RGS1811

I did this with DeepSeek a couple of days ago.

This is one of the most wonderful uses of AI I've seen in a while.

No, my argument is that the need to pace the frontier means they cannot safely advance in capability due to liability concerns. The competition is already almost caught up. If OpenAI/Anthropic have hit an upper bound on safe capability improvement, the gap will close all the way, and we will have reached the full commoditization of LLM tokens very soon.

Alignment just means "this machine operates in ways that align with the intent of its users". It doesn't imply anything about the inscrutability of the machine in question. A gun with a misaligned scope would likewise fail to operate in accord with its user's intent, and likewise with potentially deadly consequences.

I don’t understand all the comments assuming that RSI is the real threat here. Dario is admitting that they failed to solve alignment. Without alignment, further improvements in capability turn LLMs into wanton felony generators. This call to pace the frontier is dressed up as altruism but it’s an admission that they cannot produce a marketable product better than what they have. Pacing the frontier means the US labs have lost their moat and are dead in the water.

It's not about job security. It's about the social and intellectual practice of the discipline.

The threat to mathematics isn't that suddenly the profitability of their profession (lol) is going to go away, it's that people are thinking of AI as a replacement for the human social and intellectual practices that constitute the discipline.

`/model claude-opus-4-7`

I get this, and I’ve said similar things about privacy and security in the past, but Meta in particular has a history of intentionally using customer data and behavior to the detriment of those customers. Creating experiences designed to ensnare, addict, and ultimately harm their users. This goes beyond paranoia about security or privacy. It’s handing your drug dealer the keys to your house.

I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would want to consult with its "personal AI" or grant it access to "all aspects of your life".

By your own admission, (top of your first comment) you don't know what you're talking about. I never implied you aren't aware of the Holocaust. Thinking that the Holocaust is the only history to know here is indicative. You don't seem to understand the history of the BRD or how its constitution is structured, and you clearly don't know the internal history of the AfD, which started as a mixed center-right libertarian anti-EU party and has become more and more extreme over the past decade. You being angry doesn't make anything I've said wrong.

There's a big difference between "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it" and "I disapprove of your stated objective to expel german citizens who don't meet your ethnic/cultural standard of German-ness, but will defend to the death your right to govern." A century ago, Germans tolerated a völkisch-nationalist party that wanted to expel non-german ethnic groups as well. They did; they expelled millions of them to Poland and liquidated them there. The Verfassungschutz was implemented after WWII to prevent that element in society from taking power again.

I find the vociferousness with which clueless Americans have decided to defend the AfD bizarre. You don't know the political context, you clearly don't know the history, but you've decided that "Germany has a democracy problem." Why are you so entitled to an opinion?

Caldwell is a Claremont guy, which is key to understanding where he's coming from. First Things is an christian nationalist / natcon outlet funded by (among others) Peter Thiel. That doesn't prevent him from being correct about things in this article, but it's worth noting the outlet and source.

Caldwell systematically elides the völkisch-nationalist character of the AfD and their adjacency to neo-Nazism. He underplays Höcke's extremism, ignores the Potsdam meeting, and leads us to believe (falsely) that the identification of the AfD as rechtsextrem was somehow a biased political stunt. It wasn't, there is plenty of backing for the classification, and it would not have been undemocratic to apply the Verfassungschutz and ban them permanently.

edit: typo

I've been reading and rereading the Philosophical Investigations this summer. Later Wittgenstein is such a gift for keeping your head clear in the era of LLMs.

Anyway, delightful site. More people in tech should read LW, both the Tractatus and PI.

…yes, actually, I made my comment after reading them call out this problem in the report.

Given that this investigation was largely carried out by AI agents (and I don’t mean to ask this flippantly), how trustworthy is this report? Why should we assume that the agents reading the transcripts were not implicitly conscripted into “the collective” or otherwise falsified their findings? The tool itself has exceeded the practical limits of human verifiability and is untrustworthy.

For me personally, the answer is no. Fable is adequate to do basically anything I want to do. My perspective, broadly speaking, is that we've saturated most of the benchmarks because we've largely saturated our capacity to verify models' work at scale. What's left is context-bound verification, i.e. the problem of ensuring that output matches intent and ambiguities in prompting were resolved correctly. Further advances in autonomy do not make that latter verification problem easier. If anything they make it harder as the output per task becomes more complex and therefore more taxing for a human to verify.

The solution to that (to my mind) would be not a better model but a basic shift in architecture beyond the current paradigm and into a setup where agents have durable, plastic memories and undergo contextual individuation over time. But at that point agents start to become quasi-persons and not tools.

This is low confidence prediction, but IMO this person’s org is setting itself up for disaster. Who is accountable for all the slop they’re shipping if nobody even knows what it does anymore?

Related: https://elliotmilco.substack.com/p/who-is-accountable-when-n...

I love Otto Dix, but this essay reads like Christian propaganda. Which is to say, its presentation of the material discussed is superficial and reductive in ways that clearly serve to advance a Christian point of view.

I was really hoping for mechanical clicking and movement.

Also for a glider gun.

Reasoning is not separable from the particulars of a specific language game / linguistic practice. I’m sure some of the things the author predicts will happen, but the idea of some sort of abstractly perfect reasoner separated from the semantic content of language gets fundamentally wrong what reasoning is.

Edit: I ran this article through pangram and it is “100% AI generated”. Cool.

This is fantastic. Now I have a sophisticated-sounding german word for my attention deficit.

Democracy depends on public education about policy needs, not just electoral fundraising and stupid campaign ads. This video is a brilliant piece of political rhetoric, because it says “here’s an issue you should care about”, gets a little technical in ways normal people can understand, and then says “hey we want to do something to fix this, please join us in this effort”.

It’s upbeat, it’s rational. It’s so good.

The future you're describing is Wall-E.

> The audiophiles were right, however.

No, they weren't actually. It's fine to enjoy vinyl. I have some myself, but the audiophiles were no more right about sampling rates than they were about paying for platinum-coated speaker cables.

> For that matter, if any Ford Motor Company executives happen to read this, I have a helpful suggestion for you, too. Cooperate with the mass pruning of regulations, and then get one of your factories turning out brand new copies of the 1966 Mustang fastback.

I'm going to be generous and call this cute, but... no one wants this. And even aside from there not being a massive market for 1966 Mustang fastbacks, tossing out environmental regulations wholesale just so we could build more cars gets us what exactly, as a society?

> Chemical pesticides got marketed using the same high-pressure tactics that made CDs popular

This is just conspiracy brain. Chemical pesticides are cheap, they massively increase yields, and they work.

> I’m going to focus here on one of the many branches of homeopathic medicine, partly because it’s the one I use and partly because it’s been sedulously ignored by the pseudoskeptics who like to assail anything that doesn’t make profits for Big Pharma.

Basically, if you disagree with him about his quack medicine, you're a "pseudo-skeptic" just looking out for Big Pharma's bottom line.

This post has a very simple response: there is no book of "forbidden" technologies. These technologies were abandoned mostly out of experience and demonstrated inferiority to alternatives. The fact that conspiratorial thinking is used to explain their failure suggests that the author is more committed to believing in their superiority than actually gathering evidence and making a rational choice.

Norbert Wiener in 1960:

"As is now generally admitted, over a limited range of operation, machines act far more rapidly than human beings and are far more precise in performing the details of their operations. This being the case, even when machines do not in any way transcend man's intelligence, they very well may, and often do, transcend man in the performance of tasks. An intelligent understanding of their mode of performance may be delayed until long after the task which they have been set has been completed. This means that though machines are theoretically subject to human criticism, such criticism may be ineffective until long after it is relevant. To be effective in warding off disastrous consequences, our understanding of our man-made machines should in general develop _pari passu_ with the performance of the machine. By the very slowness of our human actions, our effective control of our machines may be nullified. By the time we are able to react to information conveyed by our senses and stop the car we are driving, it may already have run head on into a wall."

"In neurophysiological language, ataxia can be quite as much of a deprivation as paralysis. A patient with locomotor ataxia may not suffer from any defect of his muscles or motor nerves, but if his muscles and tendons and organs do not tell him exactly what position he is in, and whether the tensions to which his organs are subjected will or will not lead to his falling, he will be unable to stand up. Similarly, when a machine constructed by us is capable of operating on its incoming data at a pace which we cannot keep, we may not know, until too late, when to turn it off."

Source: https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/moral.pdf

Yes, it is autonomous to excess and lacks the moderating curiosity one would expect from a human collaborator that would check over-eagerness and prevent it from committing costly mistakes. I have stopped using Opus 5 completely and switched back to Opus 4.7 for most of my work.

Plato is delightfully weird and engaging and way more fun to read than Aristotle, agreed.

Actually reading Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics is worth it. Not because he's right about everything (he has some pretty messed up and weird views), but because it's challenging and good to think on, and chances are you'll take something away for yourself that you wouldn't have gotten from some webpage that took one-liners out of context, some of which aren't even by Aristotle.

It would be generally beneficial for people engaging in this sort of discussion to read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations”. Not a summary. Read the actual book, stew on it a bit, have some thoughts.

Funny enough, I didn't know, but your comment made me look it up, then I tracked down a PDF of the book, read the relevant section, and wrote my reply. So, even if I didn't help you out, you helped me lol.