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Don't Worry About the Vase

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Levels of Friction Scott Alexander famously warned us to Beware Trivial Inconveniences.
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...
a month ago
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a month 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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The Risk of Gradual Disempowerment from AI The baseline scenario as AI becomes AGI becomes ASI (artificial superintelligence), if nothing more...
a month ago
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a month 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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Go Grok Yourself That title is Elon Musk’s fault, not mine, I mean, sorry not sorry:
a month 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...
a month ago
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a month 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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On Deliberative Alignment Not too long ago, OpenAI presented a paper on their new strategy of Deliberative Alignment.
a month ago
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Medical Roundup #4 It seems like as other things drew our attention more, medical news slowed down.
a month ago
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On GPT-4.5 It’s happening.
3 weeks ago
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The Mask Comes Off: A Trio of Tales This post covers three recent shenanigans involving OpenAI.
a month 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...
a month ago
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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...
a month ago
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a month 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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AI #102: Made in America I remember that week I used r1 a lot, and everyone was obsessed with DeepSeek.
a month ago
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On OpenAI's Model Spec 2.0 OpenAI made major revisions to their Model Spec.
a month ago
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The Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit It doesn’t look good.
a month 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...
3 weeks ago
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Grok Grok This is a post in two parts.
a month ago
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Time to Welcome Claude 3.7 Anthropic has reemerged from stealth and offers us Claude 3.7.
4 weeks ago
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AI #105: Hey There Alexa It’s happening!
4 weeks 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...
a month ago
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a month 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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The Manus Marketing Madness While at core there is ‘not much to see,’ it is, in two ways, a sign of things to come.
2 weeks ago
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On Writing #1 This isn’t primarily about how I write.
3 weeks ago
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AI #106: Not so Fast This was GPT-4.5 week.
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 weeks ago
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On Emergent Misalignment One hell of a paper dropped this week.
3 weeks ago
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Operator No one is talking about OpenAI’s Operator.
a month ago
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NYC Congestion Pricing: Early Days People have to pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street.
2 months 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.
a month ago
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AI #101: The Shallow End The avalanche of DeepSeek news continues.
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.
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...
2 months ago
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2 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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DeepSeek Panic at the App Store DeepSeek released v3.
a month ago
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Stargate AI-1 There was a comedy routine a few years ago.
2 months ago
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On DeepSeek's r1 r1 from DeepSeek is here, the first serious challenge to OpenAI’s o1.
2 months ago
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Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025 Some points of order before we begin the monthly:
2 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.
2 months ago
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o3-mini Early Days and the OpenAI AMA New model, new hype cycle, who dis?
a month ago
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DeepSeek: Don't Panic As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation.
a month 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...
2 months ago
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2 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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On the OpenAI Economic Blueprint Table of Contents
2 months ago
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AI #99: Farewell to Biden The fun, as it were, is presumably about to begin.
2 months ago
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Meta Pivots on Content Moderation There’s going to be some changes made.
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 week ago
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a week 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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The Most Forbidden Technique The Most Forbidden Technique is training an AI using interpretability techniques.
2 weeks ago
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Response to Scott Alexander on Imprisonment Back in November 2024, Scott Alexander asked: Do longer prison sentences reduce crime?
2 weeks 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...
2 weeks ago
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2 weeks 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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On MAIM and Superintelligence Strategy Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang released an extensive paper titled Superintelligence...
a week ago
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a week 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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OpenAI #11: America Action Plan OpenAI Tells Us Who They Are
a week ago
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They Took MY Job? No, they didn’t.
a week ago
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AI #108: Straight Line on a Graph The x-axis of the graph is time.
a week ago
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Going Nova There is an attractor state where LLMs exhibit the persona of an autonomous and self-aware AI...
a week ago
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a week 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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More on Various AI Action Plans Last week I covered Anthropic’s relatively strong submission, and OpenAI’s toxic submission. This...
4 days ago
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4 days 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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On (Not) Feeling the AGI Ben Thompson interviewed Sam Altman recently about building a consumer tech company, and about the...
3 days ago
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3 days ago
Ben Thompson interviewed Sam Altman recently about building a consumer tech company, and about the history of OpenAI.
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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...
2 days ago
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2 days 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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AI #109: Google Fails Marketing Forever What if they released the new best LLM, and almost no one noticed?
9 hours ago