I think the AI situation is pretty dire right now. And at the same time, I feel pretty motivated to pull together and go out there and fight for a good world / galaxy / universe @So8res has a great post called "detach the grim-o-meter", where he recommends not feeling obligated to feel more grim when you realize world is in deep trouble It turns out feeling grim isn't a very useful response, because your grim-o-meter is a tool evolved for you to use to respond to things being harder *in your local environment* rather than the global state of things So what do you do when you find yourself learning the world is in a dire state? I find that a thing that helps me is finding stories that match the mood of what I'm trying to do, like Andy Weir's The Martian You're trapped in a dire situation and you're probably going to die, but perhaps if you think carefully about your situation, apply your best reasoning and engineering skills, you might grow some potatoes, ducktape a few things together, and use your limited tools to escape an extremely tricky situation In real life the lone astronaut trapped on Mars doesn't usually make it. I'm not saying to make up fanciful stories that aren't justified by the evidence. I'm saying, be that stubborn bastard that *refuses to die* until you've tried every last line of effort I see this as one of the great virtues of humanity. We have a fighting spirit. We are capable of charging a line of enemy swords and spears, running through machine gun fire and artillery even though it terrifies us No one gets to tell you how to feel about this situation. You can feel however you want. I'm telling you how I want to feel about this situation, and inviting you to join me if you like Because I'm not going to give up. Neither am I going to rush to foolhardy action that will make things worse. I'm going to try to carefully figure this out, like I was trapped on Mars with a very slim chance of survival and escape Perhaps you, like me, are relatively young and energetic. You haven't burnt out, and you're interested in figuring out creative solutions to the most difficult problems of our time. Well I say hell yes, let's do this thing. Let's actually try to figure it out 🔥 Maybe there is a way to grow potatoes using our own shit. Maybe someone on earth will send a rescue mission our way. Lashing out in panic won't improve our changes, giving up won't help us survive. The best shot we have is careful thinking, pressing forward via the best paths we can find, stubbornly carrying on in the face of everything And unlike Mark Watney, we're not alone. When I find my grim-o-meter slipping back to tracking the dire situation, I look around me and see a bunch of brilliant people working to find solutions the best they can So welcome to the hackathon for the future of the lightcone, grab some snacks and get thinking. When you zoom in, you might find the problems are actually pretty cool Deep learning actually works, it's insane. But how does it work? What the hell is going on in those transformers and how does something as smart of ChatGPT emerge from that?? Do LLMs have inner optimizers? How do we find out? And on that note, I've got some blog posts to write, so I'm going to get back to it. You're all invited to this future-lightcone-hackathon, can't wait to see what you come up with! 💡

Would be great if people at Anthropic could collect data on this! (But I understand they might be busy and this might not last long...)

Not enough people appreciate that @m_bourgon is at the frontier of getting agents to do extremely useful mundane work. Ask him about the Gmail API…

I am uncomfortable with the number of @DKokotajlo's predictions coming true

Similar but I like the new energy

It's very good seeing this from both OpenAI and Anthropic. Best news all year.

“A Grassroot Institute of Hawaii study found the Act costs Hawaiian households roughly $1,800 per year.” Why don’t residents of Hawaii lobby hard against the Jones Act?