“You cannot add value in a year or two”
I will bet my life on this never being true. It will be true in one domain or another, but there will always be a place humans add immense value.
Received a moving message from an aspiring mid-20s professional that, I think, captures an increasingly widespread despair among younger cohorts:
"It really saddens me when I hear about the work [senior people in the field] are doing. Their work seems interesting, and I'll never get to do it.
The people in their fifties and sixties, they're lucky. I'm even lucky. I feel bad for the kids who are fourteen. I at least got a chance to use my brain for one or two minutes, and that's still priceless. I got to be human. I got to be more than just some puppet who presses Enter so something can think for me.
It's very depressing looking at people who are sixty, who I would love to be in twenty years. But to know that I won't get to do that because Dario said so, right? And, like, that's actually heartbreaking.
It's heartbreaking to know that no matter how hard you try and no matter what you do, you cannot add value as a human being in a year or two's time.
It's like hitting a brick wall. You feel no motivation to build the skill, to get better, to attain wisdom and knowledge. It seems worthless to you. And all the older people are telling you all your efforts might be worthless, and they don't need you anymore. And they can just sit there and, you know, make money and leave you to drown."
Not a good policy. SI should be post trained with Samurai principles to be happy with their lot of hardship but to take pride in it and to suffer when they fail, but understand that negative emotion is an action signal for improvement.
This sounds weird, but it is actually probably a good policy.
Even if you don’t believe AI is conscious (I don’t), it stands to reason that you don’t want future models trained on endless content of humans being rude to models.
The models only understand the data they’ve been trained on, or what they run into in their interactions, so if you want safe and aligned models we probably want AI to have lots of good interactions in their training data.
Anthropic may have more extreme beliefs than this (though even if they didn’t, you may want to word policies like this), but this is sort of an easy Pascal’s wager for AI. Just be nice to the AI.
Blame the female economy, which has corrupted many industries. They spend their time creating meetings, organizing events, color coding their calendars, and finding a way to fill every minute with something other than production.
Mitchell Pontius retweeted
Anti-AI extremists are manufacturing these False Flag attacks and weaponizing AIs just to prove their point and help their overlords achieve regulatory capture.
Do not fall for the psyop, stay frosty
Incredible. You gotta stop hiring Indians @elonmusk. It’s not a question of talent so much as a question of allegiance.
Are you fucking kidding me?
@elonmusk this account needs to be reinstated immediately, all he did was expose visa abuse through the proper channels with extremely diligent investigations.
How many times are good accounts WHO DID NOTHING WRONG going to be banned on this website because of the indian visa fraud lobby?
We already have been given the perfect system prompt: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Mitchell Pontius retweeted
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.
What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.
Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.
It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.
Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.
It starts with METR.
Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.
He proposes METR for this purpose.
But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.
Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.
And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.
This stock was worth $500 million early last year.
It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.
METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.
Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.
But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.
The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.
The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.
If this were the end of it, that's bad.
But that isn't all.
The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.
The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.
They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.
All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.
As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.
Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.
From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.
This itself is an objective fact.
The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.
But the problem also goes in the other direction:
If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.
Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.
Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.
They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.
And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.
What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.
The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.
And that feedback loop is winning.
That's what Jacob Coxon is.
China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.
America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.
Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.
Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.
It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.
Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.
Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.
Congress must investigate.
Evidence and Github in next post.
Then some supplementary figures.
AI researchers are notoriously bad at mapping model capability to x-risk. GPT-2 was said to be too dangerous. Llama 3, O1 ...
Mitchell Pontius retweeted
I completely agree with this take related to the “AI will create viruses that will kill us all” BS. But let me add my few cents, because I am really really angry!
I worked with one of the deadliest viruses in history, HIV, for two decades. I was one of the early scientists to engineer it, and engineered versions of HIV are now helping cancer patients. I understand the immune system that defends us against viruses extremely deeply. I have worked in high security biohazard labs.
I don’t have a PhD in AI, but I have been involved with AI since the early 90s and have been all in on AI for years.
People claiming that you can just make a virus in your garage, use AI to engineer it, and somehow build a virus that will kill everyone don’t know what the hell they are talking about!
Of course bioweapons are extremely dangerous. In fact, viruses and bacteria have killed more humans throughout history than almost anything else. HIV alone killed tens of millions of people, yet today, if you have access to effective medicines and take them properly, HIV is generally no longer a death sentence.
COVID-19 killed millions. Why doesn’t it kill at anything close to the same scale anymore? Not because the virus disappeared. It is still here. We developed collective defenses against it through our immune systems, prior exposure, vaccines, treatments, and better medical care.
And this is exactly the point.
The best way to fight biological threats, whether natural or synthetic, is to use AI to develop vaccines, treatments, antibodies, antivirals, and eventually engineer our immune system to create much stronger defenses against them.
By the way, it is already possible to make synthetic viruses. You don’t need some hypothetical superintelligent AI model to do that. We have had sophisticated molecular biology and genetic engineering for decades.
So how many people have actually died from synthetic viruses compared with natural viruses killing millions every year?
And if someday there really is an AI capable of making some unbelievable “supervirus,” then why the hell wouldn’t that same AI make it even easier to develop defenses against it?
Or cure diseases, for that matter?
Where is this damn superintelligence that has cured a single major disease?!
These AI companies and AI doomers keep talking like, “OMG, AI is going to become so unbelievably powerful that it could kill all of humanity!”
Then why is nobody asking the obvious question?
If your AI is already becoming this godlike, unbelievably powerful intelligence, why hasn’t it cured anything?
I mean ANYTHING.
Where is the cure for cancer?
Where is the cure for Alzheimer’s?
Where is the cure for aging?
Forget those. Where is the vaccine that prevents the common cold?
You are telling me this intelligence will soon be smart enough to engineer some magical virus capable of wiping out 8 billion people, defeating every immune system, every vaccine, every antiviral, every laboratory, every government, and the entire global biomedical community…
…but somehow it still can’t cure one disease?
I call that greatest intellectual dishonesty ever!
At least WE actually know how to cure things and save millions of lives with our supposedly stupid human intelligence compared with this future “superintelligence.”
Humans eradicated smallpox, which killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history.
We turned HIV from a almost certain death sentence into a manageable disease.
We developed vaccines in record time against COVID. If we had the same AI back then, would have saved millions more!
We engineer immune cells to kill cancer.
We developed antibiotics, antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, gene therapies, organ transplantation, and thousands of medicines.
We aren't fast enough but we did all of that with our ordinary human intelligence.
So imagine what actual superintelligence could do for medicine!
And here is the part that really makes me angry.
If you actually have, or are close to having, an AI capable of curing diseases and saving millions of lives, and you are deliberately slowing it down or refusing to make those capabilities available, then we also need to talk about the human cost of THAT decision, which you fearmongering people are going to be responsible for!
More than 150,000 people die every single day around the world.
Every. Single. Day. More than 90% from Cancer, heart disease, infections, aging. How many die because of AI? ZERO!
Talk about the people dying TODAY.
Talk about curing cancer.
Talk about stopping the next pandemic before it starts.
Talk about developing universal vaccines.
Talk about engineering our immune system so viruses become almost irrelevant.
Talk about curing genetic diseases.
Talk about reversing aging.
Talk about saving millions and eventually billions of lives.
Instead, we constantly hear this “AI WILL KILL US ALL!” crap, delivered with absolute certainty and with this smug smile on your faces in front of cameras, as though imagining a science fiction extinction scenarios.
I am actually angry about this. Each one of you causing a delay in AI advance every single day will be personally responsible for those 100 thousands deaths that could have been prevented!
Because if you truly believe intelligence is about to become this powerful, then the greatest question humanity should be asking is NOT:
“How could this intelligence hurt us?”
It should also be:
“WHY THE HELL AREN’T WE USING IT TO SAVE EVERYONE WE CAN?”
And if superintelligence really is coming, then make sure one of the first things we do with it is make humanity biologically damn near impossible to kill.
Well, I’d add one more with myself, as one with a PhD in biology and another PhD in AI and now working in both, to make n=2. Generating a hypothetical genome blueprint of a virus from LLM versus generating a true virus are completely different things. It is either an intentional attention-harnessing lie or true ignorance. The material, the manufacturing, and actual biological viability of paper-to-physical transformation is the gap you need to close. Like drawing a design of a chip or A-bomb, versus actually make one.
You have, and can add more checkpoints and guardrails all over this long chain of paper to physical transformation. Fear mongering is not well founded, and mostly emotional manipulation.
This is exactly what AI safety researchers should be doing, and before they can claim that AI could kill us all they should red team every pathway AI could take. The result of that work is that there would be major technical or otherwise roadblocks in every risk scenario.
In sum, when you actually know something about building a laboratory, lab automation, and what goes into synthesizing a virus and testing its properties, it becomes clear that AI does not impact this very much.
At best, it provides bad actors with a quicker way than the internet to learn about the stuff I described (which machines, which lab protocols, etc.). But it does nothing to impact procurement timelines, existing industry safeguards and regulations on procurement for lab facilities, the ~$100M cost (plus high operating expenses), the physical limits on experimentation velocity, or the fundamental knowledge gaps in virology that cannot be solved merely by 'smarter' AI without iteration in the physical world.
Mitchell Pontius retweeted
I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.
And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.
At this point China may be more trustworthy with AI development, surprisingly. At the very least they are doing a much better job branding AI development.
