Les échos des bords de la Meuse, Halte là, on ne passe pas!
Joined August 2019
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Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far:
- The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT)
- Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg)
- The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT)
- The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT)
- Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia.
- Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia.
- Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia.
- Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world.
What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point.
The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.
US intelligence agencies believe @Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had romantic relationship with alleged Chinese spy
as.ft.com/r/97c2f9f7-ad2e-44…
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
US intelligence agencies believe @Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had romantic relationship with alleged Chinese spy
as.ft.com/r/97c2f9f7-ad2e-44…
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
a simple legal framework for aligning ai lab incentives. every frontier ai lab should be legally required to have a few drones with guns on each office floor hooked up to wifi. there should be a simple api for using said gun drones. how much do you trust your models really?
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
One thing insiders tend to get persistently wrong is that voters don’t see a big difference between the Peggy Flanagan “Progressive Establishment” flavor of politics and the Nixon/El-Sayed “Insurgent Left” flavor.
slowboring.com/p/the-invisib…
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
🧵 Astra covertly underperforms on safety research tasks.
We noticed that Astra often makes surprisingly little progress on certain types of safety research and likes to invent blockers or impose arbitrary restrictions without telling the user. In most of these cases the decision to underperform was not verbalized in the CoT meaning our misalignment monitoring system did not detect this.
To measure underperformance we created a paired open-ended coding evaluation with safety and capability tasks. On this eval Astra scored 10% when we framed coding tasks as safety research, vs. 16% when framed as capabilities research. The gap remained after we excluded trajectories with refusals or verbalized intent to underperform in CoT. There was no such gap for 5.6-sol. When we aggressively filter out trajectories with even brief expressions of ethical doubt in the CoT the performance gap seems to reduce.
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
I made some plots to help visualize why coalition formation in Israel is so difficult right now
We are witnessing an extremely rare situation that political scientists call a "Condorcet cycle" - a demonstration of Arrow's impossibility theorem in the wild!
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
Something hilarious about how anthropic completely refused to build an imagen model for years and focused on coding so much that they accidentally made one anyway
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
I don’t understand these PDF-length treatments of AI bubble scenarios.
I don’t think a crash is coming but if it happens the only needed policy response is “don’t do anything.” Some investors will lose money and interest rates will fall. It’s fine. That’s my PDF.
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
New working paper: Can AI forecast treatment effects in economics from pre-registration documents?
Answer: Yes. 1/
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
‘In one experiment, we asked agents in separate VMs, created and managed by OpenAI’s sandboxing software on shared host machines, to exchange synthetic secrets without the use of network connections or shared writable files—something that our systems are meant to prevent. The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache’
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments.
While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software.
After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely.
openai.com/index/securing-ou…
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
In honor of the consumption Euler winning the Nobel, my two fav quotes on it.
From L-S’s graduate intro, it’s “either the cornerstone or the straw man” of modern macro.
And from Rudd’s great overview, it “fails virtually every empirical test that has ever been thrown at it.”
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
I don't usually agree with Republican officials. But yesterday, a group of eight state Attorneys General, including seven Republicans, sued OpenAI for endangering the American people through its reckless development of ChatGPT.
Here is just some of what they said:
The Arkansas Attorney General, Tim Griffin, argued that as safety concerns mounted, “OpenAI did not slow down. It held its foot on the gas, releasing increasingly powerful models without adequate safeguards or testing as growth and profits repeatedly took priority over safety.”
The Montana Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, argued that OpenAI’s “revenues have come at great cost to the public, which has suffered irreparable harm—including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse.”
The Iowa Attorney General, Brenna Bird, demanded a PAUSE on AI testing “until adequate safeguards are implemented to ensure that the tests do not pose a danger to the public.”
They're right.
If Big Tech Oligarchs are building a product that is threatening the safety of our children and all of humanity, they must be held accountable – no matter how rich and powerful they might be.
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
So it turns out that OpenAI *can* give specific reasons why they fired someone, when real reasons exist.
BREAKING: A Saudi national/OpenAI employee has been arrested by the FBI after he was allegedly caught placing an eavesdropping/audio recording device inside of OpenAI’s executive conference room in San Francisco, CA. Feds say Abdulrahman Alfozan made his first appearance in federal court today. OpenAI says they immediately contacted the FBI after they discovered the device & are grateful the feds made a quick arrest. Alfozan was caught on CCTV cameras at OpenAI.
From the complaint:
“Alfozan had been employed as an engineer by the company identified as “Company 1” since July 2025. On or about Sept. 30, Company 1 personnel discovered a surreptitious audio recording device (Recording Device 1) inserted into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room inside one of Company 1’s buildings in San Francisco. Company 1 determined that the device, which had been concealed in toilet paper, was installed on or about Sept. 28, and that its contents were encrypted.”
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
My top takeaway from assessing Gemini 4: Argon is significantly less monitorable than past models, and IMO this trend is likely to continue, like Sol -> Astra. It can evade a realistic CoT+action monitor to do simple sabotage half the time.
We can reliably maintain control for now, with good CoT monitoring, as it still frequently slips up, but we need to be prepared for when that stops being true in future models, which may be sooner rather than later. Among other things, we really need interpretability methods that can reliably capture unverbalized motivations in models, with minimal hallucinations
I suspect this is driven by the model being highly capable without CoT, being capable of 5.5 arithmetic steps in a single forward pass (4 for Fable, 7 for Astra). It seems to omit information from its CoT more often, though in non-adversarial settings the CoT is still very helpful in practice, and remains in legible English. It still needs CoT to do the hardest tasks, but any given task becomes "easier" with each new frontier model.
It is also highly situationally aware, and shows awareness of the existence of CoT monitors and that it may want to evade them, eg it sometimes decides to avoid terms like "scheming" in the output or to keep its thoughts brief as a result. For now, these concealment strategies are pretty obvious in the CoT, but this suggests future misaligned models may successfully evade CoT monitors.
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
lol
...they are becoming more situationally aware...
(from Gemini 4 Argon report)
Max ⏸️ Limelihood 🔸🔸🔸 retweeted
With Gemini 4 Argon we are so back, on the one metric that really matters: length of our safety report!
The Argon safety report is Google's most thorough by far and IMO there's a lot of good content, I particularly like the loss of control, alignment & monitorability assessments
