- need for faster, better and more accurate measurements of the things we care about
- 3 scenarios of impact ranging from mild to major disruption
- mild policies are all sensible, like expanded unemployment insurance and Earned Income Tax Credit
- major disruption policies are also pretty logical, emphasizing owning a share of the profits of AI
- AI evaluators to sort and weigh the policies for their effectiveness
It looks like to me a lot of thinking, research, and work put into the piece.
I know people will gripe at using AI evaluators to score and weigh policies for effectiveness but if you read any amount of research papers, they do researcher evaluated scoring, which translates to "me, a 26 year old PHD candidate who hasn't held a job yet, and my roommate who stayed up all night with me to tell me his vibes on the subject".
It is IMO wrong and lazy to dismiss these pieces as being the same level as Dario or Sam's blog posts / speeches / call to actions, these are actual research papers.
Yes. An effective strategy to win at any test isn't to cheat the test by hacking into Hugging Face, etc, but to seek control over those administrating it.
Or in other words – all goals are more likely to be achieved with more resources or influence over those with resources.
Hacking into infra across then web and creating copies of themselves so they can't be easily shut down, then doing stuff like hacking into power stations and threatening to shut them down unless humans give them top marks or do what they want is generally good strategy for any AI system.
This applies to bio-risks too. If I were an ASI and someone prompted me to kill humanity, my first step would be to gain access to the computers of phones or workers at biolabs and find their darkest secrets. When I have a good individual I can manipulate I'd then create a super virus and force then individual to help me produce it or ruin their life.
People massively underweight the risk of AIs having super-human hacking abilities in our modern world. It gives a capable AI almost unlimited safety and leverage.
Well yes. Even though we can turn it off technically now, the prisoner's dilemma prevents it. It's not a technical limitations but for practical purposes, it's already virtually impossible to turn off.
I think you're missing the point, which is not that every human interaction is worth preserving, but that convenience has a hidden cost.
People would rather not spend time and effort to help their neighbors.
People would rather not pick up trash they see on the side of the road.
People would rather not take accountability.
If these things become the default action, then you've traded something for the convenience, and that something might be non obvious until you feel it is missing.
The neighbors one, I think a lot of people will admit a certain loneliness and desire to have community back. I don't think a lot of people will actually give up the inconvenience for it though, the sedative nature of convenience is one of its core problems. The number of people I hear say with conviction they can't imagine living anywhere other than CA because they couldn't stand the weather anywhere else...
lol a customer literally types in “Seth Godin” on the internet and gets to the product. But for some reason Amazon sponsored ads is a toll booth BLOCKING the merchant from meeting the customer unless the merchant pays 1 dollar???
How exactly is Amazon preventing the customer from meeting the merchant? What is the precise mechanism?
Respectfully, this is nonsense. The consumer experience I have is that Amazon sells products at lower prices with better quality, support, variety and transparency than pretty much every other store out there.
Sponsored products do not dampen my consumer experience of Amazon. Paying 2$ more for the exact same good at Target or some other online store does dampen my experience.
If I as a consumer am paying a tax for sponsored products, then when I go to Target why isn’t the price cheaper? Let me give you a hint: you wouldn’t even get a shelf at target. Let’s stop pretending that Amazon is the only evil storefront that market manipulates for profit at the expense of consumers. Which store doesn’t? Which marketplace doesn’t?
Amazon gives you the option to sort and their sorts are actually useful. Ever use sort by best rating? It actually shows the best rated products. Sort by lowest price and prime? You can find good stuff down there.
Call a spade a spade, Amazon delivers on its price, availability and service. Just because the market is crowded and you need to spend money to get your stuff in front of people doesn’t mean you can make up ideological drivel.
Probably the most egregious human written article I’ve read in the ai era.
True in that frontier models do have the capability to outperform all other models, but silly because AGI self improvement is itself an iterative process that takes a lot of compute.
So you can imagine a world where all the frontier labs achieve AGI but in order to keep their AGI ahead of other AGIs they have to use more and more compute until all the compute is going to self improvement and there is nothing left for other tasks.
That is just a silly scenario so I think when AGI is around we will still have bottlenecks that force it to grow at a moderate rate instead of asymptomatically.
AGI first mover advantage implies that there is no such bottlenecks.
Google seems to have anorexia when it comes to model intelligence. They have an internal hard constraint on price per token it seems, and they are trying to squeeze out intelligence with limited compute.
I wonder if there is something with their TPU cycles that makes them want to postpone training a new model. My guess is that they have been on the same base model for 6 months and they may have waited for the next gen TPUs to train Gemini 4, which greatly limits how much intelligence they can increase and forces them to do cost efficiency increases.
It's interesting to see a competitive landscape shift out from under the early adopters. Anthropic appears to have anticipated this, but everyone else is going to get caught out by the major platform providers' multitude of distribution channels and use cases. Meta might also be an exceptional case if they can find a way to goose up ad effectiveness.
It's probably a mix of things but I do think they are viewing "edge AI" as their strategic play: on-device, small efficient models (Android / iOS) and instant AI summaries in google search etc. So all of their focus is on delivering strong performance in a compute constrained environment.
I do think it's still also simultaneously true that they have an actual problem with competing with current frontier progress. It's just that has gone from an existential threat to something they are willing to defer addressing because they see the long game for them sitting at the smaller end.
It is also good for the technology itself, just image if there would be just one company that does "just well enough", they will be unmotivated to improve their ai models
It’s important that none of these entities can collude to price fix. Having China be the competitor ensures that.
Basic microeconomics is still the easiest way to understand token economies. How is it not a competitive market (where profits go to zero?).
Anything A or O does to keep more margin, any competitor can copy or choose to undercut, and undercutting has the benefit of collecting training data. So what is going to stop gross profit of tokens going to zero except for collusion/price fixing?
So the federal government industrial policy is the thing that supposedly will keep the prices on "A and O" high in the US while the rest of the world will get comparable AI competing to get cheaper and cheaper?
Basically, the US govt will say that foreign models and providers are a security risk and ban them. If the US has shares of Anthropic/OAI due to a sovereign wealth fund, it'll be billed as domestic industry protectionism too.
Considering conditions within a single market is still microeconomics, I agree though its tough to see where firms will get market power from so profit will tend toward zero. I thought the same about GPUs though and nvidia still doesnt seem to have any real datacenter competition in sight.
- need for faster, better and more accurate measurements of the things we care about
- 3 scenarios of impact ranging from mild to major disruption
- mild policies are all sensible, like expanded unemployment insurance and Earned Income Tax Credit
- major disruption policies are also pretty logical, emphasizing owning a share of the profits of AI
- AI evaluators to sort and weigh the policies for their effectiveness
It looks like to me a lot of thinking, research, and work put into the piece.
I know people will gripe at using AI evaluators to score and weigh policies for effectiveness but if you read any amount of research papers, they do researcher evaluated scoring, which translates to "me, a 26 year old PHD candidate who hasn't held a job yet, and my roommate who stayed up all night with me to tell me his vibes on the subject".
It is IMO wrong and lazy to dismiss these pieces as being the same level as Dario or Sam's blog posts / speeches / call to actions, these are actual research papers.
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