Pinned tweet: if you've clicked on my profile because you're wondering why you follow me, my display name used to be Sam Atis and this used to be my profile picture, but I got sick of being anon. Please don't unfollow!

Jensen Huang: “Now, if they say [that their models aren’t safe] … then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down.”

The problem with tourism in Venice is mostly just that there are so many people you can barely move, it has nothing to do with the type of people they are.

A meaningful U.S.-China deal on AI pacing is probably going to be messier than most people think. We spoke to a dozen current and former diplomats who've led arms control negotiations with China and Russia to understand what it would take to get there. Full report below.

The end is nigh! (For superforecasters.)

Even Google's models are capable of carrying out hacks? We're cooked.

Trump has been terrible for free speech.

This actually happened

This is just an extremely odd timeline that we’re living in.

If you view AI as an alien mind (or if you anthropomorphise it), you’ll understand it a lot better than if you think of it as a tool. Tools alone don’t typically write prize winning literature or solve millennium prize problems or hack into websites.

AI insiders have warned that AI could be extremely dangerous and that national governments should help coordinate a slowdown in AI development. Some people have said this is regulatory capture, or that it's meant to push up their stock prices. A few things to think about: - "Pacing the frontier" mostly affects companies with frontier models (rather than smaller companies), making it very different from typical examples of regulatory capture. It hurts the incumbents while leaving startups, and even fast followers like Meta, unencumbered. - AI infrastructure stock valuations fell after company CEOs called for a slowdown, and there isn't any evidence we can see to show that comments about AI risk have ever boosted company valuations. - Several of these CEOs have been making lots of these sorts of warnings for years, before any obvious commercial incentive to do so. - Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic before any of his equity vested there (although he retains some at OpenAI, so he isn't totally financially disinterested). If this were purely self-interested, it likely would have made sense to wait another two months before resigning. - Much of this has come as a response to the HuggingFace Incident, which seems to have left lots of AI company CEOs/employees genuinely spooked. - Many of the people who are making a big deal about regulatory capture (like the quoted account) are themselves political operatives working on behalf of the AI industry. We work to hold AI companies to account, and we know that they're often misleading and willing to compromise on safety standards. (Check out our website to see a ton of examples of our reporting on this). Similarly, regulatory capture is real, so this isn't an inherently silly thing to be vigilant about. But in the past few weeks, it seems fairly obvious that the claims that AI is dangerous are mostly sincere.

Joke, joke, joke of a country

Don't buy into the cynicism. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei aren't calling for a slowdown because it's good for their companies, it's actually a costly signal that they're really worried.

RT @deanwball: There’s an impulse in American politics, a set of tactics and drives that has proven very effective at extinguishing speech.…

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While this feels big, I don’t think using Astra will feel qualitatively different to using Fable. I’d be surprised if it causes many people to “feel the AGI”.

It’s really important that society has institutions that can be trusted to tell the truth and to be fair and reasonable. This editorial, which launders the reputation of an obvious conman, makes clear that Nature is no longer such an institution. What’s left?

We're organising a competition for AI-generated philosophy with $11,000 in prizes. Consider entering!