People sometimes ask if I think it's risky for everyone to have access to AI. I think it's MORE risky for an exclusive & homogeneous group alone to develop tech that impacts us all. x.com/techreview/status/9787…

This will go down as the greatest irony in the age of AI. Not one of these employees said anything in our defense, except to be condescending, when we couldn’t even say “cancer” to Fable 5, considering us a biosecurity risk. Maybe they regret it now & I still feel sorry for them.

Virtue is cheap in the land that ships no frontier models; except it is not cheap (cohesion, resilience and *values* at €76Bn ) and still no frontier models shipped.

We just raised $85M, Europe's largest ever robotics Series A, led by @CRV, with backing from @Samsung and @LVMH. But this story did not start today. Carla and Jia have been obsessed with robots since they were kids. They met as engineers at UPC, started the university's robotics club, and competed and won at an international level. Years later, that obsession became THEKER: a company built from Barcelona to be the largest in the world, and to crack the technical problems other people call impossible. Today we are well on our way to the goal we set on day one: solve 100% of physical work. Our robots are live in production, improving every day, and the pace is only increasing. This round is not the destination. It is one more step in the right direction. Thank you to everyone who got us here. To our team, who hold a standard most people would call unreasonable. To our customers, who push us to become better. And to our investors, old and new, who saw it before the rest of the world did. If this mission excites you, we are hiring across the board. Come build it with us. We will win.

Europe has the 🇪🇺 Competitive Compass made by the prescient EU Commission. We're saved. youtube.com/watch?v=2mElHcLv… The 🇪🇺 EU Commission direction is totally ridiculous.

No 🇪🇺 AI initiative will be serious until performance capabilities are deemed more important than "ethics" and "trustworthy". Ethics and trustworthiness are nil if you model is not performant. Period.

Your passport will determine not only where you can travel, but which models you can use.

As powerful models get incrementally "too powerful to be released" few consequences arise Models are already converging on similar capabilities, switching costs are low, and frontier labs are ~months away between them and another 6-9 months vs. China: 1) Value capture will shift from model serving (API tokens) to complete industry specific solutions, first with partners in each industry, then they'll get dis-intermediated. 2) Frontier labs will use each new generation of models to compete into all corners of economy using their models as unfair advantage. 3) Passive-aggressive tactics (downgrading, boycott, etc.) will turn direct offensive.

Painfully dishonest degrowth piece. Here's a teardown. 1. The headline promises maths that isn't there. "We've done the maths" but the piece contains no calculation. Just two borrowed statistics and a policy wishlist. 2. The 92% figure isn't a measurement, it's a definition. "Excess" emissions means anything above an equal per-person share of the carbon budget going back to 1850. Define the rules that way and the North is guilty by construction. Pick a different baseline year or allocation rule and the number changes completely. It's a moral framework dressed up as arithmetic. 3. "Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity" is the opposite of the global record. Extreme poverty fell from roughly 38% of humanity in 1990 to under 9% before the pandemic, almost entirely through growth in China, India and East Asia. Not redistribution. Not aid. Growth. The claim is only half-true for median wages in some rich countries, and they quietly universalise it. 4. The headline contradicts the article's own sixth paragraph. Headline: growth is doomed. Paragraph six: low-income countries still need growth. So growth works precisely where the poor actually live. That's not a doomed strategy, that's the most successful anti-poverty mechanism in history with a footnote. 5. The decoupling double standard. This school insists GDP can never decouple from emissions (so growth must end), while claiming GDP has fully decoupled from wellbeing (so growth is pointless). Decoupling is impossible in one direction and total in the other, depending on which suits the argument. In reality 30-plus countries have cut emissions, including imported ones, while growing. 6. "Poverty is manufactured" is backwards. Poverty is the default condition of our species for all of history. Wealth is what had to be manufactured. Inequality is policy-shaped, fine, but treating destitution as something governments created implies it vanishes once they stop, which no historical evidence supports. 7. "Endless expansion on a finite planet" conflates money with stuff. GDP measures value, not tonnes. A therapy session, a software licence and a barrel of oil all count. Physical limits constrain material throughput, not value-added, and the two have been diverging for decades. The two claims that hold up: the top 10% producing nearly half of emissions (solid Chancel/Piketty data) and the debt-servicing figure. Everything structural around them is rhetoric wearing a lab coat. theguardian.com/commentisfre…

By the way, public service announcement: if you're one of the numerous people posting about Anthropic's dystopian ways and you're thinking about getting Claude to help you write that post... don't! Another one of their terms is that you may not use Claude to do anything that "exposes [Anthropic to] reputational harms" 👇 And, if you do, under the - extremely unusual - clause 13 of their terms (anthropic.com/legal/consumer…), you have PRE-AGREED, by using Anthropic (and accepted their terms), that the harm you've done is irreparable, that you won't oppose Anthropic injunction, and they don't need to prove actual damage. They can simply go to a judge in a friendly jurisdiction (and of course, their terms precise that any dispute "will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in San Francisco, California") and: a) file an injunction that shuts you down b) make you pay for everything since under section 11 of their terms you agree to indemnify Anthropic for "any and all liabilities, claims, damages, expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees and costs), and other losses arising out of or related to your breach or alleged breach of these Terms." In other words, if you use Claude to help you talk shit about Anthropic publicly, their terms say you pay their lawyers to go after you and you've already pre-agreed you've lost the case. Oh, and cherry on the cake: in the odd case the judge were like "are you crazy, this is insanely abusive, you Anthropic are the ones at fault here," according to their terms Anthropic's maximum liability is... $100.

Recursive Self Improvement

Fable 5 release is rushed. Bio/cyber censorship is laughable. This can only mean OpenAI is about to release something equal or better. (i hope i'm right, the alternative is so dark)

In good faith and with no judgment (mistakes happen), I truly hope that Anthropic will hear the feedback and change course on this. Anthropic is a company that has been raising awareness about AI manipulation which is a very important topic! You don’t want to go down as the first company to enable and open the door for human-designed AI manipulation at scale (giving intentionally bad answers to users without them knowing is the highest form of manipulation in my opinion). One way to avoid that is just at the very least to always keep disclosing the limitations and safeguards. More generally I want to emphasize that there are millions of AI builders out there using your tools for good every single day and the more you can keep helping them, the better for the world! Thank you, it’s not too late to fix this!

When you hear AI "safety" you should hear "censorship" and "control" instead. All of us surveilled and spied by safeguards of loving grace. Today it's intelligent Terms of Service control. You can't do AI research. Can't ask this question about your kid's biology homework. Tomorrow it's refusal to help you with competing coding projects. A 100 page blacklist of questions. Or this question means AI will search your computer stealthily and snitch on you to the cops because you posted an prohibited insult in a WhatsApp chat in the UK. Open source must win out at both the model and the harness level. That's because AI will become our interface to the world. It will sit higher in the stack than the OS. It will collapse current SaaS layers, chat, communications, apps, app creation, into a single new kind of interface that doesn't exist yet. It's got to be open. It's got to be a cypherpunk solution that makes privacy and security the number one priority. If a closed source solution wins this layer, it's a disaster for the world. Especially if it's built by a single company with a single closed source model. Why? Because what we share with AI will be more intimate than anything we've ever shared with a machine. It will be our friend, our sounding board, our advisor. It will know our business ideas before we've told anyone. Our medical issues. Our financial picture. We'll talk about the fight we had with our partner. About feeling lost or depressed. Our kids will talk to it about problems at school, about bullying, about heartbreak, things they won't tell us. It will know us more intimately than we know ourselves. Right now the world runs on a surveillance economy. We traded free stuff for apps that peer deeply into our lives. If we replicate that model in the AI era, it's not just surveillance economy 2.0. It's surveillance economy squared. Social scoring. Automated evidence gathering. Legal conversations you thought were privileged showing up in court. Random people making $2 bucks an hour on the backend from God knows where reading the most intimate details of your life. Every insecurity, every fear, every half-formed thought you whispered to your AI buddy at 2 AM, sitting in a database somewhere, searchable. If we let closed source models dictate what we can and can't do it will only get worse and worse. We've got to fight this future with every last breath. If you can read this, you are the revolution.

Who are we kidding, Hans?

HISTORY LESSON: In 1968 the US, USSR, UK, France, and China signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, declaring nuclear weapons too dangerous for any more countries to build. All five already had them. Everyone else had to submit to inspections while the cohort pinky-promised to disarm eventually (they didn't lol). India refused to sign, pointing out the NPT didn't decide nukes were too dangerous to exist, just too dangerous for anyone who didn't have them by 1967. Anthropic sabotaging Claude for anyone building what they deem a "frontier model" is the same hypocrisy. The danger started, conveniently, the day after they finished. Perhaps @dwarkesh_sp was more on point when he compared GPUs to nuclear bombs.

Today: Passive-aggressive sabotage of anyone making progress on AI we don't like. Tomorrow: actively OFFENSIVE to anyone making progress on anything don't like.

just so you guys are noticing this; they will pull the ladder from above you as soon as they can. their intentions are to disempower you as much as they reasonably can. the only reason they have given you anything at all is because openai has forced them to