I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: — As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. — Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.) — A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. — In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.” — In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. — In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. — The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. — Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

Gifted and Talented, or G&T, programs have long been a perennial subject of debate, particularly in New York City, where it has bedeviled mayors for years. Some parents have already washed their hands of the whole G&T business, refusing to participate in what they view as a corrupt system of segregation. But countless others still place significant stock in the G&T designation and what it offers and are comfortable relying on cognitive testing, should it be required, to determine whether a child qualifies. “When your intelligence is the foundation of your self-perception, failing to achieve feels like soul death,” writes Katie Arnold-Ratliff. But if the limited amount of information we have about gifted kids long-term is any indication, most lead, at best, ordinary lives of modest accomplishment. A 35-year study of 677 gifted children found that by age 50, only 12.3 percent had reached a level of “eminence,” defined as “full professors … Fortune 500 executives … judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and writers.” This means 88 percent never did. Arnold-Ratliff digs into the myth of the gifted child, and how our notions of intelligence may be inherently flawed: nymag.visitlink.me/9mc2Wh

The brother and sister in the “Sophie of Dundee” incident have been found guilty of aggressing those young girls. I was overly hasty in expressing scepticism about the narrative as it happened. I’ve deleted the tweet and - yes - lesson learned. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2d…

this was already true before LLMs but at this point you really should not think of social media as a place where individual people go to express their opinions. the algorithm defines an optimization target (engagement) and people and LLMs work together to optimize it. we have built a machine for inferring what the audiences of different platforms want to see and hear and extruding textslop and imageslop and videoslop conforming to the shape of that desire as quickly and efficiently as possible when you read a viral post you think you are reading the thoughts of a person. you are reading the thoughts of the algorithm. out of the churning mass of nonsense constantly being posted, that specific post was selected to ascend to virality by an evolutionary process, and that process is the actual agent in the situation. the individual author barely matters, we are simply approximating the infinite monkey theorem here. at this point it barely even matters whether the author was technically human or an LLM, LLMs are just an additional source of monkeys

Here's a draft excerpt from our film project THE WILD CITY, chapter on contemporary warfare. Needs more reality melt - suggestions would be welcome

I just read a short story in the New Yorker that was worse than AI

paperclip-punk is the only "new aesthetic" movement that matters right now

We are still more interesting storytellers than the AIs because we have lives. It's our edge. Live yours.

i’ll run a workshop on guerrilla tactics