Machine Gods? Like… really? I thought even Casey Newton would have more taste than that but allegedly he has farmed out he vast majority of his thinking to a machine and one of the “moats” that there “supuh scawwie” machine gods still allegedly can’t cross is taste so maybe that tracks

A friend linked me to FelonyBench which monitors how many laws each of the labs are breaking with their models 😆

But if I call it AI, I get to use the rhetorical trick of laundering responsibility. The AI did it, and I am merely a helpless observer of its greatness.

You have to both call it AI and be stupendously rich (or stupendously poor and owe hundreds of billions to investors). If you or I tried running an agent and hacking HF… Believe it or not straight to jail

So bored of the super intelligence narrative that has been breathlessly accepted by the media in general after a few decades of priming via sci-fi movies and slightly more recently, “CEO said” reporting.

All these anti-ai or pro-ai-but-in-the-specific-way-i-like (also looking at you Gary Marcus) efforts serve to divide and conquer opposition to current GenAI nonsense.

Also bonus points to these people for co-signing a document with Steve Bannon. I mean if that’s not a red flag…

Also the frontier “labs” are rapidly running out of money and having to raise more and more insane investment rounds. This is a great way to save face and back away from burning $$$$ on training runs that push the frontier of can a model rearrange some arbitrary coloured squares by 10% next they just need to solve the problem of how to make their customers pay cost+ on inference when they’ve been giving it away at steep discounts for nearly 4 years… Easy!

Omg we are haemorrhaging money AI is so scawwie powerful intelligent and nobody will lend us any more becoming self aware. We need to slow down the frontier to do regulatory capture and juice our numbers for ipo protect civilization

It sounds like many of these math proofs that AI is managing are simply scooped from users’ chat histories anyway!

If you work there and you genuinely believe you will destroy civilization you’re either full of shit or experiencing AI psychosis. This tech is simply not that good. go outside and touch some fricking grass.

zoMG. aI Is gOnNa KiLL uS All sOonnnn!!!11!

what a fucking joke

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The bad stuff happening now is worth it so that humanity can benefit in the future… Now where have I heard that before,

Betteridge’s law at work here

Oh for sure and I am definitely strong Manning Drew’s post to the max here. If it turns out he just generally means that resilient infra is bad with no nuance then I agree with your original point.

The “censorship resistance” being criticised here is in support of free speech absolutism: posting propaganda, misinformation and brigading and trolling people with no recourse. This is bad and has real and meaningful consequences for people like Jason Arday who was recently driven-to-suicide for being black and successful amid false plagiarism allegations and a media witch hunt.

I agree that left leaning causes also need resilient comms infra to allow for organisation. Unfortunately these issues are two sides of the same coin. I think it is completely fair to criticise people like Dorsey who left bluesky in 2024 because of their moderation approach which is hardly heavy handed - especially if you are a far right hater of trans people . We can condemn this behaviour and also hold the belief that we need resilient infra that the government can’t easily seize.

Tonight’s pivot article? 😊

Matt Clifford, Snake oil salesman, founder of Entrepreneur First startup incubator and chair of the UK’s ARIA research committee (that hands out money to researchers) quietly doing a fascism* by joining anthropic whilst also continuing to be a civil servant. Other high profile anthropic bribe salary receivers include Rishi Sunak the former Prime Minister and George Osbourne the former Chancellor.

*from Wikipedia: Corporatism became a main tenets of Italian fascism, and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy advocated the total integration of divergent interests into the state for the common good

Marcus is not anti-AI. He is anti Scam Altman and Dario - or more specifically anti-llm. He relentlessly witters on about how “well aktually if you did it my way it would be good AI…” he is still an AI maximalist that wants to bring about AGI. He is one of the most frustrating people whose work I’ve read because he is soooo close to making a good point the majority of the time and then spoils it by saying “but guise we should totally still do AGI and we should do it my way”.

In the addendum to his essay he defends his use of anthropomorphizing language because it makes it easier to understand…

“quantum physics is hard so here’s a fairy tale about the mysterious proton and his three children: the quark triplets”

I enjoyed one of the comments comparing Zitron to a fire and brimstone priest… like dude, Big Yud and Dario are right there

Ed Zitron says water is wet but he didn’t properly quantity wetness or indeed how long it would take me to be soaked through if I touch water… Checkmate atheists!