The videos AI can make when I give it my stuff are already better than my channel. 3Blue1Brown is 10 OOMs of quality above mine. AI video seems to improve by about 3 OOMs of quality per year, so...

Man this guy's a completely irredeemably evil lunatic

I have so much faith that AI will cure all disease that I'm going without superfood shots at my local smoothie place

Guys I think she did understand the joke

Taking a chill day after a lot of travel, wrote a short post on something that's been bugging me in a lot of the AI discourse I've seen blog.andymasley.com/p/thinki…

It takes a lot to surprise me with how low someone can go in politics these days, but yeah Ramaswamy surprised me

I think YCSE was good but people are really hyping it too much. It is nowhere near the "best documentary ever," I think people haven't seen enough truly great ones

Have had a few comments surprised that I endorse mild shaming over climate stuff and like I endorse it when someone's actually disproportionately emitting. The point of my "don't climate shame people for AI use" thing is that AI emits comically small amounts at the individual level, not that shame's always bad. I agree that in an ideal world we'd just have carbon taxes, but carbon taxes aren't happening anytime soon, and so we need to socially construct other forms of taxation in the meantime, like side eyes. I'd like everyone to mostly focus on systematic change, but I still think some boos are in order when someone buys a Hummer.

Cold Takes remains criminally under read

Amazing surprise at the end of a conversation at EAG where the other person ended with “I need a picture with you because you’re the reason my class passed physics and I wanna show them I met you”

I think people adjacent to the field don't appreciate how small AI safety is. For example, sometimes people complain about how AI safety threat models don't seem as well-developed or rigorous as climate change models. I think some of this is a skill issue on the part of AI safety researchers and advocates, which I complained about elsewhere (see reply). However, by far the bigger issue is that there is just way more money and people going into addressing climate change than on AI safety. There are tens of millions of people working on reducing climate change, and the core of people working on threat models ("climate scientists") number in the tens of thousands. (Yes, I was surprised by how big the numbers were too). (Most people work on stuff like clean energy). In comparison, there are low single-digit thousands (anything from 1,000 to 4,000 is defensible imo) of people working on AI safety, and collectively maybe low dozens of people working on figuring out threat models. (Most people work on ai safety engineering, some on policy). So we're 4 whole orders of magnitude behind climate change in people working on addressing the issue, and maybe 3 orders of magnitude behind on threat modeling. In terms of money, yearly spending on AI safety is in the high hundreds of millions to maybe 2 billion. In contrast, annual spending on reducing climate change (including clean energy) is in *trillions.* So we're 3-3.5 orders of magnitude behind on spending, and 4 ooms behind on people. The AI safety inputs picture looks a bit less bleak than this immediate comparison might suggest. For example, I think our average talent pool is somewhat higher human capital. There's also more latent interest/willingness-to-spend on AI safety than the "high hundreds of millions to low billions" current spending numbers might suggest. In contrast, climate change spending can't be scaled much higher (since you can't really jump OOMs above "trillions").

Someone should make a list of upper-midwit concepts—this would go on it. Bullshit jobs, POSIWID, stochastic parrots—not as dumb as “ai uses up all the water” - that’s lower-midwit. But still midwit. Pseudo profound & Airport-book-y

I’ve gained weight in the last few months and now I can just say it’s counter signaling