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The subjects this post names, from the same vocabulary the directory files beliefs under, and the word it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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19 September
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Their words
lossy self-improvement remains my baseline on the trajectory of progress, and the increased discussion of extinction risk seems very misplaced
18 September
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Their words
There are only five possible futures for superintelligence: 1. Kills human race 2. Human disempowerment 3. Paperclip maximizer 4. Departs for parts unknown 5. Stoner
17 September
16 September
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korrents.com
Nervous credit-market sentiment around the AI datacenter buildout could suddenly reverse and collapse the boom.Their words
And when market opinion is nervous, it might turn and collapse the boom at any moment.
15 September
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Their words
Nobody knows for sure. We're in uncharted waters here, and I think even the LLM skeptics would have to say that the technology has taken us far past what many originally thought possible.
From one piece The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formation 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
it was a chance to stand up to the oligarchs and this technology they've staked their future on.
The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formationbillmckibben.substack.com
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Their words
one way to understand a data center is that it's a device for burning natural gas, the latest excuse (after Ukraine and Iran) for the fuel that Big Oil is counting on to keep its business model afloat even as the world turns away from internal combustion cars and crude demand begins to drop.
The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formationbillmckibben.substack.com
14 September
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Their words
To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities.
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Their words
Social media put our entire discourse in the hands of our society's biggest assholes and idiots, just in time for the arrival of an alien superintelligence
From one piece A simple plan to save the world from rogue A.I. 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
There is now broad agreement within AI safety circles that fully open AI development is undesirable.Their words
I think it's now pretty widely agreed in safety circles that total openness is in fact not desirable.
A simple plan to save the world from rogue A.I.slowboring.com
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Their words
Only a safe, well-aligned superintelligence developed in the world of liberal democracies could entrench liberal-democratic values.
A simple plan to save the world from rogue A.I.slowboring.com
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Their words
AI data centers resulting in lower electricity prices for consumers
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korrents.com
The p(abundance) outlook is far more likely than the heavily covered p(doom) discussion and deserves more engagement.Their words
The p(doom) discussion gets all the headlines, but the p(abundance) scenery is far more like and deserves much more engagement.
13 September
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Their words
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
12 September
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Their words
The concerns over AI safety and cybersecurity are legitimate, but we’re risking talking America, the global AI leader, into self-inflicted obsolescence and the obscurity of bureaucracy.
11 September
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korrents.com
Among AI people, roughly 10% is the typical estimate given for the risk of human extinction from AI.Their words
10% is pretty much the standard number you get when you ask AI people about the risk of human extinction from AI.
From one piece The AI safety vibe shift 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
No one, including safety researchers themselves, is yet confident that superintelligence can be safely controlled.Their words
I believe the researchers who say we are nowhere close to being sure of it - and are quitting, in protest, jobs that would make them rich.
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Their words
AI companies make for flawed messengers on this subject: they can reasonably be accused of marketing, of blame-shifting, of regulatory capture, and more.
10 September
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Their words
From an investment viewpoint, the opposite of the safetyist view is "it's all a bubble," not "A.I. is going to be really good."
From one piece Fear Is Not an Argument 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Less technology and less wealth increase the risk of human extinction, rather than reduce it.Their words
In fact, the risk of human extinction is assuredly higher if we are poorer and have less technology.
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Their words
These people tend to carry a totalitarian ideology. Their ideas will only work if everyone is made to agree.
9 September
From one piece GPT-6 Astra: The System Card, Alignment and What Comes Next 4 beliefs · thezvi.substack.com
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Their words
A model looking like it is becoming smarter, attempting shenanigans less often, and more often doing what you want, but getting better at hiding its actions when it wants to do that, is exactly the scary combination.
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korrents.com
Astra's mundane alignment is greatly superior to Sol's, but its superalignment status is deeply frightening.Their words
Astra’s mundane alignment is greatly superior to Sol. For practical purposes, I was actively nervous about some potential uses of Sol, in a way I am not for Astra. Astra’s super alignment status should scare the living daylights out of you.
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Their words
Now, with Astra, we are no longer playing on super easy mode. The AI is going to think ‘will this obviously turn out super badly for me if I try it?’ and if the answer is yes then it won’t try to do the thing.
+ 1 more
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korrents.com
Qualitative claims about AI alignment cannot be validly inferred from quantitative scores on mundane use-case tests.Their words
Making qualitative claims about alignment, based on quantitative data on mundane use case tests, was bullshit when Anthropic did it, and it is bullshit now when OpenAI does it. You cannot conclude one from the other.
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Their words
data centers are nowhere near the biggest climate problem with artificial intelligence.
7 September
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Their words
I agree with Jakub that alignment is not a side problem, it is the central problem, if you ‘solved alignment’ in the relevant senses the rest becomes easy and if you don’t the rest is impossible or worse
6 September
From one piece An Alien Mind 2 beliefs · openai.com
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korrents.com
No lab has solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed much longer.Their words
Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.
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korrents.com
The fundamental challenge of alignment is generalization: holding values in situations the training never covered.Their words
The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization.
5 September
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korrents.com
China is more likely to cooperate on AI safety if the US maintains a clear and comfortable lead in AI capabilities.Their words
But given the Chinese Communist Party’s power-seeking nature, it seems much more likely that China would agree to cooperate on AI safety if U.S. capabilities were comfortably ahead.
America is still beating China in the AI racenoahpinion.blog
4 September
3 September
2 September
1 September
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korrents.com
Stoke's reusable launch vehicles will be shipping Starcloud's data centers into orbit within a few yearsTheir words
In a few years, Stoke's reusable launch vehicles are going to be shipping Starcloud's data centers into orbit.
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korrents.com
True AI alignment is impossible because obedience and benevolence are fundamentally incompatible goals.Their words
AI alignment will forever be balancing the tradeoff between paperclip-maximizing and disempowerment, because these two rival concepts of alignment are fundamentally incompatible.
From one piece On the Loose 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor.
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Their words
But alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth. You should expect for highly capable, poorly aligned, self-sovereign agents to exist alongside you in the world.
From one piece Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
sometimes I talk to people in DC and their their natural inclination is to say why don't you punish the model for doing these bad things like why don't you like bring it under heel and like uh like you know show it who's boss and that is a very dangerous way to address these issues right
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Their words
But actually, this is a tremendously useful scientific artifact for understanding misalignment. And it's tremendously important for researchers at OpenAI and ideally also at third parties to be able to run counterfactual tests on this model.
31 August
30 August
28 August
26 August
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Their words
I think this is one of the great tragedies of the moment, is the falling birth rates are making it more difficult for people to be excited about a more prosperous future that is difficult to get to. Because if we're planting trees of which our children will not sit in the shades, I don't know, maybe we should just make some lumber and burn it all down, right? I think there's a nihilism that can sneak into society much more easily when we are not DNA invested in the future
25 August
From one piece I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I have a long separate post here looking at the evidence we have, and I come away thinking the data center backlash is basically entirely homegrown.
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korrents.com
The data-centre backlash is about the buildings themselves, not about what people think of AI.Their words
All this combined with the survey data on Americans’ stated reasons for opposing data centers makes me think that attitudes toward AI are probably a meaningful factor for a minority of people opposed to data centers, but I don’t think the backlash overall is driven by people’s thoughts on AI.
22 August
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Their words
Preventing companies from building data centers in America wouldn't slow down the rate of progress in AI. It would merely slow down the rate of progress in AI in America.
21 August
From one piece AIs are companies, my friend 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
If you do think it's the overall system that matters, then the alignment that's needed is far less like training a virtuous child and more like managing a semi-virtuous corporation!
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korrents.com
Aligning multi-agent AI systems is fundamentally a problem of institutional and political design, not model training.Their words
Multi-agent alignment is fundamentally a liberalism project.
From one piece A year in, the data center/AI battle starts to clarify 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The buildout of AI data centers is part of a broader extension of oligarchic control over people's lives.Their words
It's clear by now that this is all part of the extension of oligarchic control over our lives.
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korrents.com
AI and the data-center buildout underlying it pose real and significant dangers to society.Their words
Its's clear by now that AI, and the data center development underlying it, pose real and significant dangers.
18 August
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Their words
We care very deeply about AI safety. We believe the entire field will have to coordinate on shared safety standards, but will act unilaterally in the meantime. We expect confidence in safety to increasingly set the pace of AI progress.
17 August
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korrents.com
A validated theory of intelligence may be necessary for achieving genuine AI alignment.Their words
There's a good chance a theory of intelligence will turn out to be necessary for real alignment.
14 August
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korrents.com
Superintelligence bottoms out in mining, because both the chips and the energy it runs on come out of the ground.Their words
Chips come from the ground. Where's the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, "Oh, it comes from the sun." Yeah, it comes from the sun. But how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right?
13 August
12 August
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Their words
they found that Big Oil's use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI's data centers.
11 August
From one piece Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Misaligned AI behaviour will keep getting rarer and, at the same time, keep getting more extreme.Their words
my expectation is what we would see from then is that the rate of problematic behavior would decrease uh and would just keep decreasing and decrease at a pretty fast rate while simultaneously the worst things that the AIS would sometimes do would get more extreme, more egregious, and more scary.
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Their words
I would also note that my sense is that like the place where the misalignment most lives is the place where you're trying to really push the eyes hard and get them to like do work that's really on the cutting edge of what they are capable of
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Their words
we are making a trade-off where because we don't have very good alignment technology. We are going to like make an alien mind with its own values and then gamble on that to some extent rather than doing this other approach of making like a tool that pursues individual user intention.
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Their words
The fastest-growing political movement in America is dead-set on stopping the construction of data centers, which are critical to the growth of the fastest-growing industry in America.
10 August
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korrents.com
Data centre opposition only pushes construction to the parts of America that regulate energy and pollution least.Their words
It seems pretty clear that the only thing data center opposition is doing is pushing data center construction to the (many) places in America that won't regulate energy or pollution. Weird thing to pat oneself on the back for.
9 August
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korrents.com
Opposition to data center buildouts is fundamentally driven by public anger about money in politics.Their words
His Lansing rally with Bernie and AOC, more than anything else, crystallized the connection between data center opposition and voters' anger about money in politics.
8 August
5 August
4 August
3 August
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'Their words
This is such a useful book. It makes the case that there's no such thing as "human error" - instead most catastrophes are caused by system issues, misaligned incentives, and unrealistic processes. You are not the custodian of an otherwise safe system that you need to protect from erratic human beings.
2 August
29 July
From one piece Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
so much of that debate is like I think um in some ways uh a little bit of a waste of time because, you know, I think it's inevitable that we're going to have very powerful models
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Their words
we believe that everybody in the world, you know, all the billions of people in the world are going to have a super intelligence that is adapted and tailored to them, that is enables them to accomplish their goals, knows their context, and ultimately is an expander of their own agency.
28 July
From one piece Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Um so I think it's an alignment failure. I think it's a security failure. I think it's like a very serious thing even though it's you know not not the biggest example of consequence.
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Their words
there's like one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety.
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Their words
it is both true that you know maybe creating super intelligence will be the most important thing yet to happen in the history of business or human society and also that it will pale in comparison to some new startup something that hopefully one of you will do.
24 July
22 July
20 July
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Their words
It's pretty clear to me that superintelligence is here and it's more powerful than us and it's moving where things are going now, not humans anymore
13 July
11 July
7 July
15 June
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korrents.com
Giving LLMs explicit instructions, rather than assuming alignment, prevents emergent problems in multi-model systems.Their words
the best way with LLMs usually is to be explicit, since otherwise even if they're aligned they cause emergent problems.
11 June
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Their words
I think there's a 25% chance of AGI by 2027, a 50% chance by 2034, and a 75% chance by 2045.
10 June
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korrents.com
There will be no central superintelligence that solves science; a good future is many people holding powerful tools.Their words
We don't believe in this like very centralized future where there should be a small number of institutions that um that basically are are advancing all this stuff. Our vision is not that there's going to be like some central super intelligence that solves all of science.
2 June
26 May
13 May
From one piece Why Anthropic’s ultra-dirty deal shouldn’t surprise you at all 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
there is nothing fundamentally inherent to the concept of a building full of computers that causes choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change.
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Their words
The fundamental drivers of this change are panic and impatience, and that is what is behind the worst impacts of data centre growth, including a material risk to decarbonisation and climate action.
10 May
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Their words
This is the number one unsolved problem in AI. It's not the tech. We're making great progress on the technical alignment problem. But we haven't made jack progress on the human alignment problem
7 May
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Their words
there is no principal-agent problem, because the human driving the machine takes on the responsibility for its actions by owning the deployment.
5 May
2 May
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Their words
This post is about whether data centers waste the land they’re on relative to what they compete with, and my claim is that they mostly don’t compete with things we need more of (housing) and mostly compete with things we need less of (farmland).
1 May
From one piece The exact wrong lesson to learn from data centre infrasound fears 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
AI data centres cannot be meaningfully reformed without a fundamental change of course and ideology in the industry.Their words
Reformation is impossible for AI data centres, at least, not without a massive change of course and an ideological reckoning.
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korrents.com
Data centres are being built in such number, size and speed that the industry cannot realistically be reformed.Their words
There are simply too many data centres being built, and they're too big, being built too fast.
30 April
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korrents.com
Data centres will become the majority driver of electricity demand growth in Australia's National Electricity Market.Their words
Even if a small fraction of this pipeline ends up operational, data centres will drive far more than 50% of demand growth in the NEM.
24 April
15 April
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Their words
The link between venture capital and evangelical Christianity was closer than I thought. They're not just analogous; they deliberately cross-pollinate.
Church Planting: Lessons from the Commentsacesounderglass.com
13 April
23 March
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Their words
Now, the second thing is we have to build data centers that gracefully degrade.
22 March
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korrents.com
Working too hard is not burnout, it is tiredness; burnout needs your values to be out of alignment with the work.Their words
It's working too hard, right? But that actually isn't burnout. That's just like getting tired. Another piece that's super critical to burnout is not having your values aligned.
20 March
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Their words
And so you're kind of like you're either on rails and you're part of the super intelligence circuits or you're not on rails and you're outside of the verifiable domains and suddenly everything kind of just like meanders.
13 March
From one piece Dylan Patel — The single biggest bottleneck to scaling AI compute 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
um humanoid robots maybe start to or robotics at least start to but the main factor is going to be for reducing the number of people is modularizing things and making them in factories in Asia
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Their words
Yeah, I think the biggest bottleneck is compute and for that the longest lead time supply chains are not power or data centers. They're actually the semiconductor supply chain themselves, right? It switches back from being power and data center uh as a major bottleneck to chips.
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Their words
oh 50 gigawatts of economic you know sort of capex in in the data center and what gets built on top of that in terms of tokens is even larger right it might be hundred billion dollars worth of AI value into the supply chain is held up by this $1.2 two billion dollars worth of tooling that simply just cannot expand its supply chain quickly.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
Getting a data centre permitted in the empty middle of America is far easier than putting one in orbit.Their words
And so I think people are figuring out how to build these things and permitting like I I just like ultimately like permitting and red tape in middle of nowhere Texas or middle of nowhere Wyoming or middle of nowhere like New Mexico is probably a hell of a lot easier than sending stuff into space
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Their words
So, space data centers effectively are not li limited by, you know, hey, we have this energy advantage. It's actually just limited by the same contended resource. We can only make 200 gawatts of chips a year by the end of the decade.
28 February
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Their words
Many AI researchers are overly focused on risks from model misalignment, and will be in for a rough surprise when havoc arises from other layers of the stack.
22 February
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korrents.com
Third-party frontier AI auditing is urgently needed and would help prevent extreme concentration of power.Their words
I think frontier AI auditing (covering both safety and security) is both urgently needed and doable, and can help avoid extreme concentration of power, since it introduces external oversight into the decision-making of people with a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" at their disposal.
We're in Triage Mode for AI Policymilesbrundage.substack.com
13 February
From one piece Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential” 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
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Their words
I actually think profitability happens when you underestimated the amount of demand you were going to get and loss happens when you overestimated the amount of demand you were going to get because you're buying the data centers ahead of time.
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Their words
but it's not an infinitely compelling product, and I don't think even AGI or powerful AI or country of geniuses in a data center will be an infinitely compelling product. It will be a compelling product enough maybe to get three or five or 10x a year growth even when you're in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is extremely hard to do and has never been done in history before, but not infinitely fast.
+ 1 more
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Their words
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
12 February
From one piece OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But then you actually sit down and do the maths, and then for most people if you just skip one burger per month, that compensates the, the CO2 output, or, like, the water use in equivalent of tokens.
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Their words
I know I have one blog post where I say, "I don't read the code." But if you read it more closely, I mean, I don't read the boring parts of code.
10 February
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Their words
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories nowcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
6 February
From one piece Why I joined OpenAI 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I've realized that performance engineering as we know it may not be enough - I'm thinking of new engineering methods so that we can find bigger optimizations than we have before, and find them faster.
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korrents.com
eBPF, Ftrace, and hardware performance counters are proven tools for finding datacenter performance wins.Their words
given those technologies are proven for finding datacenter performance wins, it seems likely
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korrents.com
AI datacenter growth makes performance engineering critical for saving the planet, not just cutting costs.Their words
The staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters is a call for performance engineering like no other in history; it's not just about saving costs - it's about saving the planet.
26 January
22 January
From one piece Alignment is not solved 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But the goal we need to achieve is so much easier: we just need to build a model that’s as good as us at alignment research, and that we trust more than ourselves to do this research well because it’s sufficiently aligned.
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Their words
This is the hard problem of alignment we need to solve in order to succeed at building superintelligence, and to this day it is an unsolved problem.
8 December 2025
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Their words
On the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
28 November 2025
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Happy Feet SocksTheir words
I've been using yoga toes daily for years, but these socks are a much comfier and cuter alternative for soothing feet, improving alignment, and feeling like a cool gecko as you walk around the house.
25 November 2025
From one piece Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
A human being, a human being lacks a huge amount of knowledge. Instead, we rely on continual learning. We rely on continual learning.
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Their words
Number three, I think it would be really materially helpful if the power of the most powerful super intelligence was somehow capped because it would address a lot of these concerns.
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Their words
Like basically I think I think that there is a big benefit from AI being in the public and that would be a reason for us to not be quite straight shot.
11 October 2025
From one piece The AI water issue is fake 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A data centre earns its county far more tax revenue per gallon of water than a golf course does.Their words
Data centers are so much more efficient with their water that they generate 50x as much tax revenue per unit of water used than golf courses in the county:
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Their words
It’s very common that I’m told that data centers poison the water around them.
30 September 2025
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korrents.com
Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, governments and intelligence services included.Their words
No, never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center locations, it's all encrypted.
30 August 2025
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korrents.com
American data centres consume about 66 million gallons of water a day, a small fraction of what they withdraw.Their words, before
Taking this into account, actual water consumed by data centers is around 66 million gallons per day.
Their words now
So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption.
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Their words
However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption.
I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumptionconstruction-physics.com
18 August 2025
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Their words
I don't think all parts of the economy can absorb intelligence equally. So let's just say we develop fairly generalized super intelligence. I always use the analogy like you can invent a lot of drugs, but if clinical trials still take a long time, you're not necessarily going to get new therapies rapidly.
15 August 2025
From one piece China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
We're not going to run out of natural gas at 1 gawatt per year indefinitely. Okay, what if we're doing 5 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 50 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 100 gawatt per year? Like, you can you can just break the situation.
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Their words
actually it turns out that you can significantly decrease power consumption with a very small reduction in overall compute. So if you if you've got like three really bad days in a row or something, you can actually just like you can dial back your power usage quite a lot without compromising your inference or or um or training.
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Their words
But then all you need to connect that to the outside world is like an optical fiber, right? An optical fiber cable which you can string up on poles, you can run underground, you could even use microwave links if you really wanted to.
11 August 2025
23 July 2025
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korrents.com
Quoting a number for P(doom) is a ridiculous notion, because it implies a precision that nobody actually has.Their words
Well, look, I don't have a P-Doom number. The reason I don't is because I think it would imply a level of precision that is not there. So I don't know how people are getting their P-Doom numbers. I think it's a little bit of ridiculous notion because what I would say is it's definitely non-zero and it's probably non-negligible.
11 July 2025
30 June 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Musings On the Alignment ProblemTheir words
He hasn’t posted since January, but I hope he gets back to it. We need more musings, especially musings I strongly disagree with so I can think about and explain why I disagree with them.
18 June 2025
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Their words
the current situation in Iran shows that even if an "IAEA for AI" is necessary for some purposes, it won't be sufficient for resolving the tricky geopolitical issues raised by AI.
14 June 2025
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Their words
so the mathematical community plural is incredibly super intelligent entity that no single human mathematician can come closer to replicating.
10 June 2025
7 June 2025
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Their words
And good luck getting to “alignment” or “safety” without reliabilty.
5 June 2025
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Their words
higher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.
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Their words
I would say my p(doom) is about 10%.
3 June 2025
6 May 2025
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Their words
Unless you’re an extreme power user, asking AI questions every day is still a rounding error on your total electricity footprint.
What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?hannahritchie.substack.com
3 April 2025
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Their words
I see this as a totally fair question that totally misses the point of what “alignment” was trying to refer to: whether we’d be able to reliably steer advanced systems towards anything at all.
1 April 2025
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Their words
Dismissing discussion of AGI, human-level AI, transformative AI, superintelligence, etc. as “science fiction” should be seen as a sign of total unseriousness.
28 February 2025
20 February 2025
24 January 2025
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Their words
More generally, we should actually solve alignment instead of just trying to control misaligned AI.
Should we control AI instead of aligning it?aligned.substack.com
13 January 2025
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korrents.com
If the AI build-out does become a bubble, power and data centres are the assets that will carry it.Their words
In today’s world, I think the increase in self-fulfilling asset prices will be due to power and data centers.
31 December 2024
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Their words
There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.
8 November 2024
13 June 2024
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Their words
Or is it really that we’re building some super machine in a box that’s going to be smart and kill everybody? It’s not even a science fiction narrative. It’s a bad science fiction narrative. I just don’t think it’s actually accurate to any of the technologies we’re building or the way that we should be describing them.
10 June 2024
From one piece How to Build an AI Data Center 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But many of these gains have already been achieved: the best data centers already use just 10% of their electricity for cooling and other non-IT equipment.
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korrents.com
Available power, not land or capital, is what now limits how many data centres get built.Their words
In particular, operating a data center requires large amounts of electricity, and available power is fast becoming the binding constraint on data center construction.
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Their words
But there's also reason to believe that data center power consumption will nevertheless rise substantially.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Utility companies see major electrical infrastructure as a long-term investment to be built in response to sustained demand growth.
7 May 2024
From one piece The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Because evaluating control just requires evaluating capabilities, it's far easier to robustly evaluate than alignment.
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Their words
That is, labs should make sure that the safety measures they apply to their powerful models prevent unacceptably bad outcomes, even if the AIs are misaligned and intentionally try to subvert those safety measures.
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Their words
The basic problem with evaluating alignment is that no matter what behaviors you observe, you have to worry that your model is just acting that way in order to make you think that it is aligned.
+ 2 more
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Their words
AI control (with only black-box techniques) seems like a fundamentally limited approach.
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Their words
We're advocating that companies handle risk from scheming models in a similar way–striving to ensure that they'll be safe even if their alignment efforts fail to prevent models from scheming.
18 April 2024
From one piece How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordable 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The cooling systems in most data centers are energy hogs and contribute no direct value.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
Efforts to improve efficiency and remove vestigial features pay off handsomely.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
Deleting the UPSs could knock off ~$750/kW after considering equipment, installation, and square footage reduction.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
+ 2 more
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Their words
The 100-megawatt facility might have ten 10-megawatt blocks served directly by a 1500V DC feeder line without connections to other blocks that would require extra switches and routing.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
Some efforts, like nuclear-powered data centers, are reminiscent of Toyota's hydrogen push.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
4 April 2024
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Their words
The copper backplane in the data center rack is effectively the new advanced packaging in the system-level Moore’s Law race.
29 January 2024
3 January 2024
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
SuperintelligenceTheir words
the back half I think it goes off the rails and makes a ton of assumptions
21 December 2023
From one piece How Effective Altruism Lost Its Way 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Diverting attention and resources from global health and poverty is an enormous gamble, as it will make many lives poorer, sicker, and shorter in the name of fending off threats that may or may not materialize.
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Their words
Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.
20 December 2023
13 December 2023
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Their words, before
precisely because smart people do devote brain-cycles to these possibilities, the rest of us have correspondingly less need to.
Their words now
I accepted what’s turned into a two-year position at OpenAI, thinking about what theoretical computer science can do for AI safety.
28 November 2023
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Their words
And I notice that the tiny handful of people capable of caring about 200,000 people dying of neglected tropical diseases are the same tiny handful of people capable of caring about the next pandemic, or superintelligence, or human extinction.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com
26 October 2023
From one piece Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress (with 24 co-authors) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Without sufficient caution, we may irreversibly lose control of autonomous AI systems, rendering human intervention ineffective. Large-scale cybercrime, social manipulation, and other harms could escalate rapidly. This unchecked AI advancement could culminate in a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or extinction of humanity.
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Their words
Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems.
13 September 2023
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Their words
If a model was capable of self-exfiltration, it would have the option to remove itself from your control.
Self-exfiltration is a key dangerous capabilityaligned.substack.com
29 June 2023
From one piece George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think we’re going to build super intelligence before we build any sort of robustness in the AI. We cannot build an AI that is capable of going out into nature and surviving like a bird. A bird is an incredibly robust organism. We’ve built nothing like this. We haven’t built a machine that’s capable of reproducing.
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Their words
What’s ironic about all these AI safety people is they’re going to build the exact thing they fear. We need to have one model that we control and align. This is the only way you end up paper clipped. There’s no way you end up paper clipped if everybody has an AI.
6 June 2023
From one piece Why AI Will Save The World 2 beliefs · pmarca.substack.com
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Their words
My response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone?
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Their words
My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.
17 February 2023
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korrents.com
Liberal societies currently face an existential risk that must be addressed to reach a better future.Their words
This book is my best crack at explaining what I think is an existential risk to liberal societies and what I think we need to do to get to that awesome future I used to be so excited about.
19 December 2022
7 December 2022
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Their words
It terrifies me, because these data repositories are not only a risk to individual user privacy, they’re effectively a surveillance super-weapon.
Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com
5 December 2022
10 June 2022
From one piece AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The field calling itself AI safety is not being remotely productive on the problems that are actually lethal.Their words
It does not appear to me that the field of ‘AI safety’ is currently being remotely productive on tackling its enormous lethal problems.
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korrents.com
Fast capability gains are likely, and they can break many of the assumptions alignment depends on at the same moment.Their words
Fast capability gains seem likely, and may break lots of previous alignment-required invariants simultaneously.
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Their words
Many alignment problems of superintelligence will not naturally appear at pre-dangerous, passively-safe levels of capability.
+ 1 more
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Their words
unaligned operation at a dangerous level of intelligence kills everybody on Earth and then we don’t get to try again.
4 March 2022
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korrents.com
The next-token language modeling objective is misaligned with following user instructions helpfully and safely.Their words
This is because the language modeling objective used for many recent large LMs-predicting the next token on a webpage from the internet-is different from the objective "follow the user's instructions helpfully and safely" (Radford et al.,, 2019; Brown et al.,, 2020; Fedus et al.,, 2021; Rae et al.,, 2021; Thoppilan et al.,, 2022). Thus, we say that the language modeling objective is misaligned.
11 January 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
Hero On a MissionTheir words
I found myself unexpectedly (and perhaps dangerously) inspired by Miller's discussion of the 15-acre plot of land he and his wife bought outside Nashville, where they're carefully cultivating the forest, planting extensive gardens, and organizing retreats.
23 November 2021
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human ValuesTheir words
I just finished this book a few weeks ago and it is still reverberating in my mind
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of HumanityTheir words
I wouldn’t say that this is the most compelling book I’ve ever read in terms of the prose style or storytelling, but it does provide a very helpful, almost quantitative overview of all the potential threats looming out there
28 October 2020
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Mastering the VC GameTheir words
The interests of a Venture Capitalist are different than those of the entrepreneurs building a company they've invested in. Jeff does an awesome job of helping explain how you can get misaligned in your goals versus your investors. Fortunately, he also covers how to avoid it.
7 October 2019
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality, and the Race to Save the WorldTheir words
Briefly, I think the book is a triumph.
7 March 2018
Nothing matches.
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