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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...
3 months ago
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3 months 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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Gemini 2.5 is the New SoTA Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is America’s next top large language model.
3 months ago
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Levels of Friction Scott Alexander famously warned us to Beware Trivial Inconveniences.
5 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...
3 months ago
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3 months 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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On GPT-4.5 It’s happening.
4 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...
5 months ago
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5 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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More on Various AI Action Plans Last week I covered Anthropic’s relatively strong submission, and OpenAI’s toxic submission. This...
3 months ago
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3 months 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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AI #113: The o3 Era Begins Enjoy it while it lasts.
2 months 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...
4 months ago
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4 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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Go Grok Yourself That title is Elon Musk’s fault, not mine, I mean, sorry not sorry:
4 months ago
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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...
3 months ago
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3 months 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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Fun With GPT-4o Image Generation Google dropped Gemini Flash Image Generation and then Gemini 2.5 Pro, so of course to ensure Google...
3 months ago
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3 months 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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Grok Grok This is a post in two parts.
4 months ago
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On Google's Safety Plan Google Lays Out Its Safety Plans
3 months ago
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Medical Roundup #4 It seems like as other things drew our attention more, medical news slowed down.
4 months 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...
3 months ago
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3 months ago
Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment.
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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...
4 months ago
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4 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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On Deliberative Alignment Not too long ago, OpenAI presented a paper on their new strategy of Deliberative Alignment.
5 months ago
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o3 Is a Lying Liar I love o3.
2 months ago
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On Emergent Misalignment One hell of a paper dropped this week.
4 months ago
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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.
4 months ago
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The Mask Comes Off: A Trio of Tales This post covers three recent shenanigans involving OpenAI.
4 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...
4 months 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...
4 months ago
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4 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 OpenAI's Model Spec 2.0 OpenAI made major revisions to their Model Spec.
4 months ago
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They Took MY Job? No, they didn’t.
3 months ago
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AI #105: Hey There Alexa It’s happening!
4 months ago
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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 months ago
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3 months ago
Ben Thompson interviewed Sam Altman recently about building a consumer tech company, and about the history of OpenAI.
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Time to Welcome Claude 3.7 Anthropic has reemerged from stealth and offers us Claude 3.7.
4 months ago
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AI #110: Of Course You Know... Yeah.
3 months ago
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OpenAI #11: America Action Plan OpenAI Tells Us Who They Are
3 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...
5 months ago
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Response to Scott Alexander on Imprisonment Back in November 2024, Scott Alexander asked: Do longer prison sentences reduce crime?
4 months 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.
5 months ago
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AI #106: Not so Fast This was GPT-4.5 week.
4 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...
4 months ago
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4 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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The Most Forbidden Technique The Most Forbidden Technique is training an AI using interpretability techniques.
4 months 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.
4 months ago
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AI #108: Straight Line on a Graph The x-axis of the graph is time.
3 months ago
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On Writing #1 This isn’t primarily about how I write.
4 months 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...
4 months ago
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4 months 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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Going Nova There is an attractor state where LLMs exhibit the persona of an autonomous and self-aware AI...
3 months ago
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3 months 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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On MAIM and Superintelligence Strategy Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang released an extensive paper titled Superintelligence...
3 months ago
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3 months 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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o3 Will Use Its Tools For You OpenAI has finally introduced us to the full o3 along with o4-mini.
2 months ago
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More Fun With GPT-4o Image Generation Greetings from Costa Rica!
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 months ago
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The Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit It doesn’t look good.
4 months ago
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You Better Mechanize Or you had better not.
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...
3 months ago
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3 months 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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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...
2 months ago
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2 months 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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AI #109: Google Fails Marketing Forever What if they released the new best LLM, and almost no one noticed?
3 months ago
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GPT-4.1 Is a Mini Upgrade Yesterday’s news alert, nevertheless: The verdict is in.
2 months ago
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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...
3 months ago
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3 months 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 months 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...
3 months ago
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3 months 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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DeepSeek Panic at the App Store DeepSeek released v3.
5 months ago
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We're in Deep Research The latest addition to OpenAI’s Pro offerings is their version of Deep Research.
5 months ago
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Operator No one is talking about OpenAI’s Operator.
5 months ago
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o3-mini Early Days and the OpenAI AMA New model, new hype cycle, who dis?
5 months ago
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GPT-4o Sycophancy Post Mortem Last week I covered that GPT-4o was briefly an (even more than usually) absurd sycophant, and how...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Last week I covered that GPT-4o was briefly an (even more than usually) absurd sycophant, and how OpenAI responded to that.
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OpenAI Claims Nonprofit Will Retain Nominal Control Your voice has been heard.
2 months 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...
2 months ago
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2 months 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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DeepSeek: Lemon, It's Wednesday It’s been another *checks notes* two days, so it’s time for all the latest DeepSeek news.
5 months ago
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AI #101: The Shallow End The avalanche of DeepSeek news continues.
5 months ago
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AI #115: The Evil Applications Division It can be bleak out there, but the candor is very helpful, and you occasionally get a win.
2 months ago
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Meta Pivots on Content Moderation There’s going to be some changes made.
5 months ago
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Cheaters Gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheaters.
2 months ago
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Stargate AI-1 There was a comedy routine a few years ago.
5 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...
5 months ago
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5 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 #112: Release the Everything OpenAI has upgraded its entire suite of models.
2 months ago
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NYC Congestion Pricing: Early Days People have to pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street.
5 months ago
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DeepSeek: Don't Panic As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation.
5 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.
5 months ago
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Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025 Some points of order before we begin the monthly:
5 months ago
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AI #99: Farewell to Biden The fun, as it were, is presumably about to begin.
5 months ago
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On the OpenAI Economic Blueprint Table of Contents
5 months ago
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Zuckerberg's Dystopian AI Vision You think it’s bad now?
2 months 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...
5 months ago
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5 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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On DeepSeek's r1 r1 from DeepSeek is here, the first serious challenge to OpenAI’s o1.
5 months ago
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AI #114: Liars, Sycophants and Cheaters Gemini 2.5 Pro is sitting in the corner, sulking.
2 months ago
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OpenAI Preparedness Framework 2.0 Right before releasing o3, OpenAI updated its Preparedness Framework to 2.0.
2 months ago
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Worries About AI Are Usually Complements Not Substitutes A common claim is that concern about [X] ‘distracts’ from concern about [Y].
2 months ago
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Dating Roundup #4: An App for That Previously: #1, #2, #3.
2 months ago
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GPT-4o Responds to Negative Feedback Whoops.
2 months ago
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GPT-4o Is An Absurd Sycophant GPT-4o tells you what it thinks you want to hear.
2 months ago