They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc.
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
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.
I'm not sure I like agree exactly with the oversight benefit you named of like you know open source systems keeping frontier systems in check feels more unrealistic to me because they're going to be so much dumber than the frontier systems.
One is yes, I agree with you that this sort of behavior, doom scrolling, etc. occurs, but I think the evidence that there are dopamine hits when you're doing this isn't really very strong.
But when they looked at the happiness levels of these people, it was the average person who actually would self-report the highest levels of happiness. So ambition doesn't necessarily equate with happiness, which I think many people would agree with with that.
What I was saying in that piece though was, I think we were right to be skeptical that time. But now, I see the same thing playing out with would you be willing to ship it some code you didn't read? There's no point in arguing about if it will happen or when it will happen. Talk about what it would take.
absolutely agree that product skills are probably the most durable. My build would just be there's a lot of people who have the title PM who haven't spent a lot of time building those skills in the last 5 years, but have gotten really good at communicating frameworks to leadership.
I think a lot of the reason people are skeptical of these is because they've been burned by things like case and UML and all these other miracle solutions that were forced on them by people who wanted them to use it no matter what.
I think if you can't find anybody else that shares your belief, you should pay attention to that. Um, and it's also very hard to do a startup on your own and very lonely. But I don't think you need to find a lot of people. And in fact, if everybody believes it, that's also like a bad a bad sign.
I agree with @theo completely, it's clear to me this is where it's going, also seeing @karpathy with Claude moving to the cloud (via Slack etc), I think AI "agents" and AI coding will operate on servers / from the cloud first
And then for those of you who are skeptical about international organizations, here's one you've never heard of. The International Organization for Standardization then standardized these container sizes to fit one if by truck, two if by railway cars, and thousands if by sea. And this just plummets transport costs.
I would agree to that type of package for every company I've ever worked with, and most CEOs wouldn't take it. Uh, it basically says you don't make money unless the stock goes way up. And if you stock goes way up, you make an obscene amount of money. And I would do that deal over and over and over and over again.
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
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
We may have a handful of genies, but that's different from having a handful of friends, right? In part because the energy's different, the conversations are different. Also, they just agree with us constantly.
Product managers need a solid foundation in statistics to be metrics-driven. This classic book is a lively and fun book will leave you smarter and more skeptical.
And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure because, if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates rights of other people as well, you become broken inside, you become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.
But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you're drunk you also get aggressive against others.
Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.
I totally agree. Sometimes I take too long to come to that conclusion, but I will proudly say, as most theoretical physicists should, that I kill most of my ideas myself.
until there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data?
There's this very good quote from Sam Altman who... He can be a hyperbeast sometimes, but one of the things he said, and I think I agree, is that superhuman persuasion will happen before superhuman intelligence, right? And if that's the case, then these things before we get this AGI ASI stuff, we can embed superhuman persuasion towards our ideal or whatever the ideal of the model maker is, right?
Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him, yet he's always willing to debate his opponents, and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face. He's a happy warrior, and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence, where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement.
Over time, they all come to share Ayn Rand's views and opinions on everything, from music to art, to clothes. She gets a dining room table and a bunch of them get the same dining room table, and it becomes incredibly conformist, because they've all believed they're acting rationally. And they believe that to act rationally is to agree with Ayn Rand and they believe there's no other way to make decisions than rationality. To disagree with her is to be irrational.
You might be skeptical of using synthetic data. After all, it’s not real data, so how can it be a good proxy? In my experience, it works surprisingly well. Some of my favorite AI products, like Hex use synthetic data to power their evals
Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.
I could believe that the Middle East doesn’t exist because I’m not there now. That would be kind of ridiculous, I think we would all agree on that. I think there’s only so much that we can attribute to our own powers of seeing. The whole system doesn’t come into being because I’m measuring it.
I am myself skeptical that there is a clearly defined notion of who “the right people” might be, and thus I am on public choice grounds far more skeptical of government than Keynes was.
Be skeptical of absolute certainty not backed up with proof. Be skeptical of pronouncements that there’s only one way a court will ever possibly interpret something.
I love this book so much. It's the joy of nihilism. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. I agree completely. I would give it a 10-out-of-10 rating but I disliked the whole second half of the book. So just read the first half. See my notes here. If you like my book “Useful Not True”, you should read this.
The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition. Despite having seen thousands of a/b test results for minor design details, I am still regularly surprised and humbled by my intuition being wrong.
And then you have a choice which is do you blame the people who are exhibiting the terrible behavior or do you blame the people who created the incentives? Right? And and and he he believes and I agree on this. I I think 100% you blame the people who created the incentives.
Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries: How does group behavior and the science of phase transitions manifest itself? The author, a physicist and entrepreneur, tries to show why some wild new ideas become game changers. I was skeptical, but when someone like Danny Kahneman claims “This book has everything: new ideas, bold insights, entertaining history and convincing analysis. Not to be missed by anyone who wants to understand how ideas change the world,” I pay attention.
As for my personal feelings on the matter, however, I’m skeptical that new licenses are the right approach on a systemic level, both in terms of feasibility, as well as where I think the world is going.
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