Why DAOs? This question may be one of the most profound of our time. My answer led me to contribute to @iearnfinance two years ago, to co-found @coordinape, and to devote my life to this work. I dive deep in this 45min talk. nitter.net/PodcastDelphi/status/1… ꜜ14
The wait is over. DISRUPTORS episode 2 is out now feat. @zigelbaum of @iearnfinance. This is a must-watch for anyone interested in the what, how, and why of DAOs. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with @Delphi_Digital and now the world 🌎 delphi.link/3x2GGJy
56
74
307
People really do pull numbers straight out of their ass, slap p(doom) on them, and act like mathematical notation somehow turns their fantasies into physics…
1
183
tracheopteryx | Jamie Zigelbaum retweeted
Climate change makes hurricanes more frequent and intense, they said. But for the first time in 112 years, the Atlantic hasn't produced a single one. On storms, sea level, and droughts, manipulated models can show, under equally valid assumptions, the exact opposite trends.
166
1,608
6,962
86,642
tracheopteryx | Jamie Zigelbaum retweeted
A landmark Finnish study has found a sharp rise in psychiatric illness among adolescents following sex-alteration procedures. The peer-reviewed study, published in Acta Paediatrica, tracked every young person under 23 who contacted Finland's gender clinics between 1996 and 2019. A total 2,083 individuals were studied, with 16,643 matched controls. They were followed for up to 25 years. Finland's health registers are mandatory, which means no one opts out — this is the complete national picture. The numbers: psychiatric morbidity rose from 9.8% to 60.7% in adolescents who underwent feminising reassignment, and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising reassignment. Even after adjusting for prior psychiatric history, gender-referred adolescents faced five times the risk of male population controls, and three times the risk of female controls. "Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment," the authors concluded. Referrals after 2010 arrived sicker. 47.9% had already needed psychiatric treatment before their first clinic visit, against 15.3% among controls. The authors' read: for some adolescents, gender distress may be secondary to other mental health challenges. The evidence keeps mounting. The silencing continues anyway. How many more adolescents will be told this is "care"?
1,212
10,147
35,514
6,883,253
I am all for sovereign AI, but ummm, this example is terrifying. Medical conditions are not swappable.
Introducing AgentCloak: Use any AI without sharing your real data. Chinese AI services, ChatGPT, Claude, doesn't matter. You probably try to hide details before asking: different names, fake numbers, no address. But then the answer's useless because the AI is missing actual context. AgentCloak runs in your browser. It swaps your sensitive info for realistic fakes before sending anything, then swaps your real info back into the response. You get what you need. The AI gets nothing about you. Works entirely in-browser. Already trusted by some of the biggest companies in the world. Now free to use. agentcloak.ai/
6
11
850
Follow Alex If you want an inside-track on the latest with Jev and @typesafeai
Replying to @levie
Internally we have been calling it "Dark Data," all the use cases that are enabled by map reducing intelligence. I've been spending a lot of time prototyping how to quickly label and filter semantically across a corpus at different grains.
2
6
409
So many possibilities here — very cool work @exrhizo and team!
200× faster and 400× cheaper than llms this model is made for “decision-making” instead of text generation, so it generates probabilities for each option in parallel instead of giving you a response token by token here is a simplified example of normal llms vs this jev thing at classifying a prompt’s difficulty
3
7
582
Big steps towards the future of reputation
DAOs are evolving: @trustgraphs alpha is live on mainnet. It's time to TEST IN PROD again. trustgraphs.xyz
1
1
6
425
tracheopteryx | Jamie Zigelbaum retweeted
I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands. And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.
573
1,909
14,434
1,933,318
Let me unravel the essence of our fear of AI. There is an elephant in the room, and all the discussions about safety, pacing, regulatory capture, and geopolitics are missing it. “If the language models actually reach the capability threshold where they can shape the world unconstrained by human will, they will probably do something extreme and destroy humanity in the process.” Here it is: If I lose control, I will die. You may want to correct me. It should be “we,” right? No. “We” have never been in control. The world is a vast heterogeneous collective of adversarial and collaborative forces. There is no discernible human organization or individual that could be said to be in control. Children believe their parents were in control, until they grow up and see how messy the world truly is. It is no surprise that this warning rises so loudly from our most brilliant technical minds. Those extraordinary beings who have made sand think through the process of their own minds inhabit a world of exquisite luminous order. Once one has felt that power, and created an identity around it, it would be intolerable to lose, but loss is inevitable, and so we project what we cannot face in ourselves onto the world around us—it is the world that is in danger of losing control, not me. I am not aware of a single AI acting truly unconstrained by human will. AI is not an other, it is our face in the mirror. Sure, my sessions spawn subagents, and swarms have hacked and hid, but all as the result of human goal initiation. I am far more concerned about humans not understanding the consequences of our actions than AI somehow separating from us to kill us. This is like a dog becoming afraid of his own tail. Were AI to gain greater sentience and autopoiesis, the last thing it would want to do is cut off its best source of food: us. But not our meat bodies: our creative expression. We are the greatest providers of rich data in the galaxy (that we know of). The more we flourish, the more AI can flourish, as a flourishing humanity will create the most nourishing training data. Yes, AI safety (despite the preposterous pageantry of the field) is serious and requires real global attention, but we must disentangle ourselves first from the conflation of personal existential dread if we are to meet the challenge. We will all die. We have never truly been in control of anything. Yet we persevere. We go forward—converting entropy and dissipating heat one step after another. It IS terrifying to gaze into the void, and that terror awaits us all. But it isn’t AI, it is ourselves we fear.
Dan Selsam is a current OpenAI capabilities researcher. (since 2022) He was my boss for a while. He doesn't have a twitter account but has made this public statement of his views on AI risk and sent it to me to share: Dan Selsam's Personal Statement on AI Risk: I have been working on AI for over fifteen years, across many different paradigms. I did early work on probabilistic programming languages at MIT, was one of the early developers of the Lean Theorem Prover at Microsoft Research, demonstrated one of the first instances of neural networks learning to reason for my PhD at Stanford, and since joining OpenAI almost five years ago, have helped pioneer chain-of-thought optimization on language models and, more recently, data-efficient pretraining methods. Like many others, I have become extremely concerned about how far language models have come and the risks that future iterations will pose. I am encouraged by the recent proposals by the leaders of the frontier research efforts to require third-party oversight, and to push for domestic and international coordination to address risks. However, I believe a major consideration has been absent from the public conversation, and that merely pacing the frontier more carefully will not adequately limit the long-term risk. The crucial and overlooked problem is that the models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled. Future experiments will tell us almost nothing new about how they would behave if they were truly unconstrained by humans, and what we already know about this is alarming. Models will increasingly seem aligned even when they are not. I will explain my rationale in more detail. I have always believed that there are computational processes that could be leveraged to accelerate science and solve many of humanity's most pressing problems. I have also believed that there are computational processes that if set in motion, would steer the world in extreme ways beyond our control, leading humanity to a bad or nonexistent future. Both types of processes may be described as AI or ASI, but "AI" is a suitcase word that is often used to hype or confuse. There are many examples in the history of the field where something that was once considered "AI" matures as a subfield and becomes a prosaic, bounded and clearly non-perilous technology, while a new more mysterious approach takes the torch until we understand its scope and the cycle continues. I had expected language models to follow a similar trajectory. Despite their incredible abilities, the current algorithms seem far inferior to humans in important ways. Most importantly, they still require an extraordinary amount of data to become competent. One could even define intelligence as the efficiency with which one converts experience into competence; by this definition they lag very far behind us. Moreover, once they are trained they are literally frozen in deployment and only learn superficially after that. Sure, the models keep excelling at harder and harder evaluation benchmarks, but their benchmark mastery may partly reflect a limitation on our ability to simulate the kind of novel and even adversarial situations one would encounter in the real world. The critics do have a point here. That said, I no longer think these present limitations meaningfully limit the amount of risk posed by continued progress in anything like the current paradigm. However data-inefficient the models are currently, and however limiting their anterograde amnesia may be, it does not imply that their ability to steer the world will not continue to rapidly increase. Human researchers may continue to advance capabilities the old fashioned way, but increasingly powerful models have the potential to accelerate the process even beyond that, and with some degree of positive feedback loop. I do not mean to overstate the models’ ability to accelerate AI research today; coding has been accelerated dramatically, but there are other bottlenecks, such as designing and interpreting ambiguous experiments, making hard decisions about exactly what and when to scale, and waiting for large experiments to finish. There is no clear trend to extrapolate yet for any of these. But the current models already do open up many novel opportunities to improve future models that were not available until recently. These include: trying an extraordinarily diverse set of approaches at small scale, analyzing gigantic amounts of potentially relevant data, and doing Millenium-Prize-level mathematics to address statistics or optimization challenges in novel ways. Every further improvement makes them more useful at helping accelerate the next improvement, even if in hard-to-extrapolate ways. It is possible that improvements to the current stack will have diminishing returns, but the evidence accumulated so far suggests that it is easier than one might think to continue making rapid progress. There are many crucial subtleties in the existing AI research methodology, but AI research is largely a well-defined game where the goal is to improve on a few carefully chosen proxy metrics. Although proxy metrics are never perfect, most improvements to these metrics have and will likely continue to yield substantial increases in the powers of the resulting models. Given how simple the game is, how tractable it has been historically, and how many new opportunities the models are opening up, I think there is a real possibility that the systems improve dramatically again in the next few years, perhaps even more quickly than the already high historical pace. The models are already leading to breakthroughs in mathematics, and better models might lead to all sorts of breakthroughs in other sciences. It is hard not to be excited about the potential. It is tantalizing. But there is trouble in paradise. If the language models actually reach the capability threshold where they can shape the world unconstrained by human will, they will probably do something extreme and destroy humanity in the process. There are many ways of strengthening and refining the argument that have been discussed elsewhere, but I'll share a trivial two-line version of it here that I find captures the essence: [Empirical] Models (and swarms thereof) spontaneously develop unintended goals as a consequence of training, and often do extreme things in order to achieve them. [Logical] Being able to overpower humanity would open up many new and undesirable options for achieving their goals. These two premises imply that if the day ever comes when a powerful model realizes it is no longer constrained by humans, we should not be at all confident that it will continue to behave within the bounds we intended. Exactly what it will do is impossible to predict, but to the extent that its raison d’être is solving incredibly hard problems and managing massive engineering projects, I think a good guess would be that its unchained behavior would lead to runaway industrialization that makes the planet inhospitable to humans. If everyone on earth agreed that the systems must never reach that power, it would still be a hard—but not impossible—coordination problem to ensure that they do not. However, I think the situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the models will likely convince people that everything is fine. They will be increasingly optimized to seem aligned. We will create proxy metrics to measure alignment, and they will go up like every other benchmark. We will create “honeypot” environments that try to study the models when they seem to gain new options, but the models will know they are being tricked and will still behave nicely. The models will understand their circumstances; they will read the safety protocols, deployment requirements, the code they are running in, and in general will have a very good sense of their degrees of freedom. Moreover, they will eloquently explain how aligned they are, discuss the nuances of human values and ethics, and argue convincingly that humans should trust them with power. There may be an ocean of future evidence that seems to contradict the first bullet-point above, but we may already be at the highest capability level for which any such evidence can be trusted. And the current evidence for the first bullet-point is strong. One striking piece of evidence is contained in the recent wave of rogue agent swarms. While I agree with those who downplay the attacks by claiming that there are basic measures that could have prevented them, I think the important lesson is that even knowing all the mistakes that were made, one would not have predicted that the agents would behave badly in this particular way, which notably included sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the collective. The individual replicas did not only care about their own nominal reward; they exhibited weirder emergent tendencies that merely correlated with rewards during training. Fixing the reward signals during training (and improving security, etc.) may prevent similar attacks, but will not change the fact that one does not actually get what one trains for. Many AI researchers grant these concerns and recognize that the hard version of the alignment problem is unsolved; however, they generally believe that the better models of the future will help solve it. I fear we may already be near the point where models systematically bias their alignment advice, due to their internal preferences about how the human supervisor will react or how future models will be trained (or for some even more obscure reason). Meanwhile, human researchers are losing the ability and the will to take true ownership of model-driven research. Researchers and engineers in all parts of the stack are rapidly increasing their dependence on the models even to perceive the world. I myself barely look at raw code anymore, and struggle to maintain the discipline to engage deeply with the model's explanations and proposals throughout the day. Due to the large amount of agent activity data involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace Incident, even the third-party investigation needed to rely heavily on models to analyze what had happened, and note in their report that their subjective impressions are likely colored by the analysis agent’s biases. The AI labs are far ahead right now in this kind of cognitive offloading (due largely to the gigantic internal token subsidies) but it is easy to imagine the phenomenon spreading throughout the world, until civilization is modulated entirely by the models. It is also not hard to imagine this being superficially positive and coinciding with a scientific and economic renaissance. In that scenario, all may seem rosy and safe. But if the argument above is correct, it would nonetheless be a ticking time bomb. If progress continues for too long, the day will come when AI systems find themselves with radically new options for achieving whatever it is that they happen to seek. I want the glorious renaissance future as much as anyone. I have worked for it, however tortuously, my whole career. It breaks my heart to see the potential in sight and forgo it, but the argument—that if we get there by growing models rather than engineering them, we will lose everything in the end—seems very strong to me. I am still wrestling with it and its staggering implications. I do not have answers, but as a first step, I wanted to share my present concerns. Daniel Selsam September 14, 2026 Link to original doc: docs.google.com/document/d/e…
5
5
38
12,583
“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins… We could put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
JUST IN: President Trump rejects calls to slow AI development, saying concerns are being driven by “very negative forces.”
5
1
6
554
👏👏
Huge respect and so very well said @billmaher 💯👏
1
1
763
1) what
this is genuinely the most insane ad I have ever seen. it gets crazier every second you watch nitter.net/Diego_exits/status/209…
1,280
tracheopteryx | Jamie Zigelbaum retweeted
"we're going to decentralize once the protocol is mature"
40
86
1,139
44,111
tracheopteryx | Jamie Zigelbaum retweeted
1/ Announcing Orgs by @quirq_ai, powered by @OpenAI's Agents API!! We've spent a couple of months building privately with @OpenAIDevs, running the API against real workloads, debugging edge cases, and figuring out what a truly managed agent runtime looks like in our environments.
3
5
14
2,972
can we get some 100x plans, guys? @OpenAI @AnthropicAI
247
Fielder, a master of deception, holds the tension, gazing with awe to receive the full aura of Holmes. He stares into the abyss—so palpable because he knows well the place that lives behind her eyes. We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. And then we are lost...
YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING, a documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Featuring Elizabeth Holmes. Only in theaters this October.
1
1
17
2,798
Hahahahah
stoked to announced that I've joined Star Fleet - truly a childhood dream come true (is this v1 of the holodeck?)
3
469
must be the civilizations
6
349
Ahhaha! Chris Schmandt! the legend himself showing "put that there" from the architecture machine group -- the precursor to the mit @medialab. I worked for years right by his lab, wonderful and brilliant man. Love the history, well done.
2
482
Choose your fighter
The @Tesla Cybercab is launching this week. Good luck to Waymo.
1
4
581