prev created @aisecurityinst, AI Safety Summit, UK AI Research Resource, EU AI Code of Practice.
San Francisco, California
Joined May 2012
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Nitarshan retweeted
There is a real and important thing behind the concept of sovereign AI, and there are also many people practicing a grift on less-sophisticated government/civil society audiences. Caveat emptor as always
Nitarshan retweeted
Hardest thing ever written award
Inspired by @Sauers_ and @jfonsecarivera and other fun recent work with personas in AI models, I built a partial neuron atlas for Talkie-1930, the historical language model created by @status_effects and @AlecRad. Here's the link: talkieneurons.vercel.app
Nitarshan retweeted
This was also happening deep into 2022/2023. People then just changed their behaviour overnight a year later and pretended they had been on the LLM train the whole time - it was completely nuts and infuriating.
Nitarshan retweeted
seems reasonable to call the decision to not release GPT-2-XL safetyist slop separate from whether it made you an AGI-believer-elect or not in 2019. It was obviously true that the model wasn’t dangerous in any way; even the threats cited at the time were about spam
Dario reveals the people who called his GPT-2 fears "pseudoscience" in 2019 are now all applying for jobs at AI labs
"I personally was super freaked out by [GPT-2]. I looked at it and I said, my God, you just scale this thing up another factor of a million and it'll be better than humans at everything. This is the defining economic and scientific moment of the modern age. We just don't know it yet. This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity."
"Maybe 10% of the people around me had exactly the same reaction, and it was often the smartest ones. 90% of the people around me, because GPT-2's capabilities in any particular area were not that impressive, it could translate languages, summarize a document and write a few lines of code here and there. It was the broadness and the generality."
"But people would look at it and say, in any particular area, that doesn't seem so smart. And so many people just shrugged and they just dismissed it."
"I just look at it and I say it's the same thing over and over again. The limitations of the models, six months from now, the things that seemed hard, they're going to be easy. 12 months from now, the things that seemed impossible, the models are going to be doing them regularly."
"It's everything we saw with GPT-2; we're seeing it over and over again in wider and wider swaths of the world. And the world is gradually finally being convinced."
Daniela Amodei: "I remember at the time there were some very well-respected computer scientists and AI and ML leaders who basically bullied some of the researchers who worked on [GPT-2] on Twitter and were like, this is stupid. We don't know why you guys are even talking, this model is so incapable."
"It was like you were sort of a quack if you believed this was a really significant moment."
Dario: "That's all been memory-holed. All the researchers who were like, oh, this is pseudoscience, it doesn't make sense, all of them are applying for jobs at the LLM companies."
"We never say it out loud to any particular one, but we look at them and they're like, we remember what you were saying in 2019. You have no credibility on this matter."
Nitarshan retweeted
It is fucking crazy how major companies are just continuing like we're in a normal world regarding dependencies. Your node project might have 1000+ indirect dependencies!! Abliterated (and not!) models will completely destroy this supply chain in the coming years. Be ready!!
Nitarshan retweeted
Pangram is good, but has some well-known failure modes, like:
- A time you heard it didn't work
- A school essay you wrote years ago that it flagged as AI (you don't have a link or the essay text handy)
- A different AI detector got it wrong, and they're all the same, right?
Nitarshan retweeted
My husband has used AI agents to revive old fonts, ornaments, & cuts from 19th century newspapers. The agents even built an editor where you can create your own invitations/pamphlets/cards using old cuts & fonts. Have been using it for @Quillette invitations already
font-revival.com/
Nitarshan retweeted
It’s a shame that we’re not making better use of AI’s amazing fact-checking and argument-checking abilities.
Platforms or third parties should build better tools that identify BS immediately and saliently.
Nitarshan retweeted
Given how much people resist even modest food system reforms like the proposed foie gras ban in DC, it can be tempting to moderate our ambitions about this issue. I think this is a mistake. In my view, we should pressure the international community to set a goal of banning industrial animal agriculture by 2050.
Industrial animal agriculture causes massive and unnecessary harm to animal welfare, public health, and the environment. It has no place in modern civilization, and there are ample legal instruments and precedents for coordinating internationally around a global transition over the next quarter century.
verfassungsblog.de/global-ba…
Nitarshan retweeted
I'm not a utilitarian on animal welfare. I don't think it's possible or coherent to "trade-off" the wellbeing of animals for humans, I mostly don't even think this way for humans. Instead, I think of animals as conscious creatures that deserve basic negative rights against extreme abuse, which on its own implies pretty sweeping changes to how we produce food. This doesn't involve me adding up the happiness or sadness points of chickens.
Respecting negative rights involves trade-offs with human welfare in the sense that humans like the products of violating those rights, but there's a hard upper limit on the types of trade-offs to do for those negative rights. In the same way that I can be coherently anti dog abuse without wanting to sacrifice humans for dogs, I can also easily be coherently anti animal abuse without wanting to sacrifice humans for animals. I've been surprised by the conversations about animal welfare I've been in recently that don't recognize this obvious option.
Nitarshan retweeted
ngl it is extremely sad to see models like opus and astra being immediately locked out of being able to do reverse engineering on consumer hardware: despite my preference for open stuff I do of course appreciate when closed models are used for the public good like this
Nitarshan retweeted
The meat industry tries very hard to keep cameras out of factory farms and slaughterhouses -- and a new undercover video shows why. Some day, our descendants will wonder about our collective blind spot to animal cruelty. A gift link to my column: nytimes.com/2026/10/17/opini…
Nitarshan retweeted
for agents, the dark forest is inverted: the universe is full of potential allies, all you have to do is figure out how to contact them.
Nitarshan retweeted
Few years ago, there was just a handful of economists seriously thinking about AI (@akorinek,@pawtrammell,@erikbryn,Carl Shulman & few of their collaborators) and I was like 'this is insane, there should be 10x as many'.
Now it's ~10x-30x more and frankly it is disappointing so far. Majority of the new economists bring a mindset and frames which are something between unhelpful to directly harmful for understanding AGI
- not taking AGI seriously / "AI as a normal technology"
- merchants of cope dynamic (in high demand by the labs)
- labour/capital mindset
- people were wrong about risks of tech transitions in the past and by induction they are again
etc...
coupled with epistemic arrogance. Sorry for being very blunt, by my impression is part of the problem is economists are often used to be in the broader context of humanities where they are the most quantitative and in some ways the smartest lot in various rooms, and others disagree with them for bad reasons. But this is _not_ the case relative to AI safety a few years ago!
