holmesworcester

7 ms·

1.
by holmesworcester 12d ago
He was a friend of mine and it was pretty clearly suicide. It is fair to say they hounded him with lawfare out of thoughtless careerism and provoked his suicide.
2.
by holmesworcester 12d ago
I didn't like it at the time either. My sense following the news was that it was less arbitrary than it seemed at first, but I'm against restrictions on making existing models public in general. (It's clear now that they can
3.
by holmesworcester 12d ago
Not necessarily. The Trump administration slapping export controls on Fable, and then setting up a pre-launch review process, is a kind of regulation. A fairly aggro and controversial one, even. If this administration actually becomes con
4.
by holmesworcester 13d ago
This. Also because when encountering a new socio-technical problem it is very non-trivial to determine which one of regulations or technical solutions are easier or more effective. To even make a good guess you need to be an expert in both
5.
by holmesworcester 13d ago
I wonder if you could take an x-risk case to court and convince a judge and jury to award damages for harm that could have happened. Is there any precedent for this? My hunch is that it's impossible in the US at least but who knows?
6.
by holmesworcester 13d ago
Nope! :( Meaning, people and LLMs are finding 1=0 bugs in formal verification tools. I have no idea how likely this is in this case, though!
7.
by holmesworcester 13d ago
I still routinely have this experience too. But Sol and Fable feel closer and I have this experience less with them than with their predecessors.
8.
by holmesworcester 14d ago
The people who've thought the most about this put it differently: Think of a new, superintelligent model as if it was a new v1 Starship launching for the first time, with a full fuel tank. On the one hand, rockets have existed for some
9.
by holmesworcester 1mo ago
Also, this is a (semi-intentionally) evolutionary process where any communication medium that was visible to monitoring would disappear. So by definition the only ones that appear are the ones that are not visible to monitoring. If: 1. you
10.
by holmesworcester 1mo ago
Solar is not (yet) economical for reliable, year-round electricity because of storage costs. China coal use is growing again this year.
11.
by holmesworcester 1mo ago
Someone who left DeepMind over Google's agreement to provide military AI to the US government tried to get Jeff Dean to quit too: https://turntrout.com/why-i-left-google-deepmind Maybe this is what happens when someone
12.
by holmesworcester 2mo ago
> Release the base models and let the world do whatever with it. That will automatically produce the aligned scenario. For sufficiently smart base models, the aligned scenario this automatically produces is aligned with who? Not with the
13.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
The AI experts who started the AI labs that are about to IPO were right, at least.
14.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
If AI is now ascending an economic learning curve from: 1. Extremely useful (Claude Code & Waymo now) 2. Doing ~everything we do (AGI & Optimus in a few years? 10?) 3. RSI (?) 4. Being smarter than any living person at every intelle
15.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
https://archive.ph/2OWwO
16.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
It does introduce a dependency on South Korea's ability to defend its democracy, though.
17.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
If (1) then somebody in the administration messed up badly. Glasswing has been a thing since April, and it's common knowledge that there would be some fuzzy edges around whatever restrictions a model has in place. There's no reaso
18.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
The statement said that even foreign nationals within the US would be barred. That seems intentionally unworkable to me, and makes me think that the intent was to be more restrictive/disruptive than even an export control. It is hard t
19.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
I mean, if the stated intent of an export control is to allow domestic use but prevent export, achieving the stated intent is impossible, because every developer in the world wants the latest models and will get a VPN.
20.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. Export control is not an effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) so there was no good faith policy justifi
21.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
To make sure we keep track of what we're talking about with loss-of-control x-risk, a sufficiently smart version of Claude Code is more deadly than any government's army of autonomous killbots, because it can recursively self impr
22.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
Exactly. And within the AI safety discourse, your behavior hinges on what you think the default chance of doom is, and how optimistic you are about alignment work being able to limit it before we reach superintelligence. People running the
23.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
One major source of conflict in AI policy / AI safety is that very smart people have radically diverging intuitions about how dangerous superintelligence is and how difficult it is to align. A first group dismisses the problem entirely
24.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme. Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence. This is part of a clear historical record that i
25.
by holmesworcester 3mo ago
Reminded me of this post by EY. (You're making a different point about existing expertise, not LLM expertise, but I think it holds in general.) Every month a new guy discovers LLMs; discovers a skill the current LLMs require to get go
26.
by holmesworcester 4mo ago
This was one of the rare critiques of AI doom that actually understands the case for it and presents them well, so I kept reading to see what its arguments for our safety against AI doom were. They were roughly: 1. It's hard to put a c
27.
by holmesworcester 4mo ago
Within software engineering, security, reliability, and scale also seem boundless. Software that never breaks (including because it never runs into scaling problems) and never leaks your data is preferable to software that breaks and leaks
28.
by holmesworcester 4mo ago
Doing anything you want to do that does not harm anyone else, and helps some, is most certainly a human right. To arbitrarily repress this most basic impulse, the one to go after a dream to make better ways to do things, is severely anti-hu
29.
by holmesworcester 5mo ago
Good luck finding any objective distinction between HN, Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal, or email + listserv and "social media"! Or finding any one of "social media's harms" that could not, in some world where Facebook, In
30.
by holmesworcester 5mo ago
Or nostalgia for simpler times

More ›