Gabriel
@Gabe_cc
CTO at Conjecture, Advisor at ControlAI. Open to DMs!
For deontology's sake, and just in case it's not obvious what my beliefs are. We are on the path to human extinction from superintelligence. At our current pace, it's very likely that we hit a point of no return by 2027. It is plausible that we hit one sooner.
There was no bargain or betrayal. Corps scraped the web. Websites regularly benefitted when Google did it. 🤷♂️ There was no collective decision or "grand bargain." It just happened. eg: AI corps now bypass robots.txt Big Tech giveth, and Big Tech taketh. It doesn't bargain.
Google exists bc of a grand bargain: scrape the open web, and profit from directing traffic to the best sites. Around 2010, the betrayal began. YouTube artificially ranked above other video, then over time maps results injected, shopping, flights, events. Now AI answers.
There are probably some guys in tech who spent the 2000s and 2010s screaming "HAHAHA DIE LEGACY MEDIA DIEEEE", and who are only now realizing that what comes after legacy media is populist insanity I probably know a few of those guys
In retrospect one of the things that allowed wokeness to become so powerful, at its peak, was the decline of journalism as an industry. The kind of people who undertook its institutional capture in 2010 mostly couldn't have gotten hired in 1980.
Fiction is understood to be fiction, yet it changes people's minds. So do thought experiments. And typical thought experiments are _designed_ to defy common sense. What happens to your mind if you get trained to answer "shrimps" to variations of "human or shrimps??"
"Your hypothetical is unrealistically extreme" is also not an excuse for getting the wrong answer to the hypothetical. It's one thing to say "it's silly to talk about whether it's OK to torture billions of people to get a hot dog" and another thing to say "I choose the hot dog".
NEW EPISODE DROPPED... AI safety advocate @MaxWinga joins me to break down the reckless billionaire AI race, the path to superintelligence, and why humanity may only have 5 years left. Watch – youtu.be/hAfPF-iCaWU Links to full episode in 🧵
Max is a good guy and nails it in this podcast, really does a good job of explaining the basics in great detail and accuracy. Great show, give it a watch!
NEW EPISODE DROPPED... AI safety advocate @MaxWinga joins me to break down the reckless billionaire AI race, the path to superintelligence, and why humanity may only have 5 years left. Watch – youtu.be/hAfPF-iCaWU Links to full episode in 🧵
Many go, "Elon, why do you do this?" It doesn't matter. It's still a distraction. The world is not about Elon. Our problem is our failure to do ourselves what's good. Despite having much better tech and science than the Enlightenment thinkers ever did.
I resisted AI for too long Living in denial Now it is game on @xAI @Tesla @SpaceX
Both the leftist and the libertarian make no sense to me here. Companies often pay a fair share to their employees and survive. Companies also often underpay their employees. I think of such conversations as about "The World of Words" and not the real world.
If your company isn’t paying you what your labor is worth, it would be in the interest of a competing company to pay you more. Think of it this way: If someone is auctioning off a $10 bill and the highest bid is $8, wouldn’t you offer more?
On one hand, researchers see ASI as a very interesting problem, and companies can make a lot of money from it. On the other hand, people do not want human replacement, experts have warned of extinction risks, and the tech is moving much faster than our ability to manage it.
1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO).
Ideologies are limited. They focus on a narrow set of values ("Social Justice", "Freedom", "Order") and declare them supremes. These limitations conflict with reality, and how people react to them is very informative. Link a reply to a full essay about this.
Virality for its own sake is another name for wasting people's time at scale. There's no promise that people are going to be better informed, more connected to others, or have more fun. Virality is just presented as its own quality.
Working on a new way to make creative viral videos fast called … ✨ Imagine ✨
People now spend most of their free time and attention on the Internet. Giving free-reign to Big Tech there has caused the decline of many load-bearing institutions beyond journalism. This itself has caused the rise of many bad ideologies beyond woke.
In retrospect one of the things that allowed wokeness to become so powerful, at its peak, was the decline of journalism as an industry. The kind of people who undertook its institutional capture in 2010 mostly couldn't have gotten hired in 1980.
On the Clearer Thinking podcast, Spencer Greenberg and I had an interesting discussion about AGI, what good institutions should look like, and under what conditions (if any) the flow of information should be restricted. Hope you'll give it a listen! podcast.clearerthinking.org/?ep=271
The recent Anthropic blackmailing paper has gotten quite some attention. This is a nicely put together video explaining the paper in a balanced way. I recommend giving it a watch if you haven't read the paper yet! youtube.com/watch?v=eczw9k…
If a job gets automated, it is painful for the people who get fired. But they theoretically can move on to other jobs. If people get automated, there's no other job. In that world, there's no place to where people can move. If you want to reason about unemployment, the problem…
The Media is the collective eye. It is what we focus our attention on. Ignoring the Media is ignoring what we pay attention to. Coincidentally, Social Media has shattered it into a hundred independent shards.
There's something weird about the fact that things like "reign in robo-calling" or "get rid of pitbulls" or "rationalize the federal holiday system" are actually all basically nonexistent from politics. There's so much quality of life stuff that just isn't in the discourse.