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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.

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  Illicit distillation is by far the most important AI misuse threat in current disruption cases.

  Their words

  Indeed, distillation is by far the most important threat in this report, and the part of the report that will have the most impact.

  The Bad Guy With An AI Named Claudethezvi.substack.com

Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reducing trade deficits and reviving manufacturing would not end the resentment fueling right-wing authoritarian movements.

  Their words

  Crude economic factors don’t explain the fascist shift in Germany. And Trumponomics, even if it worked (which it doesn’t) wouldn’t end the resentment feeding our own authoritarian movement.

  Neo-Nazis and the Impotence of Trumponomicspaulkrugman.substack.com

Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

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  Being told to be realistic about your ambitions is how ambitions fail; the boundaries people accept about what they can do are the ones that stop them.

  Their words

  If I had thought in those ways, it probably wouldn't have happened. I just didn't think that we should have these boundaries to what you can do.

  youtube.com

Writer and technology executive; blogs at anildash.com, was CEO of Glitch, and helped build Movable Type and ThinkUp.

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  Stigma changes what people admit to rather than what they do: they keep using the platform and simply get quieter about it.

  Their words

  People being embarrassed or ashamed while still using the technology does not bother the authoritarian owners of those platforms in the least, as long as they’re profiting off of those ashamed users.

  anildash.com

Graphic designer and type designer, who created the original Macintosh icons and typefaces at Apple from 1982 and has since designed interface graphics for NeXT, Microsoft, Facebook and Pinterest.

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  A plain drawing of a pencil stands for writing better than a glossy realistic pen, because the more detail an image carries the more particular the thing it depicts.

  Their words

  which is why I think like a simple drawing of a pencil can stand for writing in some ways better than a chrome pen with a reflection, which is real very fancy, but it's a very particular kind of pen that not everybody might write with.

  youtube.com

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

From one piece Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Building a realistic simulator is exactly as hard as building the agent, because the simulator is itself a large AI model.

  Their words

  And the problem of building a good realistic simulator is just as hard as building the agent itself.

  youtube.com

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  A physical AI company needs three AIs, not one — the agent, the simulator and the critic — turning deployment into a flywheel.

  Their words

  So, a deployment of your agent uh in the real world generates data. That data then grounds the simulator and makes it more realistic. The simulator generates harder edge cases for the critic to score and for the agent to learn from.

  youtube.com

Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

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  Fair hardware benchmarks must use the best software and tuning for each hardware option, not hardware specs alone.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  The most accurate and realistic evaluation for HW involves selecting the best software and then tuning it, and doing this for all HW options.

  Third Stage Engineeringbrendangregg.com

Runs global health R&D at Open Philanthropy; writes about the science and medicine that could exist and does not.

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  The tools that make biology powerful for medicine are the same tools that make it dangerous, so the benefits and the misuse risk cannot be separated.

  Their words

  Some models could be used both for good and ill, yes. Diffusion models in particular could be used by bad actors to hallucinate toxins or other harmful proteins.

  AI could help lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com

Director of strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology; an OpenAI board member until November 2023, and writes Rising Tide.

From one piece Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misuse 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Advocates who argue for restricting AI on misuse grounds while privately fearing takeover end up less credible than if they said what they meant.

  Their words

  By trying to use misuse as a fig leaf for their real concerns, they end up sounding much less credible than if they just tried to argue for what they actually meant.

  helentoner.substack.com

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  Nonproliferation is the wrong frame for AI misuse; the workable strategy is to use the gap before a capability spreads to build defences against it.

  Their words

  We should think of the gap between frontier models and proliferated models as an adaptation buffer: a limited time window when we know what bad actors will soon be able to use AI for, which gives us a chance to implement defensive measures that increase society’s resilience to the danger.

  helentoner.substack.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

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  As soon as founder mode is an established idea people will misuse it: founders excusing an inability to delegate, and managers deciding to act like founders.

  startups

  Their words

  I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't founders will decide they should try to act like founders.

  Founder Modepaulgraham.com

Biologist at the MIT Media Lab; invented CRISPR gene drives and then spent years arguing for safeguards against their misuse and against engineered pandemics.

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  The tools that make biology powerful for medicine are the same tools that make it dangerous, so the benefits and the misuse risk cannot be separated.

  Their words

  Our experiment demonstrates that the immense potential benefits of biotechnology are profoundly vulnerable to misuse.

  media.mit.edu

Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

• Lovedsponsoredrcmnd.app

  Theft of Fire

  Their words

  Theft of Fire offers a plausible and realistic universe. The characters, Marcus Warnoc and Miranda Foxgrove, are not mere archetypes; they are complex, flawed, and deeply human. Their struggle to trust one another and overcome their own demons is a powerful allegory for the modern human condition.

  lemire.me

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

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  Hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian: it is a property of self-organising systems that emerges for the benefit of the parts.

  Their words

  But hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian. Hierarchy did not originate as a political structure that humans invented for controlling and dominating one another, it is in fact a property of self-organizing systems, and it emerges for the benefit of the subsystems.

  charity.wtf

Development economist; argues that letting people move to rich countries does more for the poor than aid, and wrote Let Their People Come.

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  Hostility to migration is the last gasp of a dying system rather than the shape of the future.

  Their words

  The negativity around migration is the last breath of a moribund system and the transition to a more realistic approach.

  english.elpais.com

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

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  Society's response to AI is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid transformative progress that many experts expect, with safety research lagging and governance lacking mechanisms for misuse, recklessness and autonomy.

  AI alignment

  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.

  arxiv.org

Psychologist and science writer; wrote Science Fictions on how research goes wrong, and writes the newsletter of the same name.

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  A hyped effect shrinking to a small but real one as the studies improve is a sign that a field is working, not failing.

  Their words

  Initial massive exaggeration of the importance of an effect gives way to more realistic, much smaller effects (which might still be useful) after people start doing better studies.

  How growth mindset shranksciencefictions.org

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Ministry for the Future

  Their words

  The Ministry for the Future does a better job than any other book I’ve read of playing out, in a dramatic but realistic way, how high temperatures can literally kill people.

  gatesnotes.com

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

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  The software industry misunderstands backwards compatibility by focusing on narrow legalistic definitions rather than outcomes.

  Their words

  We as a profession misunderstand and misuse the concept of backwards compatibility, both upstream and downstream, by focusing on narrow legalistic definitions instead of outcomes.

  log4j: between a rock and a hard placecrawshaw.io

Developer and podcaster; created Instapaper and Overcast, co-founded Tumblr, and co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The realistic alternatives to Apple's App Store would end up worse than the App Store itself.

  Their words

  Apple's App Store is the devil we know. The most viable alternatives that would crop up would be far worse.

  The future of the App Storemarco.org

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

• Readrcmnd.app

  Naked Statistics

  Their words

  The book’s stated goal is to convey an intuitive (as in: very little math) understanding of statistics, and I think it succeeds at that. It shows both the awesome power of statistics (for research, science, predictions) and the dangers of its misuse.

  radex.io