You can now pre-order my book, "Making Sense of Modern Science," on Amazon! amazon.com/Making-Sense-M…

If you decide to buy it, not only can you learn about the greatest scientific ideas of the last century, but you can also add a very beautiful book to your collection.

I religiously watched each new #STTNG episode (and reruns too) each week through my school days.

Sad to see this great actor gone. I hope he’s on to exploring new frontiers.

Alright, reply guys, do your worst! youtu.be/FsxS8qeAHwI

(I'm the second closest lifter to the recording camera.)

“So, five-card stud, nothing wild... and the sky's the limit.”

Rest in peace.

That’s the reason why I work on lower bounds more than algorithms!

Looks like I got off pretty easy.

Wow. So many results that assume the ETH will fall if this checks out, including multiple of my own!

I've reached 5000 followers! Does that mean I'm now halfway to being an "influencer"?

Fall of the Berlin Wall!

It’s not hacking when the reward function isn’t a proxy.

I got 1700's to 1900. Euler is apparently an obstacle 😂

I’ve lately been getting emails from prospective grad students with detailed questions about my papers and proposed approaches to extend them.

Sorry, not impressed. A year or two ago, I might have been, but somehow it’s never happened until now… 🤔

My #ALT2027 paper was just desk rejected for a rather minor deviation from the submission instructions (according to my corresponding coauthor).

As an author I’m obviously a little sad, but as ALT’s SC chair also proud to report that you cannot accuse our conference of cronyism!

I am inundated with emails from people who say they've read my book and love it so much that they want to "partner" with me to help promote it or something.

The only problem is that my book isn't out yet.

Is there no industry that's safe from relentless spammers and scammers?

Mike was my colleague at Berkeley, and he's been fairly skeptical of deep learning's trajectory for years. Most scientists are skeptics, and it can take a big shock to get someone to consider a possibility that goes against the anchoring effect coded in our DNA.

I too was somewhat of a skeptic until ~6 months ago, and people ask me all the time why I joined Anthropic.

It started in April, when a friend I've known for 20 yrs messaged me saying he'd be in the Bay Area in a week, and he suggested we meet up. I invited him to my house for dinner, and he told me he had just joined Anthropic. He said the models were becoming increasingly more capable, and he believed both that they'd soon be smarter than him and also that all intellectual work would be highly devalued in the near future, and lastly that society was not at all ready for what's coming.

I'd of course heard claims similar to this before, but not from a friend I'd known for this long, and who I trusted, at my dining room table. It was the initial shock needed to destabilize my own anchoring. Also, I've been fortunate to work with and/or mentor many smart people in my life (e.g. Fields medalists, a 4x Putnam Fellow, IOI first place winners, etc.), so I feel pretty calibrated in recognizing very smart people, and this was someone who is definitely very smart and with impressive such credentials. So, it was hard to ignore this friend saying the models would be smarter than even him in particular.

After that dinner, I decided to do an informal survey, calling and meeting up with a lot of my friends who now work on improving model capabilities at these frontier labs. They all agreed with that first friend. These were all people I'd known 10, 15, 20 years, who mentored me, or I mentored them, or we met professionally in academia. These are people I trust, and their beliefs on this topic were consistent.

I then spent a whole lot of time understanding the missions of different companies, and talking to current and former employees and people in leadership. I read Dario's (long) essays and watched videos on YouTube of company leaders being interviewed. Anthropic's stated mission "to ensure that the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI" felt like exactly the right guiding principle to handle such a society-disrupting technology, and everyone I spoke to at the company was very aligned with this mission. It's easily the most mission-focused place I've ever been at, and everyone takes the work extremely seriously and with a profound sense of responsibility.

And now here I am. And being on the inside, the pace of progress has surprised me more than I first imagined. The moment that pure mathematicians are in, to me, is just a microcosm of what I predict a much larger of society will be grappling with in the not too distant future, and I really hope our leaders and the general public internalize sooner than later just how significant a moment we're in.

@joelwatsonfish NSF disallows reviewers posting proposals to LLMs, but of course people won’t listen. NSF should provide access to an internal LLM or something similar at least.

Professional programmers will outlast professional mathematicians because code behavior is undecidable whereas mathematical proofs are efficiently checkable.

@aminkarbasi I remember a chess grandmaster complaining in some interview that he was bored at a laundromat, and he noticed that the washer had a chess app on its menu screen, so he played it and lost. Washing machines can already beat grandmasters at chess. What more do we want from them! 😂

Another common misconception is that lawyers will eventually get involved and sue Frontier Labs, forcing them to radically change their practices or even go bankrupt. But that's not going to happen—you cannot stop a tidal wave with a lawsuit!

The people who think that LLMs are producing all these proofs by stealing the work of mathematicians who are using their services are deluding themselves. The sooner we accept how powerful this technology is, the better able we will be to deal with its consequences rationally.