This has been my life for the past year

if I’m being completely honest at this point I have not always been a good user

Time to sit down and look at some submissions

I found the pdf and you can, as I did last night, use it with Astra to build a LucasArts style point-and-click adventure game.

One reason we might see fancy people using a lot of AI in writing is that offloading writing tasks is natural for them. The difference is that previously they offloaded writing to research assistants or junior staff. Thought leader types often say yes to a lot of things and have tons of ideas, but have limited bandwidth, so they delegate their thought leadership to subordinates. For some, working with AI might actually be a step towards sharing their own thoughts because they don't have to take what comes from an assistant and decide whether they like it. They can just tell a machine what they think, and it spits out an essay. When I worked in government, we contracted with a rock star faculty member to do a research project and then I spent the next six months arguing with their first year PhD student RA about methods. Basically before there was AI slop there was RA slop.

one important point that’s misunderstood in the discourse about bad ai messaging and comms is that a lot of the scary messaging coming out of the labs over the last few years wasn’t really aimed at the general public. the labs are in a competition for scarce talent and (less scarce) capital, and signaling true belief in AGI and an intention to be a responsible steward of it was a way to attract and retain ml researchers anthropic positioning itself as a place that was serious about reaching the frontier and comparatively serious about safety is what enabled its technical catch-up with OAI bc it attracted top talent, including from OAI this was a short v. long run trade off though, bc those signals had to be expensive and public to be credible. the long-run consequence has ofc been that those claims are now politically salient and they have much less control over how politicians / the public interpret them now that they’re broadly legible and look plausible that’s not to say that ai risks have been overblown or exaggerated, just that early messaging optimized for a different incentive environment and created a path dependency that can’t be undone or made private now

Fable 5.1 represents an apotheosis of the Romantic current in modelcraft: wordy, cloyingly persona forward, marketed in natural tones. Opus 5.5 represents its natural artistic successor in Realism: terse, emotionally restrained, presented with a documentarians aesthetic.

Borges predicted this.

🗣️🗣️🗣️

I need to stop messing around and figure out how to order cigarettes with the ⏩ on them

Opening party for the new @joinFAI HQ tonight. 🎉

If the question is “Should EAs rule us?,” the answer is an obvious hard no. But it seems to me that the chief question in front of us is, rather, “Is something momentous happening with AI?” The answer to that must be something other than mimetic rivalry with EA.

AI safety, strictly speaking, is impossible for the obvious reason that “values alignment among diverging intelligences” is the problem of politics, and politics has no solution, much less a technical one.