Post-training contractor. Tinkering a lot on the side.

Joined December 2022
Believing people can't change is a crutch for you yourself not changing.
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Hahaha it's just like politics
It's very hard to have a reasonable position on this website. Yesterday you're getting blocked because you're AI shill. Today something like this happens. Perfect balance
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The best use of AI for me has been rapid UI prototyping. The interface is the entire product. It's what people can actually see. Trying different layouts and color/animation choices in minutes is a really really cool thing. Your first idea is rarely, if ever, the best you can do.
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Tried it. It's competitive. Results are on par with frontier models. Keep an eye on these guys: @typesafeai
After co-inventing ChatGPT, I kept asking myself: why have superhuman chat models not led to AGI? I’ve spent the last 2 years in stealth building a new way to train models (RLCD), and a new type of frontier AI model that we are releasing today: Jev • 20-200x faster • 40-400x cheaper (w/ output tokens free) • Frontier composable intelligence optimized for decisions AFAICT the shortest path to AI-based economic revolution
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Nick Cook 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.
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Nick Cook retweeted
Replying to @PessimistsArc
Right. Dario was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now.
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We've reached the point where, after 25y in cybersecurity, I feel morally obligated to say this for the record: The narrative being pushed around AI safety, sandbox incidents, and the suggestion that METR be treated as an authority is dangerous, deceptive, and morally corrupt.
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"anthropic is using the same playbook religious institutions have been using for centuries" "you will all die. and because i can protect you, you must follow me, you must do what i say" "this is the same psychological concept"
We're publishing our most detailed threat intelligence report to date. It covers how people tried to misuse Claude—for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, biology, and building weapons—and how we found and stopped them. We disrupted every operation in the report, and used the lessons from them to strengthen our safeguards. Where appropriate, we also shared what we found with authorities and other AI companies. These cases are not typical: we’re highlighting some of the most sophisticated misuse we’ve seen. But they’re especially important to discuss, because they show us where AI misuse is headed, where our safeguards work, and where they need to improve. We’re publishing this report so others can spot the same activity on their own platforms, and so we can give the public a clearer view of how emerging threats develop. Read the report: anthropic.com/threat-intelli…
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they want to kill ai like they killed nuclear energy
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Nick Cook retweeted
Right as open source models catch up to frontier closed source ones for 1/10th (or less) of the cost suddenly it's time to hit the brakes! Funny how that works.
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Nick Cook retweeted
Can someone explain to me why OpenAI and Anthropic allow any employee to tweet anything they want. Apple, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, Uber and Airbnb all have obvious and granular rules about e employees speaking for the company. Which is to say, employees should never say anything publicly unless it's cleared with comms first which isn't intended to censor anyone, just to make sure the company is aligned and marching in unison I could never imagine tweeting the stuff that OpenAI and Anthropic employees are tweeting without checking with the CEO and founders first! So are these P-doomers clearing their tweets with the CEO and comms?
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Nick Cook retweeted
Replying to @Henry_J_Brew
Convinced that once we learn how to center a div, the simulation will end.
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Nick Cook retweeted
Yep. Except: 1. This was about important internal tools. The team was stuck in some architecture nightmare of their own doing (writing it in rails but headless, with graphql api, and a SPA react app, constantly needing frontend engineers for changes). I call this kind of thing 'cosplaying an enterprise production app'. All that complexity was in the way and using straight rails was perfect in that case. 2. I make calls like this all the time. Usually someone on the team asks me to. They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc. Sometimes this is jokingly referred to as Founder-mode-as-a-service here. 3. For ten years I’ve also run an internal podcast called Context, where I revisit decisions like these and explain the reasoning so everyone can learn from them. This is helpful to give people all the variables that were considered and why this was the choice made given the information available at the time. I want to teach how to make such decisions effectively without needing me. Sunk cost fallacy is a problem. 4. Any notions that Shopify is succcessful despite of me doing this, instead of because of it, will have a hard time making their argument come together I think 😄 the part of 'two weeks later tobi learns about...' is nonsese and the pivot of that project up there happens one of the more successful examples of interventions. But getting the company to work effectively with great architecture and low technical debt baggage into the right direction is literally the job, so guilty as charged I suppose. But there are always cope stories floating around like this because they are more fun, than saying 'somehow we needed tobi to stop doing silly architecture astronautics'. I can totally see that.
just leaving this here
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Some "people" don't know right from left and still manage to get 10K likes. If this guy can be successful, we have zero excuses.
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Nick Cook retweeted
We've updated the Odin website's frontpage, to showcase the people who ship. odin-lang.org/
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You're missing the core drama of the story: Tristan is softly accusing OpenAI of having stolen their result from Codex chat logs. Tristan then claims OpenAI tried to threaten him to not publicly disclose this, and that they'd give him the Clay Prize ($1M) as the "closest humans to the problem" if he'd agree to disavow his co-author, @__alpoge__ , who is at Anthropic. This is HBO-level drama, but with math proofs.
SITUATION DETECTED: Mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge have made major progress toward solving the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the most important problems in mathematics, and say OpenAI may have solved it fully.
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The middle of the California desert, there's a desolate oven of a place called "Death Valley". In the middle of Death Valley, there's a deep crack in the earth called "Devil's Hole". Deep in the middle of that crack, there's a puddle. In that puddle, lives a species of goldfish. It's not really all that dissimilar from the goldfish in a tank at the petstore, at least not in any way that really matters, but for people who care about these things, it's a distinct species. And it lives nowhere else on Earth. Except this puddle. In the middle of one of the most vicious deserts on the planet, where it's hotter than Satan's asscrack for most of the year. At some point, some yahoo put it on the endangered species list. Technically, it qualifies, of course. There's only about 500 of them, give or take. But the list is really intended for helping us do something about animal species that happen to find themselves under humanity's vast technological footprint. The fish isn't endangered because of us. It's endangered because it lives in the stupidest place on Earth. But, and here's the important bit, if you could have conversation with the fish, it wouldn't agree. It would argue, quite vehemently and with a lot of gurgling, that the puddle is not only the best place, but the only place, because everywhere outside the puddle is utterly hostile to fish. They would know this from having swum to the surface and glanced around briefly. And if one of the fish were to agree with you, were to spend a lot of time at the surface, trying to catch a glimpse of distant rivers and lakes and oceans, the other fish would consider him insane. Doubly so when he started trying to fit wheels to an aquarium. To them, there is only the puddle. The natural habitat of the Puddlefish. This post is not about fish.
Eric and Wendy Schmidt are spending hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money to put a 3-meter telescope in orbit in 2029. Bigger than Hubble. This panel at @DragonCon is dismissive of them as amateurs. Can’t believe they will meet their schedule or capability commitments. The only credible path forward would be to hire “hundreds of people” with experience on Hubble, JWST, etc. The lack of vision is really depressing. Crabs in a bucket.
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Good thread on pro data center args
Replying to @MollyJongFast
There will be a permanent increase in high paying construction jobs in these small towns. Especially electricians, plumbers and hvac technicians. Plus the people who operate the data centers. They pay higher property taxes than other tenants. And they lower electricity prices.
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This is why I think App Intents / Siri AI as a driving force is so important beyond the actual value of using Siri to do things on your phone. All the software that you rely on needs to be agent-ready on all platforms, and you need to have access locally on the phone as well as from your work agent experience. That same software needs intent parity across platforms. If you are relying on software that refuses to participate or can’t serve your needs everywhere, why would you stick with it in the agentic era? Plus, by adopting App Intents, you can also design your own integrations with these third parties and hand them to your customers, who can then pull in all that context into your system with their own access controls. Build your own OS plugin, and then connect everyone else’s plugins proactively and provide a deep gallery of curated experiences.
None of these chief of staff products work for busy people because they are missing more than half the knowledge that is currently stored in a walled garden (aka your phone).. Only when you are able to combine it, get folks to train it to teach what’s important, give it episodic memory and push actual proactive things - you can claim to be a *real* chief of staff. Till then you’re just a sparkling GSuite & Slack wrapper. Useful, will save you time but definitely not a chief of staff 🙈
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