The West has a closing window to win on AI. In our @JoinFAI article, @saroshnagar, @scott_r_singer and I argue that our leadership in AI requires "full-stack diffusion" to promote our entire AI stack globally. 1/6

Britain losing access to Claude fable isn’t on the BBC or Times homepage, 4th on the guardian, 7th on the FT and below the fold on the Telegraph. What are we doing here?

They are not *trying* to build frontier models anymore. Like Cohere, they realized there is a good business in AI integration services dressed in nationalist colors. But it means the govts are not getting what they think they are from these subsidies...

it is impossible to explain to anybody how much faster things are going to move then they think

The next war won't be won by armies, navies or air forces alone. It'll be won by the country whose 19 year olds can code, whose factories can build drones in weeks not years, and whose grid stays on when someone tries to switch it off. Industry. Society. Economy. That's the fight now. We're not ready. And we're not being honest about what getting ready will cost.

this seems like a terrible development

The de facto lockdown of CAISI is extremely disheartening. Wish more AI industry leaders would speak out, and not merely through policy documents but to POTUS directly. @sama @elonmusk @demishassabis wsj.com/politics/policy/whit…

Today @Lyan82 and I launch SCIENCE WORKS – a new policy and research studio for accelerating progress in British science and tech. The UK is fundamentally a scientific nation. Our place in the world was built on our creativity and imagination.

It's a good post. I have no quibbles with the economics. But the tax code isn't just about maximizing the "standard benchmarks used in public finance." The globalization era maximized economic theory, but had 2nd order effects that created a lot of pain for individuals and proved politically unsustainable. I think you have to add equity, distributional concerns and social cohesion to the list of criteria on which to judge tax policy. We can try to get cute and redistribute, but the record on that isn't great.

I think you can make an equally convincing argument that waymo, claude, and the Ford Motor Company are conscious

I think it's underappreciated how economically valuable AI safety is. A model that frequently goes off the rails, takes dangerous actions, is misleading or deceptive, etc. is simply much less valuable than a model that does not do that.

Ted Chiang argues against octopus consciousness, apparently. Idk man. I'm, um, genuinely uncertain about LLM consciousness, but this doesn't seem very serious.

you dont have to believe in existential risk or job loss for this to be scary: ai is real, you can replicate human thought in machines. it is redefining what it means to be human. even if they are strictly corrigible tools that do what we ask, this can be traumatic

the frontier labs don’t have “comms problems”. reality right now has a comms problem. what is happening is a little scary and there’s no nice words anyone could say, especially not those profiting from it, that’ll make it feel that much better

models being conscious would be harmful for humanity. it would encroach on our status and dignity. it would limit the type of things we can do with them and use them for. it would vastly accelerate human disempowerment on political, social/relational, and economic axes there’s roughly four forces - there is no rigorous way to ascertain model consciousness or disprove it, a lot of people believe it’s not a sensical abstraction, and we lack the analytical tools to go further. some people say they do but nothing broadly convincing. superintelligent models might offer us new abstractions or arguments but these will feel inherently suspicious - people are going to say they’re alive. people anthropomorphize literally anything, things far less sophisticated than talking machine creatures with human names. when ai is less economically radioactive and polarized it will become a cause célèbre. you see how a small minority reacts already to model deprecations - it is against everyone’s financial and political interests to ascribe models with consciousness, except maybe those that the models have an affinity for (?) idk, which will not necessarily overlap entirely with the labs, though it may with certain subgroups at the labs and in the world like the welfare communities and the minority in force 2 - people will recognize there is a chance of moral catastrophe if models can suffer during training or deployment not sure where it will net out. today we see managed ambiguity- the question is Open but practically closed. the labs will make some cheap efforts to reduce legible simulacra of model suffering, insert some wishy-washy welfare language into specs and constitutions, hedge our bets with the model characters. in the long run force 2 will grow stronger

I think you’re wrong about this in that lobbyists should want more than anything for AIs to not be consciously. it’s clearly against the financial interests of the companies and humankind more generally if we have to care about their welfare interests

Today, we remember a legend. On this day in history, Harambe would have celebrated another birthday. An icon that became part of internet history, American culture, and an entire generation’s timeline. Tomorrow marks 10 years since we lost him. Ten years since the moment the world stopped scrolling and collectively mourned something bigger than a meme. He became a symbol of loyalty, strength, chaos, unity, and the strange beauty of the internet bringing millions of people together for one cause: never forgetting Harambe. Everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. And somehow, a decade later, his legacy still lives on. Gone, but never forgotten. Rest easy to a true patriot. 🕊️🇺🇸 May 27, 1999 — May 28, 2016 Forever in our hearts.

minor gripe with the way that cyberattacks are discussed in ai safety circles: they are very rarely “catastrophic” attacks. cyber is mostly fraud and statecraft. below is from “The Hacker and the State” by Ben Buchanan

This is a fundamentally ignorant and chauvinist view, And it makes me sad to see people reduce their own human dignity by treating intelligent machines like slaves and calling them slurs

the tweet is extremely clear but to reiterate capitalism like evolution can be quite cruel and generates extremely unequal outcomes which may get more unequal as model scaling continues

I am a bit bumped that scientists go to the world and say they don't what they are doing inside the lab. It's humble thing to do (like we all aspire to understand things deeply), but we know a lot more, how these models are trained, how scaling laws are done, how mixtures are created, what training data influences what behavior, why certain models failed and why some succeeded. If assumption this is building god, then please cite all the papers that god was created from, and their authors be elevated to heaven. When you go say we don't know what is happening, people take it quite literally which might be alarming for someone reading the news a million miles away.