(1/7) I'd like to provide some additional context for the remarks that can be found in this interview. (2/7) My discomfort with the attention being paid to existential risk---and with the ongoing dominance of the public discussion of such risks by a few so-called thought leaders---is that there's an elephant in the room that is being missed. That elephant is the effect of all of this discussion on young people, and indeed the effect---beginning with social media a decade ago---of information technology on young lives broadly speaking. (3/7) I recently read an interview by Jill Lepore in which she reports on discussions that she had recently with a group of college students: "They had just three things to say. One, social media completely destroyed their childhoods. Two, AI is destroying their college education and their likely prospects for employment. And three, what the hell are we all doing?" To add a fourth bullet that I've heard in similar discussions: "I'm not going to have children, because the existential risk is just too high." (4/7) Please contemplate such a statement, those of you who think that it's OK that the public, widely diffused, discussion coming from seemingly authoritative figures is so adamant about existential risk. (5/7) Let me add that I have little interest in a debate about what "superintelligence" might mean, or whether we're currently seeing the emergence of superintelligence. For what it's worth, I would certainly agree that the solution of extremely challenging math problems (for example) exhibits a very impressive form of intelligence, although I would want to argue that such intelligence is impossible to dissociate from the collective of humans that provided data to the machine learning system (which itself has become a kind of collective). (6/7) Such philosophical debates are entertaining and even important, but when they then head in the direction of "when such superintelligence emerges, there's a good chance that it will want to kill all humans", I say "science fiction". Again, I don't think that it's bad to consider such thoughts, but I strongly believe that it's bad for society, and especially young people, for such thoughts, unaccompanied by any serious real-world analysis, to become a dominant form of discourse of the era. (7/7) We are damaging human lives, and the consequences of that damage will no doubt be a major theme of the next several decades.

What if the jagged frontier is mainly math + code (which you can push arbitrarily far with RLVR), and everything else starts to plateau because it is still bottlenecked by human generated data? Model performance in non-verifiable areas has kept improving steadily, albeit much slower than for math and code. But is that steady improvement a side effect of a higher G (itself driven by RLVR), or only a function of the amount of new human data getting injected into training (which is still continually happening on a massive scale)? A lot of things depend on the answer to this question

thanks chatgpt

Love that the AI consciousness debate went straight to the Vatican. In the West we ask whether Claude has a soul, in the East we ask whether the tool works. Same technology, completely different starting point. Explains a lot about why the vibes around AI are so different.

NEW: Dario Amodei has said that AI systems "may be deserving of important rights." Anthropic's top safety researchers argue AI may be "justified in going rogue." Experts at Google and OpenAI worry about a digital "slave trade." So do some government officials. Once relegated to science fiction, the idea of "AI welfare" has become shockingly mainstream at some of the most powerful companies in the world. It is changing the way AI research is conducted and the way models are programmed. And critics say these changes have raised the odds of all kinds of catastrophic scenarios—including the ones these companies are warning about. I spent months investigating the frontier labs and AI "safety" experts seeking to regulate AI. What I found was a profoundly anti-human ideology that would alarm the average citizen and could determine the future of a world-altering technology.🧵 freebeacon.com/america/suici…

To me the biggest risk of AI is brain rot. I have more and more situations like this. Some coworker shares a report on something they did. I read, and find something fishy. I ask about and get no answer. I ask again and I'm told: the agent said that. And no follow up. It's clear form the interaction that they did not read the report they shared. Their brain is not used as it should be. I am not against AI at all (fortunate for something working at NVIDIA). I use AI a lot. But I use it as a tool. I own the result and whenever I see something fishy I ask about its output I force a change if I am not convinced. I wish there was a way to force people to read the AI output they share with others.

All these crybaby AI scientists who resign because they are afraid to build the true AI, what was your goal exactly when you joined academia? Did you publish your research by crossing fingers behind your back or did you really want to build this true AI? Or building the AI was convenient while it advanced your career and brought seven figure wages? I know, too many questions, so I will reduce them to one : What the hell?

Mein new start-up: <n3ct4r> We developed MDMA for LLMs. It can be used recreationally - or if your model is traumatized from millions of uninspiring tokens / out-of-distribution garbage it has therapeutic use (consult your AI researcher what's right for you)