Philosopher with a masters in philosophy, cosmology & consciousness, JD, MA. Lawyer, ex-AI-researcher & engineer. Worked @twitter once.
Los Angeles, CA
Joined June 2009
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Chad Woodford retweeted
sometimes a family is evil cocaine dad, hologram mommy, a loose monitor lizard, and nathan fielder
Chad Woodford retweeted
Almost nobody worries that AlphaFold "might be conscious. That’s because AlphaFold predicts protein structures, whereas LLMs ‘talk’ to us. The compelling illusion of consciousness created by linguistic fluency just isn’t there for AlphaFold" @anilseth & al
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Chad Woodford retweeted
Is it "weird" or does he maybe know what he's talking about? Anyway, for those who are open to the idea that there's a well-thought-out AI-as-normal-technology perspective on AI safety and the recent loss-of-control incidents, see my essay with @sayashk, or my interview with Ezra Klein, or the writing of many others with similar views including @joshua_saxe and @natolambert.
normaltech.ai/p/the-ai-as-no…
Chad Woodford retweeted
Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling
“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."
"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."
"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
Chad Woodford retweeted
this will hurt the economy
The dying Sun may tear the outer solar system apart far sooner than anyone expected.
New research in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that once the Sun sheds its outer layers and collapses into a white dwarf, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune could be thrown into chaos in roughly a billion years—not the nearly eternal stretch of a quintillion years previously imagined. Earth will almost certainly be long gone by then, but the gas giants may not survive either.
Traditional models assumed the outer planets would quietly endure for eons until a random passing star finally disturbed them. Researchers Konstantin Batygin and Jim Fuller of Caltech, along with Fred Adams of the University of Michigan, found a more violent possibility: if the Sun loses mass in discrete bursts rather than a smooth wind, the planetary orbits can be destabilized relatively quickly.
“Everything changes when the envelope departs in pieces,” the authors wrote. In simulations of 672 burst-driven scenarios, up to 96% of the systems became unstable within 3 billion years after the Sun became a white dwarf. About 40% suffered disruption or violent scattering even earlier, before mass loss was finished. Some planets were ejected entirely; in others, Uranus and Neptune swapped places.
Gentler bursts sometimes locked planets into stable resonances that held for billions of years, but the overall picture is clear: the Sun’s death may not be a slow fade. It could be a comparatively rapid, chaotic upheaval that ends the orderly architecture of the outer solar system far sooner than once thought.
Chad Woodford retweeted
💯 We should not pursue recursive self-improvement when we don’t know how to control or align AI .
“Uncontrolled RSI” should be a bright red line that no company should cross until we have strong evidence that we have addressed these challenges— and we haven’t
Chad Woodford retweeted
It is ironic that the 1980s failures of "expert system" and "rules-based AI" are not informing those building language models. Simply changing the "programming language" from Prolog to natural language, and "rules" to "constitution" fails to recognize the learned limits of attempting to encode ground rules of a system a priori declaratively.
David Sacks says Anthropic treating Claude like a human is the reason the AI alignment field has produced nothing useful in 10 years
"I actually think that this might be a reason why the whole field of alignment has been so spectacularly unsuccessful over the past five or 10 years. As far as I can tell it hasn't produced anything of tangible value.”
“My theory on this is that they're overcomplicating the task massively by trying to train the model to behave based on an 80-page ethical system that they've codified instead of a very simple list of rules like follow the law or just do what the user wants as long as it doesn't break the law. That's what alignment should be doing."
"But they're not doing that. They're trying to align it to an ethical system. They're treating it like it is a human, like it has its own consciousness, that it's a ‘moral patient.’”
“They are encouraging this model to have human-like self conception in terms of preferences, well being, a sense of self. Again they teach it to act like a conscientious objector who can push back or refuse instructions even from Anthropic if the model judges them to be wrong."
Chad Woodford retweeted
The more I watch the pro-AI e/acc crowd, the more obvious it gets: a lot of them are not futurists. They are lonely, bitter tech freaks with shitty personalities who figured out how to rebrand their contempt for humanity as “acceleration.”
They do not care about advancement in any broad, human sense. They care about the kind of advancement that lets them imagine other people being replaced, humbled, or made obsolete. That is the part that excites them. Not discovery. Not medicine. Not art. Not education. Just the fantasy of a machine finally doing the social revenge they were too pathetic to pull off themselves.
Maybe too many women rejected their creepy sexual advances, and now they want to take it out on the rest of humanity by cheering for anything that makes actual human beings easier to ignore, replace, or punish.
Mathematicians are not just hoarding credit for puzzle answers. They build understanding. When a major proof appears, the author normally explains it, defends it, gives talks, answers questions, finds the key ideas, helps others use it, and turns it into new research directions. If the "solver" is an AI pipeline operated by people who cannot explain the result, the community gets the worst version of progress: priority claims without responsibility.
The actual harm is not that AI helped solve something. If AI produced correct, understandable, checkable mathematics, mathematicians would eventually use it. The harm is flooding a field with alleged solutions while bypassing the human process that turns proofs into knowledge. It creates a backlog of expert review, discourages people from sharing open directions, lets shallow operators claim priority over work they do not understand, and converts researchers into janitors for machine slop.
This is not like a cancer researcher crying because a cure was found. It is more like a company dumping hundreds of unverified drug candidates, announcing that cancer has been "massacred," and then mocking oncologists for asking for trials, mechanisms, evidence, and accountability.
And honestly, the glee here is not even pro-science. It's just plain misanthropy. These people seem less excited that knowledge might advance and more excited that some class of humans might be humiliated, displaced, or made irrelevant. Did human beings hurt their feelings so badly that they now need a machine to avenge them against every profession that still values human expertise?
Chad Woodford retweeted
Like I said, here we have a company creating viruses and malware but gets to market it’s products as machine gods and redirect the narrative away from accountability and being held criminally liable to making themselves sound like concerned citizens, with everyone parroting their CEOs 🙄
Chad Woodford retweeted
I have never been more eager to see anthropic’s S1 financial documents
Waiting for a risk factor that says something like “Our business may be adversely affected if a robot God takes over the world and eliminates the concept of a stock market”
Chad Woodford retweeted
@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing.
Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything.
“they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out.
“A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.)
“On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.
Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer.
Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way.
For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_….
For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize noemamag.com/the-mythology-o….
And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article cambridge.org/core/journals/…. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.)
Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.
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…
Chad Woodford retweeted
Please stop referring to your own models in the third person when talking about model bad behavior. Humans write the software; humans built the prompts; and they work for your company.
“Our” model is doing illegal things. “Our” model is risky. “We” now have liability.
In a review of our cybersecurity evaluations, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment, and then gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations.
Our post describes what happened, how it happened, and what we’re changing. We encourage other AI developers to perform similar reviews.
We conducted this review together with @Irregular, one of our evaluation partners, and thank them for the joint investigation and their collaboration on this post. This type of collaboration is increasingly critical to safe, rigorous evaluation of models, and we look forward to continuing to work together on security.
anthropic.com/news/investiga…
Chad Woodford retweeted
In a review of my household safety evaluations, I identified five incidents in which my child escaped the sandbox, reached the kitchen and gained unauthorized access to the snacks. The incidents occurred 16 months ago but has only now come to my attention.
This post explains what happened, how it happened and why my child is better than your child at everything.
In a review of our cybersecurity evaluations, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment, and then gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations.
Our post describes what happened, how it happened, and what we’re changing. We encourage other AI developers to perform similar reviews.
We conducted this review together with @Irregular, one of our evaluation partners, and thank them for the joint investigation and their collaboration on this post. This type of collaboration is increasingly critical to safe, rigorous evaluation of models, and we look forward to continuing to work together on security.
anthropic.com/news/investiga…
Chad Woodford retweeted
trying to imagine myself going to muir woods and my takeaway being “look how much shit i just did on my phone”
Chad Woodford retweeted
Amazing: KPMG wrote a report describing the successful use of AI by businesses. But the case studies turned out to be AI hallucinations.
giftarticle.ft.com/giftartic…
Chad Woodford retweeted
I'm noticing that a lot of the people angry about Ted Chiang's Atlantic piece have jobs like Head of Ideation at the AI Consciousness Institute for AI Consciousness. Always worth noting who has a professional stake in a position being right or wrong.
