Crypto babblΞr ᵐᶠᵉʳ
Joined January 2021
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Good read
The best, most comprehensive take on AI I’ve read. After a year of confusion and fear about the future, I finished it feeling like a weight had physically lifted.
It’s long. Make the time.
@vgr is undefeated.
contraptions.venkateshrao.co…
cryptobabble.eth | .lens ᵐᶠᵉʳ🦇🔊 (🌸, 🌿) retweeted
OPENAI to EMPLOYEES: You got no bitches before. Maybe you should question why that would change?
OPENAI to EMPLOYEES: If someone is trying to seduce you, first consider — could they be a spy???
OpenAI is warning its employees about honeypot spies and strangers with children in playgrounds ... a very fun one with @georgia_wells and @MeghanBobrowsky:
wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-companies…
cryptobabble.eth | .lens ᵐᶠᵉʳ🦇🔊 (🌸, 🌿) retweeted
The state of the world in one chart.
🇪🇺 Europe represses wages and exports its savings: that's the "Europoor" phenomenon.
🇺🇸 America turns European savings into soaring tech valuations: that's the AI bubble.
🇨🇳 China builds the factories and floods the world with cheap goods: that's involution.
And each loop feeds the next.
More here: ardenletter.com/p/the-wests-…
cryptobabble.eth | .lens ᵐᶠᵉʳ🦇🔊 (🌸, 🌿) retweeted
On January 1, 1983, ARPANET switched to TCP/IP, and separate networks became one internet. Everything before that is now prehistory.
This is Ethereum's 1983. We knew atomic composability would work in theory. On mainnet, it still feels like magic. ✨
Atomic synchronous composability is no longer a promise. History made on mainnet: the first atomic cross-chain L1->L2 transaction ever 🔥 And this is only the beginning for EEZ ... 🚀 @etheconomiczone
You should watch this
All-In Summit: Bill Gurley
(0:00) Bill Gurley takes the stage at the All-In Summit
(1:29) Bill's Presentation: Searching for Feynman
Links to additional resources mentioned in talk and used in research:
p3.institute/searching_for_f…
@bgurley
cryptobabble.eth | .lens ᵐᶠᵉʳ🦇🔊 (🌸, 🌿) retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
cryptobabble.eth | .lens ᵐᶠᵉʳ🦇🔊 (🌸, 🌿) retweeted
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.
What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.
Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.
It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.
Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.
It starts with METR.
Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.
He proposes METR for this purpose.
But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.
Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.
And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.
This stock was worth $500 million early last year.
It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.
METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.
Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.
But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.
The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.
The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.
If this were the end of it, that's bad.
But that isn't all.
The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.
The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.
They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.
All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.
As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.
Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.
From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.
This itself is an objective fact.
The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.
But the problem also goes in the other direction:
If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.
Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.
Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.
They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.
And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.
What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.
The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.
And that feedback loop is winning.
That's what Jacob Coxon is.
China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.
America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.
Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.
Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.
It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.
Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.
Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.
Congress must investigate.
Evidence and Github in next post.
Then some supplementary figures.
cryptobabble.eth | .lens ᵐᶠᵉʳ🦇🔊 (🌸, 🌿) retweeted
the gervais principle is probably the single greatest blog post ever written. Robert greene wishes he could write this accurately on power dynamics.
ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/th…
This is tragic, another amazing project winding down
After 5+ years, we're winding down POAP.
Over the years, we:
* minted millions of collectibles across hundreds of communities.
* did incredible collaborations with world-class organizations - Coinbase, Amex, WMG, Bayer, and a long tail of others, including countless in crypto.
* ran one of the biggest activations at Devcon, minting 8000+ collectibles over the course of a week.
* built an Airport Rally to let collectors get POAPs at airports around the world.
POAP meant something to a lot of people.
Unfortunately, crypto's funding cycles and distribution dynamics made it hard to build a sustainable company without cannibalizing the ethos that made POAP mean something. Building on a fragile and quickly evolving stack, in the middle of an incredible hype cycle, only added to the challenges.
Still, there are some big lessons I am carrying from the POAP story.
First: Customer communities are the most undervalued asset a company can have. If you build something with soul, people who use it and love it will take your brand everywhere. Do not underestimate the power of customer communities.
Second: Connection is still the point. It's easy to lose that thread when the conversation is about the latest bubbly tech or price speculation, but the people using POAPs at events, in classrooms, at hackathons were getting something real out of it.
Third: Longevity and brand equity are the only moats left. With the time to building and shipping something new collapsing quickly, and distribution becoming increasingly an engineering problem, customers increasingly want to make sure they can trust that the things they are buying will grow and evolve with the market, without changing radically.
Grateful for everyone who believed in what we were building. It's too soon for me to say what's next, but for now, I'm thinking a lot about what GTM looks like in the age of AI.
cryptobabble.eth | .lens ᵐᶠᵉʳ🦇🔊 (🌸, 🌿) retweeted
After 5+ years, we're winding down POAP.
Over the years, we:
* minted millions of collectibles across hundreds of communities.
* did incredible collaborations with world-class organizations - Coinbase, Amex, WMG, Bayer, and a long tail of others, including countless in crypto.
* ran one of the biggest activations at Devcon, minting 8000+ collectibles over the course of a week.
* built an Airport Rally to let collectors get POAPs at airports around the world.
POAP meant something to a lot of people.
Unfortunately, crypto's funding cycles and distribution dynamics made it hard to build a sustainable company without cannibalizing the ethos that made POAP mean something. Building on a fragile and quickly evolving stack, in the middle of an incredible hype cycle, only added to the challenges.
Still, there are some big lessons I am carrying from the POAP story.
First: Customer communities are the most undervalued asset a company can have. If you build something with soul, people who use it and love it will take your brand everywhere. Do not underestimate the power of customer communities.
Second: Connection is still the point. It's easy to lose that thread when the conversation is about the latest bubbly tech or price speculation, but the people using POAPs at events, in classrooms, at hackathons were getting something real out of it.
Third: Longevity and brand equity are the only moats left. With the time to building and shipping something new collapsing quickly, and distribution becoming increasingly an engineering problem, customers increasingly want to make sure they can trust that the things they are buying will grow and evolve with the market, without changing radically.
Grateful for everyone who believed in what we were building. It's too soon for me to say what's next, but for now, I'm thinking a lot about what GTM looks like in the age of AI.
cryptobabble.eth | .lens ᵐᶠᵉʳ🦇🔊 (🌸, 🌿) retweeted
I want to be clear and I won't mince words.
This pisses me off, a lot.
I don't care in any way shape or form if you think I'm being overly dramatic, I truly don't. If anything - you aren't mad enough.
POAP is hands down a top 3 dapp/protocol and has been for years. We are losing an absolutely incredible thing here - and it's our fault.
Rise Up has been using POAPs since 2021 for all sorts of things - community events, episode milestones, games, treasure hunts, and more.
Knowing I won't be able to use it for our 600th episode, or 1000th, or anything else is absolutely maddening.
Can you imagine for a second, if we elevated and paid attention to something like @poapxyz the same way this space has the Ansem meme? Even 10% of the attention?
Every time something like this - a free to use, simple, and accessible tool for new user onboarding - goes away, it feels like we lose another piece of what brought many of us here in the first place.
I personally used POAP to onboard dozens and dozens of people who had never made a wallet, minted an NFT, sent a transaction, or looked at onchain data.
The process was SO easy, and just like that a brand new user got to enter this space with a great experience and immediate induction into a phenomenal community.
My conviction to fight the erosion of our core ethos is stronger for staring down the barrel of losing a platform like this - and I hope everyone takes this as the warning sign that it is.
I have seen this industry rally together when terrible things happen. The unity I saw in the wake of the Kelp DAO bridge exploit was so inspiring - I hoped it would catalyse a broader push to take our industry back.
Yet here we are - letting another amazing piece of the space fade, all while pretending that Congress and Blackrock have our best interests at heart.
Maybe it was just about greed the entire time.
The fight goes on, there is so much work to be done. Don't let this canary go unnoticed. – at Port Wentworth, GA
After 5+ years, we're winding down POAP.
Over the years, we:
* minted millions of collectibles across hundreds of communities.
* did incredible collaborations with world-class organizations - Coinbase, Amex, WMG, Bayer, and a long tail of others, including countless in crypto.
* ran one of the biggest activations at Devcon, minting 8000+ collectibles over the course of a week.
* built an Airport Rally to let collectors get POAPs at airports around the world.
POAP meant something to a lot of people.
Unfortunately, crypto's funding cycles and distribution dynamics made it hard to build a sustainable company without cannibalizing the ethos that made POAP mean something. Building on a fragile and quickly evolving stack, in the middle of an incredible hype cycle, only added to the challenges.
Still, there are some big lessons I am carrying from the POAP story.
First: Customer communities are the most undervalued asset a company can have. If you build something with soul, people who use it and love it will take your brand everywhere. Do not underestimate the power of customer communities.
Second: Connection is still the point. It's easy to lose that thread when the conversation is about the latest bubbly tech or price speculation, but the people using POAPs at events, in classrooms, at hackathons were getting something real out of it.
Third: Longevity and brand equity are the only moats left. With the time to building and shipping something new collapsing quickly, and distribution becoming increasingly an engineering problem, customers increasingly want to make sure they can trust that the things they are buying will grow and evolve with the market, without changing radically.
Grateful for everyone who believed in what we were building. It's too soon for me to say what's next, but for now, I'm thinking a lot about what GTM looks like in the age of AI.
cryptobabble.eth | .lens ᵐᶠᵉʳ🦇🔊 (🌸, 🌿) retweeted
“Claude, order me Taco Bell that doesn’t cause the turbo diarrhea. Make no mistakes”
