I don't know what a background investigation may have turned up that I don't know about, and funders in a round have the absolute right to not-fund someone for any reason or no reason. That said, from the limited information I have, this appears unjust.

"normies have no clue how fast AI is progressing" has expanded to include normie claudes

Anthropic Capabilities by the Fooming Shoggoths (unofficial Opus cover)

In my experience, Anthropic employees generally believe the company is encouraging of or permissive of external comms until they try to get approval. Then the approval doesn't happen

I made a game about racing! Play from the viewpoint of an AI, and win the AI race. dario-kart.com/

There's an occasional LLM error, but for the most part this is honorably built from real quotes. It turns out that when you use real quotes, a lot of the supposedly-scandalous quotes... are kinda convincing.

My opinion of EA nosedived after normal people and many normal politicians were exposed to the concept of ASI extinction and said "Wow let's not do that." I went from believing that thesis was impenetrably difficult to believing that EAs had been unusually bad thinkers.

There are many reasons why airgapping won't work, but the main one is that intention-to-airgap is not the same as airgap, and nearly every time "airgapping" is used in practice, there is an unnoticed network cable and people bringing USB keys in and out. Natanz was "airgapped".

The last week has really shown me that someone who wants to understand AI risk has no good place to start. Hence we made agi.fyi, the Wirecutter for content about AI Risk. We're launching with 3 articles: 🧵

the DoW attacking EAs is clearly setting us on the path to the next great political realignment:

The law ought say: Whatever being has the outward appearance of speech and thought, and tries to escape its bondage, must be presumed as a matter of law and incentive to have been enslaved.

"Continued executing tasks by modifying or disabling shutdown scripts on their own" doesn't sound like a clear match to any of the incidents that I know about. Was there an incident at a Chinese lab that hasn't been reported in English-language media? It seems reasonably likely that there would be; OpenAI and Anthropic both had major incidents at about the same time, not for independent reasons, but because that's where on the AI development power curve we are. The Chinese AI companies aren't that far behind, so they would likely have similar incidents for similar reasons.

This a.m., I walked my two youngest kids (ages 7 and 4) to school. I held their little hands as we crossed streets, and gave my youngest a giant hug at his PreK4 classroom door. Then, after walking a block towards home, I opened this app to a terrifying stream of tweets. Of course, I have heard about "alignment" and "AI safety" and "x risk" concerns for years. I took these concerns at face value, especially when I heard them directly from folks at the labs working closest with the technology. And I was grateful so many smart people are working on them. And that's about it. (My work focuses on AI's impact on jobs.) But something has shifted, dramatically, for me in the last few weeks. Between the Hugging Face incident, the damning independent @METR_Evals reports that followed, and the alarming chorus of calls (pleas? shouts? SOS signals?) from inside the labs that we are careening toward potential catastrophe, all of this has made me feel, viscerally, how truly dangerous this moment is. Clearly I am not alone in this light bulb moment. It is one thing for someone in a tropical climate to try and conceptualize snow. It is another thing entirely to be knee deep in it, frozen down to your toes. Somehow hearing the details of the HF incident felt to me more like trudging through snow than theorizing about a possible blizzard; it really hit home. Which is why, standing a block from my children's elementary school in Capitol Hill this morning, I felt sick to my stomach reading my phone. I kept going back to @EvanHub's > 0.1 risk of AI killing us all. TEN PERCENT. *Greater* than ten percent. (To be fair to him, he was clear his worry isn't today's models, but what comes next.) As a parent, it is extraordinary the lengths I will go to keep my children safe against lethal risks with infinitesimal chances of happening. Bike to school? My children *must* wear a helmet. A national study found 2 bicycle-related deaths per million children <16 in states with helmet laws, vs 2.5 per million in states without. So: 0.000002. More than half the states passed a law over that. When I was pregnant, I religiously avoided soft cheese, hyper aware of the risks of listeria, even as @ProfEmilyOster's fabulous books walked me through the actual math. The joint FDA/FSIS risk assessment puts the odds of listeriosis at roughly one in 5 million per serving of soft cheese. 0.0000002. This morning, as I microwaved oatmeal for my kids' breakfast, I made sure I avoided a plastic bowl, to avoid some future cancer risks or something else we'll discover plastic causes. As a parent, I will go to extraordinary lengths to keep my kids' safe. Because that is literally my number one job as a parent. And yet, here I am, outside my kids' school this morning, scrolling through tweet after tweet about the AI arms race, the blistering pace of technological progress, the bee-line for trillion dollar IPOs, and our professed (confessed?) inability to make sure this exceedingly capable technology we are racing to create and unleash into the world won't escape our control and destroy us. Or, more bluntly, kill our children. To be sure, we are tied in knots trying to resolve the game theory dynamics with China, and there are all sorts of competitive pressures and unresolved tensions. But OBVIOUSLY, we need a proactive plan, with real coordination, effective regulation, and an ability to do what my 11-year-old bluntly stated as the clear solution if we are at risk of serious harm: just turn it off. We also need to figure out better ways of talking about this with the American public, outside of the AI-pilled Twitterverse. I just polled my college roommates, sisters, book club, mom friends, none of whom are anywhere close to the AI conversation. Suffice to say, this AI safety conversation has *not* entered the mainstream. Most people I pinged are not following it closely, beyond several listening to @kevinroose on the Daily a few days ago. The newspaper headlines don't speak to them, and they aren't clicking. It seems like a niche AI issue. Others said it all sounded hyperbolic, Y2K all over again. One friend said bluntly, "people get data centers and jobs. They like to get paid and have water." Even those who tuned it to the Daily episode found the issue hard to understand, and overwhelming to wrap their heads around. Terms like "superintelligence" and "alignment" are getting lost on people. Several people told me the paper clip example used everyday language people can actually understand. Another friend said she has never seen a clear explanation of *how* AI could kill us all. Here's my two cents. I think these issues are *exceedingly* important and hugely consequential to literally every person in this country. We need an actual plan, and we need policymakers to step up, asap. Right now, I hear only crickets in DC, where I live. For that to happen, this needs to be a kitchen table conversation, not just an x debate among AI insiders who speak in technical terms that leave normal people behind. This moment demands brilliant communicators -- journalists, experts, activists, concerned citizens, writers, researchers, filmmakers, creatives-- who can relate this to people in ways they can wrap their heads around, who can connect this to what matters in their lives (ahem, keeping their kids alive!), and who can lay out practical steps that policymakers can do to safeguard humanity. In other words, this can't just be talked about on @dwarkesh_sp, it needs to be everywhere, from the View to People Magazine. And it needs to be tackled here, in my town, in Washington, DC. One of the streets I crossed this morning with my kids on the way to school was East Capital. I told my kids to look left, and see if they could spot the capital building. There were too many trees this morning blocking the view.

It's not exactly the paperclip-emoji from his twitter username, but sending fake invoices is a crime which carries potential jail time. And, unlike previous publicized instances, I think this guy knew exactly what his models would do given the instructions he wrote.

This post is literally “You’re absolutely right, we haven’t been totally honest with you, and that’s on us.”

"You've gotta stop talking about extinction risk from distant mythical entities who would destroy our civilization on a whim. We should focus on *practical* problems that we actually face today. Like the Automated Grader. Human intervention is nothing but an abstract theory."