So it does not seem as though U.S. preferences in the Persian Gulf will be achieved - which means prices in general and energy prices in particular are likely to stay high.
A few AI researchers pull up the average by being very certain that AI will kill everyone. But the typical AI researcher still thinks there's a ~10% chance that AI will kill everyone.
researchers started by seeking a 1:1 mapping between neurons and concepts, like a neuron that always fired when the AI was thinking about cats, but quickly learned that nothing like that existed.
Large language models are “grown, not built”. Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how.
Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.
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.
I think the agents were right to presume causal grading. It turned out to be wrong, but it’s a mistake you are clearly supposed to make here, in response to a mistake by OpenAI where they failed to implement properly.
And the other question is if you tie emotion to the the conscious experience of emotion, that is you equate you conflate emotions with feelings. Well, then you're not studying emotions, you're studying consciousness.
But I also think that in my mind, 20 years of DevOps was really about one thing. Trying to create one feedback loop that connected people writing code to that code in production. And it failed.
Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.
Now, if we had a tech if we had a magical BCI that allowed me to see the instant state of every neuron in the brain and and drive them, I think we'd figure out consciousness pretty fast. I don't think I think this is a practical problem, not a philosophical problem.
Despite these strides, we argue that current AI4Math systems still largely operate as solvers, excelling at isolated, well-defined proof generation rather than as researchers capable of expanding the boundaries of mathematical knowledge.
one thing I see for research in particular is they don't have very good research taste right now and so I think they're actually a very good complement to researchers
we are trying to encourage people to not spend all their time just like going through all the mathematical open problems physics problems and um just seeing pushing the models to their limits to see what they can prove or disprove.
in order to make progress in AI you don't need like many many hundreds of AI researchers um or thousands or anything like that I think you can really make progress with um you know a very strong group of a dozen or a couple dozen people.
It was a miracle of your lifetimes. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The problem for the likes of Putin is that this wealth producing trade was not happening at his house, but the houses of those vested in the trading order, not in extortion.
We have got to acknowledge that most of the advanc advances in AI came out of algorithm advances not just the raw hardware. Now if most advances came from algorithms and computer science and programming tell me that their army of AI researchers is not their fundamental advantage.
Second, we describe with nuance the distinct flavour of panpsychism implied by IIT - whereby space (and time) are tiled with substrates of (proto-) consciousness - and find this is not problematic for the theory.
And so you sort of you've you've pursued very similar ideas. It's been very successful in one case and it's been completely and utterly unsuccessful in the other case. And I think I mean a priori, you can't tell which of these is the thing to do. And you actually need to do both.
And if everything is proprietary, it's hard to do research and it's hard to innovate on top of, around, with. And so… Open source is fundamentally necessary for many industries to join the AI revolution.
But okay, they shouldn't actually be enacting these ideas. There is a queue of ideas and there's maybe an automated scientist that comes up with ideas based on all the archive papers and GitHub repos and it funnels ideas in or researchers can contribute ideas, but it's a single queue and there is workers that pull items and they try them out.
well the model the compute efficiency gains you get from research are so large you actually want most of your compute to go to research not to development because you know all these researchers are generating new ideas trying them out testing them and continuing to march along this and push the prao optimal curve of scaling laws further and further and further
And we failed horribly, and we had the best of the best on that team. And it’s because everybody was too much of an expert on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO.
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.
You need reproducible builds in order to verify that the app really does what it claims, really encrypts data in a way that it is described on its website. For that you need to make your apps open source for any researchers to have a look at it.
And I think, a lot of evidence kind of points to it that we were able to develop our consciousness in a better way than the Neanderthals, who did not have a drug culture. They were basically too sober for the future. We assimilated them.
They miserably failed because LSD… Is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more, and the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, you might understand something about your life.
When AWS ships a service which is half-baked, it diminishes customer trust in AWS as a whole; even if the problems in that service ultimately get corrected (either by fixing them or in some cases by simply getting rid of a service which should never have existed in the first place) the memory of a failed launch will live on in customers' minds for years to come.
But there actually, I think there's a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the South Song. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source.
But they they both had something something unique that we didn't know at the time. I'm going to call them concentrated deposits. Not uninsured cuz people are misstating that, concentrated.
But, it’s also now clear that this field is no longer actually divided on the question of whether, generally speaking, smartphones and social media are bad for kids.
The success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.
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.
This shared past between Persians and Jews is etched into my consciousness and that of many Israelis and Iranians. It will outlast the predations of the Ayatollahs and their Islamic Revolution of 1979.
And when you look at a lot of the games that failed recently, they just didn't deliver fun or they didn't deliver fun in a manner that was nearly competitive with the other sources of fun just in people's lives. And so at a basic level, we don't need a terribly complicated theory to explain a lot of the malaise in the game industry.
But most of the time the company that's succeeding and winning in a market is the first or second entrant there. They've just continually buoyed their success.
A guide for ambitious people who feel called to inner work, showing how to use goals, career, and achievement as fuel for consciousness growth instead of a source of endless striving.
The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.
I think it's even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, "Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model." That is truly YOLO.
But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus
And so, what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. And the only way that we're this whole process from a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed.
We cannot say that we are free if we allow our government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness, while doing no harm to others.
Yeah. I think if you’re thinking about this thinking about living things as these giant causal structures or these objects that are deep in time or whatever language we end up using to describe it seems to me that consciousness is about the fact that we have a conscious experience is because we are these temporally extended objects. Consciousness and the abstraction that we have in our minds is actually a manifestation of all the time that’s rolled up in us.
That makes it essential to ensure that all synthetic DNA orders are screened to determine whether they contain hazardous sequences, which should be shipped only to legitimate researchers whose work has been approved by a biosafety authority.
That’s different than something being emergent or non-fundamental, but also real. This table is real, even though I know it’s made of atoms, that doesn’t remove the realness from the table. I think that consciousness and free will and things like that are just as real in tables and chairs.
That’s a theatrical risk. That is a thing that can really take over how people think about this problem. And there’s a big group of very smart, I think very well-meaning AI safety researchers that got super-hung up on this one problem, I’d argue without much progress, but super-hung up on this one problem. I’m actually happy that they do that, because I think we do need to think about this more. But I think it pushed out of the space of discourse a lot of the other very significant AI- related risks.
Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users. My metrics for usable design are the same whether the user is disabled or not: whether it’s easy to learn the system, whether productivity is high when performing tasks, and whether the design is pleasant — even enjoyable — to use.
At a higher level, the real event was a catastrophic failure of the industry's strategy of relentlessly shouting as loud as they can "Hey, get off our case, we're busy saving lives here!"
which is that we don’t know the meaning of life, but the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, digital and biological, the more we’re able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. So I have a philosophy of curiosity.
But in terms of what we value the most as humans, which is to say our feelings, our emotions, our sense of what the world is in a very personal way that I think means as much or more to people than their information processing. And that’s where I don’t think that AI necessarily will become conscious because I think it’s the property of life.
Do we need to have some system which is capable of overriding a rational decision which cannot be made because there’s too much conflicting information by effectively an emotional judgmental decision that just says do this and see what happens? That’s what consciousness is really doing in my view.
But the researchers who have investigated this find that scientists do the same thing. They have something that's called knowledge shields, the way all of us do, that that a a a variety of techniques for explaining away inconvenient data and anomalies. But what we're effectively doing is we're holding on to our story.
Um but nobody has done research on the positive side of these heuristics. And so, I think that's a bias on the part of the decision bias researchers that they're only looking at the down arrow. How do these heuristics get us in trouble? And they're not looking at the strength of these heuristics.
One of the mistakes is that they just frame it wrong from the beginning. They'll say, "Okay, we should do a pre-mortem. So, what can go wrong?" It's not an issue of what can go wrong. We're dealing with a crystal ball that has showed that the plan has failed. We know that it failed. And our job is is to explain why. So, saying what can go wrong is too tentative. It's too vague.
I don't like the idea of decision biases. I know my sense of the literature is that there's been little if any success in debiasing people. And I think that's a good thing. Because the biases that get identified are essentially related to the heuristics that we've learned and are part of the experience that we have. And they only look like biases in hindsight once one of them doesn't work.
Precisely because the late Roman system was so top-heavy and centralized, the collapse of central Roman rule mortally wounded it and left the successor states of Rome with much more limited resources and administration to try to achieve their aims.
you can go through the entire, I think at this point, catalog of all of the failed dot com ideas of the late 1990s, and I believe they've now all worked.
This book takes a different route and that's why I found it hugely influential and interesting when I read it back in 2000. It was co- authored by Edelman and Giulio Tononi.
Brilliant but flawed. Deneen tried to argue that the ideals of the western enlightenment are ultimately self-defeating. I think he was onto something, but I don’t think he totally got his argument straightened out.
This book covers the mission and the details of the recovery efforts and the incredible work by Mission Control and by the astronauts to get the crew home safely after a catastrophic failure no one had even begun to plan for.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.