not a day to lose now

The Jensen + @dwarkesh_sp podcast was fantastic. Jensen is someone who understood how ecosystems work and someone who understands real-world trade, policy and controls work. And in some deeper sense how AI will actually diffuse into the world. In this podcast, Dwarkesh came off as someone who picked up talking points from an AGI party in the SF Mission District. And the contrast was so evident. As someone who understood ecosystems relatively deepy, maybe I understood Jensen's take more than others did (idk). Mythos, that Dwarkesh kept bringing up, is not a single absolute turning point in the AI development landscape. Take a state-of-the-art Chinese open-source model, and give it three orders of magnitude more test-time compute + post-training algorithmic advances that haven't been published yet. That's the baseline. It was evident that in whatever bubble Dwarkesh is in, that is seen as a naive or illogical baseline. When AI has such a complex development cycle, it's evident that America needs many levers of policy intervention across multiple layers in a dominant ecosystem that ideally the Western world controls. The entire premise that a particular model with AI development will have a critical phase change is neither correct nor does evidence point to it. OpenAI made this point with GPT-4, Anthropic made this point with Mythos, but neither stood / will stand the test of time. I think Jensen's repeated emphasis within the podcast to try to make this point mostly didn't get Dwarkesh's attention. And Dwarkesh (in this podcast) represents an entire cult of AI researchers and decision-makers that are going to influence policy. The thing with policy interventions is that if you do too much too early, you shoot yourself in the foot. There's a good reason American foreign policy and general sanctions of all kinds are measured and continuous. Despite Jensen's attempt at educating the "Anthro" audience how ecosystems work, I'm also not super hopeful a lot of people who've taken the extreme position will change their thought after listening to this podcast. I do think there's a certain religiousness that has permeated some of that community that would make it hard to understand ecosystems at a deeper level.