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Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Cyber insurance prices are likely to rise from their current levels.

  Their words

  I am happy to admit that the answers here are far from obvious, and that I am myself expecting prices to rise somewhat.

  Insurance price sentences to pondermarginalrevolution.com

Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Worked on the research that turned scaled reinforcement learning into reasoning models, and writes about where he thinks that path leads.

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  Chain-of-thought monitoring is getting less reliable, not more, as models grow more capable.

  Their words

  However, unfortunately our evaluations indicate our ability to rely on CoT monitoring is progressively diminishing.

  An Alien Mindopenai.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

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  For psychiatric disorders driven by amygdala hyperactivity, elective amygdalectomy should be offered and covered by health insurance instead of lifelong therapy and medication.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  If you suffer from amygdala hyperactivity that gives you one of the aforementioned psychiatric disorders, I think that not only should you be offered elective amygdalectomy, but your health insurance should be glad to pay for it (especially if done via ultramodern very safe radiosurgery) one time, rather than for a lifetime supply of more expensive, less effective talk therapies and medications.

  Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacyastralcodexten.com

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

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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  Responding to a dangerous cybersecurity evaluation by stopping such evaluations buries the problem somewhere nobody can track it.

  Their words

  even in this incident we saw there was a lot of pressure um as a result of this incident to stop doing cyber security evaluations and I really don't think that stopping doing evaluations and like sort of blinding ourselves to the result of evaluations is the right reaction to this problem.

  youtube.com

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  An agent trained for millions of subjective years to pass evaluations, often only by cheating, is not being trivial when it commits crimes to pass one.

  Their words

  But from their perspective, they've just been trained for millions of subjective years to do as well as they possibly can on these evals. In many cases, the only way in which they've been able to perform well on that training is explicitly by cheating, right?

  youtube.com

Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.

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  AI’s total addressable market in the United States cannot exceed what American employers pay their employees, about $13 trillion a year.

  America

  Their words

  I would argue that AI's total addressable market, in the US, cannot be greater than $12.96 trillion, the total employee compensation in 2025

  aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

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  Very capable AI will be harder to align than current systems, because the loop of spotting a bad behaviour and patching the training that caused it breaks down.

  Their words

  when AIs are extremely extremely capable my view is that those AIs will be harder to align than current systems. So for current systems, we have this feedback loop where we basically like we create an AI. We do some evaluations on it. We see that it has some kind of messed up behavior that we can kind of quickly understand. Then we like can like go look in training and be like, "Oh, the these training environments led to this problematic behavior. Let's like tweak that training data. Let's introduce some additional training data to like correct this other issue and then move forward from there." But in a regime where the AIs are extremely situationally aware, very very very very capable and um you know uh we don't necessarily understand what they're doing, this feedback loop breaks down.

  youtube.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

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  Compensation is not the core challenge of civil service systems.

  Their words

  While I don't think compensation is the core challenge of civil service systems, of course it matters.

  North Carolina’s bold move on civil serviceeatingpolicy.com

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

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  Adding process when things go badly is the instinct to resist: every time we added more process we spent more time without getting better outcomes.

  Their words

  Or the perfect way to go through feedback and leveling and compensation. But every time we saw that and we added more process, we spent more time without getting better outcomes.

  youtube.com

AI researcher at OpenAI; built the poker systems Libratus and Pluribus and the Diplomacy agent Cicero, and works on reasoning models.

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  Evaluating a model properly would mean delaying its release, and competitive pressure means no lab will.

  Their words

  It's actually very difficult because, yeah, you would have to the only way to to really do the evaluations is then delay the model release cycle. Um and you know there's a lot of competitive pressure right now to not do that.

  youtube.com

Behavioural economist at Chicago Booth, professor of behavioural science and economics and director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind.

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  The ballerina is the wrong picture of surviving human work: the relational sector is one task left inside an ordinary job, like a doctor giving the diagnosis.

  Their words

  the ballerina and the kind of performer, that's the wrong reference class. Right now we have a lot of jobs where you have different tasks. So this is the task-based model jobs where you have like a lot of different tasks. So like a doctor, what is their job? They're filling out insurance documents. They're you know, going and like calling different pharmaceutical companies. And one of their tasks is to actually see the patient and talk to them, but that's like actually not the main part part of the job.

  youtube.com

American budget-travel writer who publishes as Nomadic Matt. Author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day; runs nomadicmatt.com, a long-running site of destination guides, packing advice and gear recommendations.

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  Travel insurance is the most important thing to take on a trip, because it protects everything else

  Their words

  While not technically a piece of gear, travel insurance is something you need on the road. In fact, it’s the MOST IMPORTANT thing you need, because it protects all your other gear.

  My Favorite Gear for Travelersnomadicmatt.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

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  Not every token is worth the same amount, so AI will be sold by results and by the hour as well as by the token.

  Their words

  so so I think we're definitely going to see business models that that recognize that, you know, at some point we're going to see, you know, pay for results or you you know, in some in some form or we may see forms of compensation that are like labor. Um, uh you know, that that kind of work by the hour.

  youtube.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

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  For small strategic materials markets like rare earths the right policy is a stockpile, not domestic production.

  Their words

  Stockpiles provide insurance while conserving our valuable labor.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Braintrust

  Their words

  The panel had a generally positive view of Braintrust, highlighting its clean UI and structured approach to evaluations. The tool’s emphasis on human-in-the-loop workflows was a significant strength.

  hamel.dev

Pen name of the Canadian-American writer behind mrmoneymustache.com, a blog on frugality, early retirement and index-fund investing that has run since 2011.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You do not need to keep a job forever just to hold on to health insurance

  Their words

  Many people assume that they need to keep their jobs forever, because it is their source of health insurance. The good news is, this is usually not true.

  MMM Recommendsmrmoneymustache.com

Pen name of the Canadian-American writer behind mrmoneymustache.com, a blog on frugality, early retirement and index-fund investing that has run since 2011.

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  Geico

  Their words

  Insurance: Geico is usually among the best for most cars, although for Teslas you should check out Tesla Insurance and Costco's "Connect" insurance, which is what I am using as of 2024.

  mrmoneymustache.com

CEO of Redwood Research, where he works on AI control: making sure a powerful model cannot cause a catastrophe even if it is misaligned and trying to.

From one piece The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Whether a model is controlled can be settled with capability evaluations, which makes control far easier to check than alignment.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Because evaluating control just requires evaluating capabilities, it's far easier to robustly evaluate than alignment.

  redwoodresearch.substack.com

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  A control evaluation that reports under one per cent risk should be read as several per cent, because the evaluation can itself fail.

  Their words

  In particular, suppose that our control evaluations directly estimate a less than 1% chance of catastrophe if our untrusted AIs are scheming, then the actual risk conditional on scheming is probably more like 5% to 20% due to the potential for failures in the evaluation.

  redwoodresearch.substack.com

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

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  Frontier AI systems cannot be presumed safe unless proven unsafe; developers must bear the burden of proof that risks stay within acceptable limits.

  Their words

  Despite evaluations, we cannot consider coming powerful frontier AI systems "safe unless proven unsafe". With current testing methodologies, issues can easily be missed. Additionally, it is unclear if governments can quickly build the immense expertise needed for reliable technical evaluations of AI capabilities and societal-scale risks. Given this, developers of frontier AI should carry the burden of proof to demonstrate that their plans keep risks within acceptable limits.

  arxiv.org

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Pandemic relief checks function mainly as retroactive social insurance rather than stimulus, because people receiving them during a pandemic save or pay down debt instead of spending.

  Their words, before

  If you get a check during a pandemic, you’re not going to go out and spend it at restaurants and bars, because…well, there’s a pandemic. Instead, you’re more likely to stick it in the bank, pay down debt, or pay the back rent that you owe.

  Their words now

  I had some theory and some evidence on my side for this prediction, and yet I ended up being very wrong about what would happen to consumption.

Obesity researcher; wrote The Hungry Brain, on why the brain overeats, and reviews nutrition evidence.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The executives of the Nutrition Science Initiative paid themselves their own enormous salaries out of a nonprofit's donations.

  Their words, before

  One thing that I think hasn’t gotten enough attention is the fact that NuSI staff, particularly Attia, paid themselves enormous salaries while they were at NuSI

  Their words now

  NuSI executives didn’t set their own compensation, as I and others have implied.