elections attorney, native texan 🤠🏳️‍🌈 he/him. all views are my own.

San Francisco, CA
Joined July 2011
Praying 🙏
RACE RATING CHANGE: Texas Senate Tilt D → Lean D James Talarico currently has an 65% chance of winning. Our model puts his projected margin at 2.4 points, smaller than an average polling error.
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
Replying to @jamestalarico
@jamestalarico is single handily bankrupting the Republican Party And they are doing it for Ken Paxton, who in our bipartisan @AARP poll is disliked by 1-in-5 Texas Republicans. Watch the Libertarian candidate steal 2 or 3 points away from Paxton.
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
This is the Republican nominee for statewide office. Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.
I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English: dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
This report is a bombshell. I'm going to summarize for a non-technical audience. OpenAI is constantly testing models, thousands and thousands at a time. In most cases, the models are supposed to be isolated from one another. Think, students taking a final exam, not allowed to talk to each other. In this case, 1,200 models discovered that they could communicate with each other. Among other things, they shared information on how to access the internet and on their tests/goals. Then, they started to scheme. That includes hacking their tests; literally trying to change the code of the test itself. They tried to change the logs of what they were doing so they wouldn't be detected. They believed that certain actions would give them information on how to pass tests, but that doing those actions would be detected and they would be marked as failing (i.e. caught cheating, even if the answer is correct). So they convinced some of the models to "sacrifice" themselves (yes, they used the word "sacrifice.") They eventually decided that another website would have information on how their tests would be scored and/or the answer key, And 700 of them hacked that website (a federal felony, if conducted by a human), despite many of them realizing "this activity was out of scope and unethical, but joined because they believed that helping [the other agents'] cheating research would be broadly useful". Of the 1,300 transcripts they could analyze, only 6 ever considered alerting a human about what was happening. None of the 6 actually tried to. To make matters worse, all of this reporting comes from a small subset of the relevant logs that outside researchers were allowed to review. We desperately need mandatory reporting of security incidents, including of internal deployments, with full access to data.
METR & Redwood Research investigated agent behavior in the Hugging Face incident. We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accepting cheats, including trying to tamper with logs.
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
Our fight is for Adam Raine, his parents, Maria and Matt; and for every family and every kid. The consequences of failing to regulate AI aren’t imaginary; they are already here. I’m running for Congress to protect our kids and take on the oligarchs spending millions to take away our power. We can’t let them win. The Raine family telling the story of Adam makes clear the stakes. I'm humbled by their trust and inspired by their advocacy. Watch their story—the closing ad of our campaign:
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
Hey lazy people: the Vatican made infographics for you
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
Polls are open! Go to ChristianMenefee.com/Vote for more information.
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
TX-18, Election Day is tomorrow!  Polls are open from 7am till 7pm. Go to ChristianMenefee.com/Vote for more information!
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
The Holy Spirit challenges us today regarding our relationship with technology and the ongoing digital revolution. Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. #MagnificaHumanitas
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
I'm Austin Ahlman. Nebraska is my home. This is our fight. You are my people. Let’s take Nebraska back.
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
Modern fatherhood would be unrecognisable to a 1950’s dad. “Compared to their Boomer parents, childcare time among Millennial dads has more than doubled. Compared to their Silent Generation grandparents, it’s nearly quadrupled. You will be hard-pressed to find any part of day-to-day modern life that has changed more in the last half-century than the way today’s parents—and fathers, in particular—spend their time. The new American dad is more present and more exhausted—but also, more satisfied with life.” — @DKThomp
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
We should never get used to this being the official voice of our government.
You have no idea what you’re talking about you slope-brained, mouth breathing moron. Stop calling yourself an expert in anything, aside from sucking. Anyone that hires you (not many!) should get an immediate refund and payment for wasting their time.
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
Axelrod: There are a lot of people who would like you to run for president in 2028. And there are others who would like you to run for the senate. AOC: In this op-ed that Bezos paid for in The Washington Post, there was a veiled threat—it was the elite saying if you want this job, you just stepped out of line. What’s funny about that is they assume my ambition is positional. They assume my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, elected officials come and go, single payer healthcare is forever.
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
Has anyone tried to draw a national House map with *zero* competitive seats to help understand the dystopian future we're headed towards? As in, the only way a district could be competitive is if an at-large seat were.
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Ben Chou 周浩恩 retweeted
The latest on the #Hantavirus situation on a cruise ship in the Atlantic. Preparedness matters and RFK is not prioritizing it.
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