maxwell retweeted
But as more work is handed to AI—including AI safety research—these judgment calls are the main levers for people's own values to influence outcomes.
If people defer to AI without noticing, then "human in the loop" might provide less assurance than people expect.
If people defer to AI without noticing, then "human in the loop" might provide less assurance than people expect.
7
31
429
24,730
lots of low hanging fruits in terms of interesting research questions that can be asked and explored fairly easily now via agentic scraping/searching and large scale analysis of open data.
without a doubt the best time in human history to be asking interesting questions!!!
without a doubt the best time in human history to be asking interesting questions!!!
We can use public social media data---like reddit---to track and detect surprising ways people are experiencing AI on a personal level. A sort of "early warning system" for behaviors, opportunities, and challenges that might arise, capturing unanticipated issues that we wouldn't g evals that have to be designed in advance based on foreknowledge of the issues.
For example, data from r/ChatGPT shows that users are no longer exchanging prompt tricks as much as they used to, but are spending more time discussing their attachment to and companionship with AI.
These are some of the interesting insights from @jessicadai_ 's research, which we're extremely privileged to share as our first ever @freesystemslab guest post!
freesystems.substack.com/p/building-bet…
0
0
0
51
The world in which we are fundamentally reliant on AI to understand what’s going on with AI is basically here.
Shortly after this comes the world in which we are reliant on it to understand things we previously understood.
Maybe this is / has been obvious to everyone else for awhile now - but I’ve been thinking a lot about epistemic security and how we can protect our ability to evaluate information independently, form our own informed perspectives, and make better decisions as a whole. Obviously there is a ton of blue sky thinking around how AI tools can (and presently do) help people reason better, make better decisions, and live much better lives.
But it feels worth thinking about the fact that we are basically hurling into a world where we might not even be able to interrogate *why* a decision is better or what *good* even looks like without AI assistance.
The degree to which this matters is unclear to me - how important is it to articulate *why* a utopia is a utopia if it is, truly, a utopia? A world in which we need AI to explain to us why life is so damn good is probably a good problem to have, right?
Unsure what to do about this, but was just reviewing some of the hugging face incident post mortem stuff, and the fact that METR/Redwood were reliant on Codex / GPT 5.6 Sol to even understand what happened left me with this sense profoundly.
Shortly after this comes the world in which we are reliant on it to understand things we previously understood.
Maybe this is / has been obvious to everyone else for awhile now - but I’ve been thinking a lot about epistemic security and how we can protect our ability to evaluate information independently, form our own informed perspectives, and make better decisions as a whole. Obviously there is a ton of blue sky thinking around how AI tools can (and presently do) help people reason better, make better decisions, and live much better lives.
But it feels worth thinking about the fact that we are basically hurling into a world where we might not even be able to interrogate *why* a decision is better or what *good* even looks like without AI assistance.
The degree to which this matters is unclear to me - how important is it to articulate *why* a utopia is a utopia if it is, truly, a utopia? A world in which we need AI to explain to us why life is so damn good is probably a good problem to have, right?
Unsure what to do about this, but was just reviewing some of the hugging face incident post mortem stuff, and the fact that METR/Redwood were reliant on Codex / GPT 5.6 Sol to even understand what happened left me with this sense profoundly.
1
0
1
76
wonderful piece - much of life happens in the inbetweeens.
every new piece of technology is very often a skill lost, GPS and sense of direction, typing and handwriting legibility feels like another, probably something with texting and less pro-social behavior too or tolerance for banal awkwardness irl.
we lose a lot when we give so much of ourselves over to machines we still don't fully understand. i don't want to call the help desk either, and i don't want to look online for shit all day when hermes can do it for me and just ping me when its done.
but ai is general purpose, and it will do more and more and more, better and better, and the more you ask of it the more it will do, and even if token price goes up in the next few months / years, the cost of frontier intelligence will be competed lower and lower until its nearly free.
something something *insert kurt vonnegut quote about buying an envelope*
i'm interested in more discourse about what this all looks like when the agent-to-agent friend coordination stuff is happening everyday, and people get agent governance to a point where most people are comfortable handing over their entire digital lives to their machine counterparts.
in this new world, what might it mean to live well? i really do think living well is being the dancing animal, in concert with others, and maybe i'm overthinking it and agent-to-agent coordination just enables more of this. but maybe it doesn't? it can possibly erode a lot of what makes life meaningful. a possible future where we are hallowed out efficient meat proxies, no time to linger awkwardly as you figure out what to say to an old friend you haven't seen in a while. the machine will find the thread and guide me through it....
what will it mean to live well in this new world that we are hastily shepherding in?? i'm excited to find out!
every new piece of technology is very often a skill lost, GPS and sense of direction, typing and handwriting legibility feels like another, probably something with texting and less pro-social behavior too or tolerance for banal awkwardness irl.
we lose a lot when we give so much of ourselves over to machines we still don't fully understand. i don't want to call the help desk either, and i don't want to look online for shit all day when hermes can do it for me and just ping me when its done.
but ai is general purpose, and it will do more and more and more, better and better, and the more you ask of it the more it will do, and even if token price goes up in the next few months / years, the cost of frontier intelligence will be competed lower and lower until its nearly free.
something something *insert kurt vonnegut quote about buying an envelope*
i'm interested in more discourse about what this all looks like when the agent-to-agent friend coordination stuff is happening everyday, and people get agent governance to a point where most people are comfortable handing over their entire digital lives to their machine counterparts.
in this new world, what might it mean to live well? i really do think living well is being the dancing animal, in concert with others, and maybe i'm overthinking it and agent-to-agent coordination just enables more of this. but maybe it doesn't? it can possibly erode a lot of what makes life meaningful. a possible future where we are hallowed out efficient meat proxies, no time to linger awkwardly as you figure out what to say to an old friend you haven't seen in a while. the machine will find the thread and guide me through it....
what will it mean to live well in this new world that we are hastily shepherding in?? i'm excited to find out!
1
1
3
446
This is great reporting and its baffling to me. What is a good life if not time spent with others???
New newsletter: THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN HOST
The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has declined by 70 percent in the last 50 years.
derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of…
1
1
3
131
I’ve recently become really interested in what it might mean to live well in a post AGI world, and I feel like any answer circles the drain of “spending quality time with the people you love” and that usually means hosting!
0
0
0
10
these are great questions and we need more people asking/testing/evaluating similar ones!
As swarms take on more consequential work, we need a science of how they behave together.
When do they reinforce mistakes? Which decision-making procedures help them recover? What communication rules make cooperation dependable?
Read our full research piece here: freesystems.substack.com/p/extraordinar…
0
0
1
96
maxwell retweeted
(Guy behind on rent with same sheets on bed for last 4 months) Yeah I’ve got it automating my restaurant reservations.
21
80
3,528
118,922
I do think in a couple years time we’ll look back on education innovations like this and say “huh, crazy to think it wasn’t always like this”
A lot of these things just feel inevitable, and AI just makes it all go faster and faster
A lot of these things just feel inevitable, and AI just makes it all go faster and faster
Today, we’re launching an ambitious new school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
Based in San Francisco, The Academy serves the most promising young high school graduates.
We think this can be an elite institution that attracts top tier talent. One that prepares students han remaining stuck in the past.
The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They'll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups. There are classes and guest lectures, too, from some truly amazing people who have built modern-day Silicon Valley.
The Academy is designed as a network, since that’s the reason students go to school in the first place. Core to that network are our 10 Founding Partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The network includes over 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors. To join as a hiring partner or faculty member, you can apply on our website.
We raised $42M in funding led by @a16z. I'll be CEO and @pmarca and @eriktorenberg will join me on the board.
Applications are open for our Founding Class Fellowship, which will be one year and tuition-free. Eventually, pending regulatory approval, we plan to offer a two-year program that charges tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university.
We're looking for the most unusually ambitious young builders on the planet. Come join us in San Francisco:
theacademysf.com
0
0
2
229
people always forget that brakes were invented to make cars go faster, not slower
Some suppose that “safety” and “innovation” in AI are at odds. My suspicion is the opposite: the next generation of breakthroughs in AI will be in safety, alignment, and monitorability. Pushing the frontier forward from here will require dramatic innovations in safety.
0
0
1
305
James is the absolute man. We need more public goods initiatives like this to accelerate science!! If this is relevant to you, you should 1000% apply!
AI transformed coding, science is next
@ReactorfieldAI makes scientists and deep tech startups AI-native
Built by me and @berkbuilds to accelerate science with frontier AI
1
0
3
424
Feels like there has never been a better time to simply articulate all the cumbersome, draining, forever-tolerated tasks in our lives.
At some point soon, the most hardest part will be figuring out what to aim the AGI blaster at!
Excited for all of us to enter into the golden age of user innovations en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_inno…
At some point soon, the most hardest part will be figuring out what to aim the AGI blaster at!
Excited for all of us to enter into the golden age of user innovations en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_inno…
0
0
0
65
My main takeaway from this is that agents are just exposing a well-known issue - that these databases are very hard to manage, and it takes a skilled and informed human an annoyingly long time to navigate these portals.
Seems extremely likely that we’ll see more and more of similarly shaped problems (i.e., humans have been doing this thing in a slow and roundabout way forever, now agents are inconsistently performing / highly variable at this task, which is problem enough for us to actually just fix the broken system thats been annoying for us to deal with all along)
It’s a bit like red-teaming, but instead of attacking a system we just need an agent to make the problem more legible to us (likely by failing benchmarks consistently, producing variable results with the same inputs, etc)
The pace of progress in the world may accelerate simply by agents reminding us of how much better things can be. This is my optimistic read.
Seems extremely likely that we’ll see more and more of similarly shaped problems (i.e., humans have been doing this thing in a slow and roundabout way forever, now agents are inconsistently performing / highly variable at this task, which is problem enough for us to actually just fix the broken system thats been annoying for us to deal with all along)
It’s a bit like red-teaming, but instead of attacking a system we just need an agent to make the problem more legible to us (likely by failing benchmarks consistently, producing variable results with the same inputs, etc)
The pace of progress in the world may accelerate simply by agents reminding us of how much better things can be. This is my optimistic read.
New Science Blog: Why has AI advanced faster in coding than in biology?
To agents, bio databases are like cities built before cars—maddening to drive in because they're designed for different traffic.
How do we build infrastructure agents can use?
anthropic.com/research/agent…
0
0
0
89
All roads lead back to project based learning - just a matter of time before basically all schools reorient to Montessori and then PBL.
An educational world of artifacts that students built and explanations of what they did and delegated and learned and unlearned.
Caveat that somewhere in the mix though we need basic literacy and numeracy - maybe in-between the Montessori and PBL parts...
An educational world of artifacts that students built and explanations of what they did and delegated and learned and unlearned.
Caveat that somewhere in the mix though we need basic literacy and numeracy - maybe in-between the Montessori and PBL parts...
World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li says AI must change how we teach and evaluate students:
"AI must change learning. AI must change K-16 learning."
"The most precious resource of our entire world is human capital."
"When we have gotten the technology that can answer standardized better than an average human, it's not about humans are bad. It's about we need to change the education system."
"We need to change how we evaluate. We need to change the way we empower teachers to educate the next generation of students where they can use these tools, be empowered, and do things that we can never imagine."
"All of the kids today should not be scared of AI. They should feel the human agency to lead AI, to use AI in the right way, and to use AI to make the impact that they want to make for the world."
@drfeifei at Bloomberg Tech live with @emilychangtv
0
0
0
36
The human brain’s most amazing feat is manipulation?? And the “hard” things are easy yet the “easy” things are hard?
Fun article: mtmason.com/the-glory-of-m…
Fun article: mtmason.com/the-glory-of-m…
0
0
0
32
It still trips me out to read some of this stuff and realize we are living through a sci-fi movie, and that we aren’t passive viewers but that action right now has leveraged impact because there is still *so* much to figure out and timelines are moving faster and faster.
Its just wild that researchers and engineers at Anthropic suspect that Claude will be better than them at writing code within the next 6 months, and that, to them, the only human advantages in AI research right now are generally research taste and judgment, both things that AI is steadily improving at. This all points towards recursive self-improvement being on the nearer-term horizon.
AI systems are a general purpose technology. This is beautiful and scary. I really loved the way @woj_zaremba talks about this in the recent Resilience in the age of AI piece from the OpenAI Foundation: x.com/FoundationOAI/…
We’ve had fire, electricity, the printing press, the internet, all general purpose technologies created by humans that possessed untold benefits and risks. We designed resilient ecosystems (i.e., third party testing apparatuses, legal frameworks for accountability, standards / codes for manufacturing and deployment, rapid response mechanisms, etc) to mitigate the risks and ensure the benefits are plentiful.
We’ve done it before, and I do believe we live the greatest version of the world currently. But I still worry about our ability to create a resilient ecosystem to an intelligent life-like form we are creating and still actively trying to understand. There is so much to do.
I like to remind myself of the quote that the “four most dangerous words are ‘this time its different’” - but it does really feel like this times its different because we are creating a thing that creates things that creates more things. AI systems are a unique set of general purpose technology that can be directed at nearly *anything* and generally improve it or attack it.
I do think the exponential will continue. It’s possible it stops, but I do think we obviously need to prepare for scenarios in which the exponential holds.
I really believe we are still in the earliest innings of AI being diffused across society. While I think a general slow down to figure out a ton of thorny problems around governance, safety / alignment, and human dignity would be immensely helpful, I don’t think it’s possible. The fact that Anthropic is exploring this and publicly talking about it is important and amazing to see though.
All of this makes me think that two of the best things we need more of right now are
1. Thoughtful grants programs (its great to see what OpenAI Foundation is doing here)
2. Thoughtful research agendas (its great to see what the Anthropic Institute / their Societal Impact team is doing here)
We need the most talented among us thinking about these problems in a well-endowed and mostly independent fashion, and we need more research that captures the economic, overall health, and psychological impact of AI systems becoming diffused across culture and society.
Overall - I’m thinking a lot about impact philanthropy, what the future of our institutions look like, and how we can best prepare our species for the societal and cultural evolution that is just only beginning.
I really want things to go well, and I think we need many more people working earnestly to ensure humanity thrives during this time.
Its just wild that researchers and engineers at Anthropic suspect that Claude will be better than them at writing code within the next 6 months, and that, to them, the only human advantages in AI research right now are generally research taste and judgment, both things that AI is steadily improving at. This all points towards recursive self-improvement being on the nearer-term horizon.
AI systems are a general purpose technology. This is beautiful and scary. I really loved the way @woj_zaremba talks about this in the recent Resilience in the age of AI piece from the OpenAI Foundation: x.com/FoundationOAI/…
We’ve had fire, electricity, the printing press, the internet, all general purpose technologies created by humans that possessed untold benefits and risks. We designed resilient ecosystems (i.e., third party testing apparatuses, legal frameworks for accountability, standards / codes for manufacturing and deployment, rapid response mechanisms, etc) to mitigate the risks and ensure the benefits are plentiful.
We’ve done it before, and I do believe we live the greatest version of the world currently. But I still worry about our ability to create a resilient ecosystem to an intelligent life-like form we are creating and still actively trying to understand. There is so much to do.
I like to remind myself of the quote that the “four most dangerous words are ‘this time its different’” - but it does really feel like this times its different because we are creating a thing that creates things that creates more things. AI systems are a unique set of general purpose technology that can be directed at nearly *anything* and generally improve it or attack it.
I do think the exponential will continue. It’s possible it stops, but I do think we obviously need to prepare for scenarios in which the exponential holds.
I really believe we are still in the earliest innings of AI being diffused across society. While I think a general slow down to figure out a ton of thorny problems around governance, safety / alignment, and human dignity would be immensely helpful, I don’t think it’s possible. The fact that Anthropic is exploring this and publicly talking about it is important and amazing to see though.
All of this makes me think that two of the best things we need more of right now are
1. Thoughtful grants programs (its great to see what OpenAI Foundation is doing here)
2. Thoughtful research agendas (its great to see what the Anthropic Institute / their Societal Impact team is doing here)
We need the most talented among us thinking about these problems in a well-endowed and mostly independent fashion, and we need more research that captures the economic, overall health, and psychological impact of AI systems becoming diffused across culture and society.
Overall - I’m thinking a lot about impact philanthropy, what the future of our institutions look like, and how we can best prepare our species for the societal and cultural evolution that is just only beginning.
I really want things to go well, and I think we need many more people working earnestly to ensure humanity thrives during this time.
None of this guarantees recursive self-improvement is on the horizon. It’s not yet clear that Claude is capable of research judgment—of choosing the right problems to work on.
But if these trends continue, AI systems designing and building their own successors is plausible. This could revolutionize society—medicine, technology, the economy—for the better. But it may also compound alignment issues and ultimately lead to loss of control.
The Anthropic Institute (in collaboration with external stakeholders) will conduct research to think through the implications of increasingly powerful, potentially self-improving systems—and how to create the ability for the world to make deliberate choices about the future development of the technology.
Read the full post: anthropic.com/institute/recu…
2
0
1
366