Related posts

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Qualitative claims about AI alignment cannot be validly inferred from quantitative scores on mundane use-case tests.

  AI alignmentAnthropicOpenAI

  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.

  thezvi.substack.com

Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Performance-related command-line flags represent qualitative changes to restartability, buffering, or concurrency, not levels on a continuous performance dial.

  Their words

  /Z, /J, and /MT are not levels on a performance slider. They change restartability, buffering, and concurrency.

  feeds.hanselman.com

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Some goods really will get a fully automated supply chain, and yet what that does to the overall capital share is genuinely ambiguous.

  Their words

  I do think there's this qualitative shift that we I think we agree is coming, which is that there will be at least some goods whose network-adjusted capital share goes to one, right? Because the whole supply chain can be automated and there's no part in it that we care intrinsically about having a human do. Um, so that'll be a, you know, that'll be a qualitative shift. Interestingly, the implications of that shift for the overall capital share are ambiguous

  youtube.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Economics journals have made large datasets and heavy statistics the price of making any causal claim at all, which has squeezed qualitative economic history out of the field.

  Their words

  Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.

  Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobelageofinvention.xyz

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Complete reverse-engineering of neural networks is a less promising research direction than studying model biology and applying interpretability usefully

  Their words

  I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).

  MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29)neelnanda.io

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Culture can be changed, so falling birth rates are a fixable problem rather than a one-way ratchet of modernity.

  Their words

  My qualitative research has taught me one thing: culture is malleable! So surely this issue is fixable!

  How do we Boost Birth Rates?ggd.world

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Qualitative leaps in AI capability from merely scaling up models are a rational necessity rather than an empirical mystery.

  Their words

  While the fact that merely scaling up AI models often results in qualitative leaps in performance may seem empirically mysterious, in retrospect it should be seen as a rational necessity.

  Hegel and the AI Mindsecondbest.ca

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The memorize-fetch-apply paradigm behind LLMs can reach arbitrary skill given training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or acquire new skills on the fly.

  LLMsOpenAI

  Their words, before

  This "memorize, fetch, apply" paradigm can achieve arbitrary levels of skills at arbitrary tasks given appropriate training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or pick up new skills on the fly (which is to say that there is no fluid intelligence at play here.)

  Their words now

  OpenAI's new o3 model represents a significant leap forward in AI's ability to adapt to novel tasks. This is not merely incremental improvement, but a genuine breakthrough, marking a qualitative shift in AI capabilities compared to the prior limitations of LLMs.

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI progress is faster than people expect, and ordinary scaling can be enough to solve problems that looked very hard.

  Their words

  This rapid scaleup will probably drive another qualitative leap forward in capability like what we saw over the last 18 months.

  Language models surprised usplanned-obsolescence.org