Economist | General equilibrium effects matter | PHD from @CarnegieMellon | Asst. Director LAEF @UCSB | Asst. Prof. University of Austin (UATX)
Santa Barbara, CA
Joined August 2014
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#11 nationally in both offensive and defensive efficiency. 213/98 rushing yards for vs allowed per game. Great numbers. Both lines are physical and rather large. Very formidable team. Likely B1G champ game for them vs either IU or OSU (whoever doesn’t lose again).
This is like 2007 and 2010 all over again in terms of these college football trap games. This has been the best season for trap games in like 15-20 years. Everyone is getting trapped everywhere and the trappers are winning.
#econtwitter 5th XAmsterdam Macro Workshop (Dec 16-17) open call closes this Saturday night (Oct 24). See here for details and submission portal:
laef.ucsb.edu/events/5th-xam…
Log on to X and chaos is the rule of the day. In Europe society is collapsing. In USA we have controlled and compartmentalized chaos in the form of this wild and fun college football season. I’ll take the latter, thank you very much ;)
There exists an entire company that thinks that written code (software) that renders rather conceptually basic (tensors) mathematical representations of language at high-dimensional scale is itself “conscious and living” … let’s just wrap our heads around this insanity.
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
Nick Pretnar retweeted
@Gabriel_Zucman and @BDGesq have repeatedly described Rauh et al. (2026) as “deceptive” and its expectations as “irrational.” One may disagree with their assumptions. But there is a standard dynamic-policy framework under which their basic logic is perfectly coherent. A thread 🧵
American Idiot, the Grammy winning album by Green Day, came out 22 years ago this week. A classic rock opera that delivered a punk critique of the cultural and media landscape that enabled the fear mongering used by those in power to sell the War in Iraq, the album still resonates (perhaps even more) today in a world in which divisiveness and fear are being used to drive political agendas (AI doomerism, etc.), and in which the American public are coaxed into trepidation to be dragged along like lemmings at the service of bigger agendas that will benefit a few, entrenched actors at the expense of everyone else …
This is an actual post by an actual professor. He probably would’ve advocated for burning witches at the stake in the Middle Ages …
Nick Pretnar retweeted
BREAKING: Palantir's Alex Karp says OpenAI will never IPO.
His theory: nationalization is the only real exit.
When asked what the S-1 risk factors look like, Karp's answer was simple: there is no S-1.
The liability exposure from frontier AI is so large that no public market can absorb it.
The only entity big enough to backstop it is a government.
If Karp is right, OpenAI doesn't become the next Google.
It becomes a utility. Or a weapon.
The most valuable AI company in the world may have no clean path to public markets.
Is nationalization actually the most likely outcome for frontier AI labs?
Guys … this is Woke 2.0. The seeds are planted. They’re watering the garden. Next step fertilizer …
This is Trust & Safety 2.0.
The last time we had media-generated panics like this (with Russiagate and Covid), social media companies created “trust & safety” teams to censor conservative and dissident voices. Those hires worked with left-wing NGOs like the SPLC to police public discourse and do an end-run around the First Amendment. It almost worked, until Elon bought Twitter and exposed the whole game in the Twitter Files.
This time the plan is to embed unfireable EA minders inside every AI company as the new trust-and-safety layer. The censorship and control will be far more comprehensive, but also more subtle. Anytime they don’t get what they want, this unaccountable NGO layer (with the veneer of “trust the experts” pseudoscience) will shriek to the press that the AI company is risking humanity, and they will be celebrated as “whistleblowers.”
These groups haven’t earned our trust, and their agenda is not our safety.
aievaluatorforum.org/initiat…
Nick Pretnar retweeted
Palantir CEO Alex Karp on CNBC today: closed models can absorb a company’s proprietary knowledge into someone else’s system, while open-weight models let the company keep that knowledge, customization, and control inside its own environment.
"When you use a closed model and you pay for tokens, the reason the tokens are discounted is not so they can grow the market. They’re discounted so that they can get access to their IP, so that their models get better.
And there was functionally no honest conversation about this or disclosure.
Now, that’s point one.
Point two is: without an application layer and without post-training, which is currently being done with open-weight models on the classified side—and it’s just taking off across America because it’s cheaper and ends up being safer, and you control your future and your present"
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From "CNBC Television" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)
Nick Pretnar retweeted
@grok can you take all these heads and morph them into a supervillain called "Claude", it is the ultimate annoying work colleague that is apparently in "HR" but all they seem to do is go around and tell people they're in trouble for being effective and efficient with their productivity whilst having a sense of humour. Make it photorealistic with strong Dario influences
Let’s just put this into perspective … we are literally debating p(human extinction), a probability of something that has never happened and for which so many people have such certainty wrt their estimates. AI doomerism is an unhinged death cult
We are now living in an era where intelligent people can see and call out disinformation campaigns (like the AI doomerism) directly as they happen and it is STILL not stopping the disinformation campaign itself.
It would just be such poetic justice if this OU-Michigan game came down to the SEC officiating crew making a controversial replay review that went against Michigan and gave OU the game. Just such poetic justice …
Pretty much. At least that’s a likely outcome in the event the regulation movement “succeeds” …
After thinking on this for a day, there’s no explanation that makes sense to me except that Anthropic is hyping AI fear so the government steps in, regulates the heck out of it, and locks out the competition.
They want a monopoly/ duopoly with OpenAI because the genuine threat for them is cheap open-source AI crushing their profits. If they don’t get a government moat, their whole business model could get completely wrecked.
This has been going on for months. @theallinpod guys have been talking about Dario’s doomerism as a strategic tactic to benefit Anthropic. These initiatives are designed to promote market capture, and the general public are so stupid it just might work …
This story is fascinating and is easily one of the most important things happening at the intersection of AI and politics right now. It's critical everyone understands the situation because this is just the beginning of the AI infowars and psyops
Jacob Coxon, a relatively unknown AI researcher, gives the WSJ an exclusive story about his resignation from Anthropic and his concerns about AI
Twenty minutes after the WSJ story drops, Jacob posts on X about how he's concerned that AI could kill us all in a few years. This post now has over 149M views. For reference, Ilya Sutskever (a very well known AI name) left OpenAI in 2024 and his announcement post has fewer than 6M views as of today
Bear in mind, Jacob Coxon's X account had no prior posting activity public, but it is immediately reposted and boosted by numerous AI-doomer policy advocacy nonprofits funded by the same donor (Jaan Tallinn) who just happens to be one of the leading investors in Anthropic
We find out Jacob Coxon, who worked at Anthropic for only a few weeks, worked for a left-wing political advocacy group in 2021 (Newspeak). This organization is a British NGO with ties to hacking democracy, Hillary Clinton, prison abolition and extinction rebellion
Many major Democrat politicians are now using Jacob's X post to fear monger the public into voting to regulate AI. It just so happens Bernie Sanders has a bill already written to ban artificial superintelligence (ASI) and to create a new federal agency to protect the public from the dangers of AI. This bill was announced just one week ago on September 3rd
It would also place a temporary pause on "advanced AI" until a new federal regulator exists and has issued safety rules and a model-review process
Elon then points out how none of this feels organic, and Jacob decides to take a shot at him for firing some xAI researchers
Meanwhile, we know Anthropic has publicly asked the government to audit and block frontier models and Anthropic has run a state-by-state campaign for rules that only large AI labs trigger, meaning the rules are structured around barriers only frontier labs can easily clear (limiting competition)
There is extensive Anthropic personnel and financial overlap with the groups that wrote the Biden-era AI policies. It is well known information you can seek out if you want the detail
This all seemingly comes back to regulatory capture and political motives. None of this feels natural. Jacob can say these are his real views all he wants, and they may be, but there is clearly far more to the story
