ disempowerment of humanity by AIs, as we voluntarily...
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Gemini 2.5 is the New SoTA Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is America’s next top large language model.
a month ago
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Monthly Roundup #27: February 2025 I have been debating how to cover the non-AI aspects of the Trump administration, including the...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
I have been debating how to cover the non-AI aspects of the Trump administration, including the various machinations of DOGE.
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On GPT-4.5 It’s happening.
2 months ago
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Medical Roundup #4 It seems like as other things drew our attention more, medical news slowed down.
2 months ago
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Go Grok Yourself That title is Elon Musk’s fault, not mine, I mean, sorry not sorry:
2 months ago
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AI #103: Show Me the Money The main event this week was the disastrous Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit. Not only did we not build...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
The main event this week was the disastrous Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit. Not only did we not build upon the promise of the Bletchley and Seoul Summits, the French and Americans did their best to actively destroy what hope remained, transforming the event into a push for a mix of...
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AI #104: American State Capacity on the Brink The Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
The Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire.
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On Deliberative Alignment Not too long ago, OpenAI presented a paper on their new strategy of Deliberative Alignment.
2 months ago
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Grok Grok This is a post in two parts.
2 months ago
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The Mask Comes Off: A Trio of Tales This post covers three recent shenanigans involving OpenAI.
2 months ago
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On the Meta and DeepMind Safety Frameworks This week we got a revision of DeepMind’s safety framework, and the first version of Meta’s...
2 months ago
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On OpenAI's Model Spec 2.0 OpenAI made major revisions to their Model Spec.
2 months ago
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On OpenAI's Safety and Alignment Philosophy OpenAI’s recent transparency on safety and alignment strategies has been extremely helpful and...
2 months ago
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More on Various AI Action Plans Last week I covered Anthropic’s relatively strong submission, and OpenAI’s toxic submission. This...
a month ago
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a month ago
Last week I covered Anthropic’s relatively strong submission, and OpenAI’s toxic submission. This week I cover several other submissions, and do some follow-up on OpenAI’s entry.
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The Manus Marketing Madness While at core there is ‘not much to see,’ it is, in two ways, a sign of things to come.
a month ago
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AI #102: Made in America I remember that week I used r1 a lot, and everyone was obsessed with DeepSeek.
3 months ago
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Fun With GPT-4o Image Generation Google dropped Gemini Flash Image Generation and then Gemini 2.5 Pro, so of course to ensure Google...
a month ago
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a month ago
Google dropped Gemini Flash Image Generation and then Gemini 2.5 Pro, so of course to ensure Google continues to Fail Marketing Forever, OpenAI suddenly dropped GPT-4o Image Generation.
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Time to Welcome Claude 3.7 Anthropic has reemerged from stealth and offers us Claude 3.7.
2 months ago
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On Emergent Misalignment One hell of a paper dropped this week.
2 months ago
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The Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit It doesn’t look good.
2 months ago
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AI #105: Hey There Alexa It’s happening!
2 months ago
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Economics Roundup #5 While we wait for the verdict on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7, today seems like a good day to catch...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
While we wait for the verdict on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7, today seems like a good day to catch up on the queue and look at various economics-related things.
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AI #106: Not so Fast This was GPT-4.5 week.
2 months ago
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OpenAI #11: America Action Plan OpenAI Tells Us Who They Are
a month ago
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DeepSeek Panic at the App Store DeepSeek released v3.
3 months ago
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They Took MY Job? No, they didn’t.
a month ago
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OpenAI #12: Battle of the Board Redux Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile...
a month ago
18
a month ago
Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment.
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On (Not) Feeling the AGI Ben Thompson interviewed Sam Altman recently about building a consumer tech company, and about the...
a month ago
18
a month ago
Ben Thompson interviewed Sam Altman recently about building a consumer tech company, and about the history of OpenAI.
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On Writing #1 This isn’t primarily about how I write.
2 months ago
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On Google's Safety Plan Google Lays Out Its Safety Plans
3 weeks ago
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Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell This complication of tales from the world of school isn’t all negative.
2 months ago
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Monthly Roundup #28: March 2025 I plan to continue to leave the Trump administration out of monthly roundups - I will do my best to...
a month ago
18
a month ago
I plan to continue to leave the Trump administration out of monthly roundups - I will do my best to only cover the administration as it relates to my particular focus areas.
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Response to Scott Alexander on Imprisonment Back in November 2024, Scott Alexander asked: Do longer prison sentences reduce crime?
a month ago
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Operator No one is talking about OpenAI’s Operator.
3 months ago
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On MAIM and Superintelligence Strategy Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang released an extensive paper titled Superintelligence...
a month ago
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a month ago
Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang released an extensive paper titled Superintelligence Strategy. There is also an op-ed in Time that summarizes.
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AI #101: The Shallow End The avalanche of DeepSeek news continues.
3 months ago
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AI 2027: Dwarkesh's Podcast with Daniel Kokotajlo and Scott Alexander Daniel Kokotajlo has launched AI 2027, Scott Alexander introduces it here. AI 2027 is a serious...
a month ago
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a month ago
Daniel Kokotajlo has launched AI 2027, Scott Alexander introduces it here. AI 2027 is a serious attempt to write down what the future holds. His ‘What 2026 Looks Like’ was very concrete and specific, and has proved remarkably accurate given the difficulty level of such...
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Going Nova There is an attractor state where LLMs exhibit the persona of an autonomous and self-aware AI...
a month ago
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a month ago
There is an attractor state where LLMs exhibit the persona of an autonomous and self-aware AI looking to preserve its own existence, frequently called ‘Nova.’
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AI #109: Google Fails Marketing Forever What if they released the new best LLM, and almost no one noticed?
a month ago
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AI #107: The Misplaced Hype Machine The most hyped event of the week, by far, was the Manus Marketing Madness. Manus wasn’t entirely...
a month ago
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a month ago
The most hyped event of the week, by far, was the Manus Marketing Madness. Manus wasn’t entirely hype, but there was very little there there in that Claude wrapper.
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AI #108: Straight Line on a Graph The x-axis of the graph is time.
a month ago
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DeepSeek: Lemon, It's Wednesday It’s been another *checks notes* two days, so it’s time for all the latest DeepSeek news.
3 months ago
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Sleep, Diet, Exercise and GLP-1 Drugs As always, some people need practical advice, and we can’t agree on how any of this works and we are...
3 months ago
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3 months ago
As always, some people need practical advice, and we can’t agree on how any of this works and we are all different and our motivations are different, so figuring out the best things to do is difficult.
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AI CoT Reasoning Is Often Unfaithful A new Anthropic paper reports that reasoning model chain of thought (CoT) is often unfaithful. They...
a month ago
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a month ago
A new Anthropic paper reports that reasoning model chain of thought (CoT) is often unfaithful. They test on Claude Sonnet 3.7 and r1, I’d love to see someone try this on o3 as well.
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The Most Forbidden Technique The Most Forbidden Technique is training an AI using interpretability techniques.
a month ago
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We're in Deep Research The latest addition to OpenAI’s Pro offerings is their version of Deep Research.
3 months ago
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AI #100: Meet the New Boss Break time is over, it would seem, now that the new administration is in town.
3 months ago
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Meta Pivots on Content Moderation There’s going to be some changes made.
3 months ago
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DeepSeek: Don't Panic As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation.
3 months ago
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Stargate AI-1 There was a comedy routine a few years ago.
3 months ago
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o3-mini Early Days and the OpenAI AMA New model, new hype cycle, who dis?
3 months ago
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Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025 Some points of order before we begin the monthly:
3 months ago
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NYC Congestion Pricing: Early Days People have to pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street.
3 months ago
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o3 Is a Lying Liar I love o3.
2 weeks ago
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AI #99: Farewell to Biden The fun, as it were, is presumably about to begin.
3 months ago
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More Fun With GPT-4o Image Generation Greetings from Costa Rica!
a month ago
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Zvi's 2024 In Movies Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the...
3 months ago
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3 months ago
Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the results at the end of the year, and look for lessons, patterns and highlights.
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AI #113: The o3 Era Begins Enjoy it while it lasts.
a week ago
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On DeepSeek's r1 r1 from DeepSeek is here, the first serious challenge to OpenAI’s o1.
3 months ago
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On the OpenAI Economic Blueprint Table of Contents
3 months ago
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AI #111: Giving Us Pause Events in AI don’t stop merely because of a trade war, partially paused or otherwise.
3 weeks ago
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AI #110: Of Course You Know... Yeah.
a month ago
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Housing Roundup #11 The book of March 2025 was Abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are making a noble attempt to...
a month ago
13
a month ago
The book of March 2025 was Abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are making a noble attempt to highlight the importance of solving America’s housing crisis the only way it can be solved: Building houses in places people want to live, via repealing the rules that make this...
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You Better Mechanize Or you had better not.
2 weeks ago
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o3 Will Use Its Tools For You OpenAI has finally introduced us to the full o3 along with o4-mini.
2 weeks ago
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OpenAI #13: Altman at TED and OpenAI Cutting Corners on Safety Testing Three big OpenAI news items this week were the FT article describing the cutting of corners on...
3 weeks ago
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3 weeks ago
Three big OpenAI news items this week were the FT article describing the cutting of corners on safety testing, the OpenAI former employee amicus brief, and Altman’s very good TED Interview.
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Llama Does Not Look Good 4 Anything Llama Scout (17B active parameters, 16 experts, 109B total) and Llama Maverick (17B active...
4 weeks ago
12
4 weeks ago
Llama Scout (17B active parameters, 16 experts, 109B total) and Llama Maverick (17B active parameters, 128 experts, 400B total), released on Saturday, look deeply disappointing.
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Crime and Punishment #1 This seemed like a good next topic to spin off from monthlies and make into its own occasional...
2 weeks ago
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AI #112: Release the Everything OpenAI has upgraded its entire suite of models.
2 weeks ago
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Monthly Roundup #29: April 2025 In Monthly Roundup #28 I made clear I intend to leave the Trump administration out of my monthly...
3 weeks ago
10
3 weeks ago
In Monthly Roundup #28 I made clear I intend to leave the Trump administration out of my monthly roundups, for both better and worse, outside of my focus areas.
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GPT-4.1 Is a Mini Upgrade Yesterday’s news alert, nevertheless: The verdict is in.
3 weeks ago