My view for years has been that the best version of the future is one where both open-weight and closed-weight models thrive. Both have unique sets of benefits and drawbacks. I hope that the U.S. can lead in both.

if my laptop isn’t warm to the touch I know i—“the royal I,” really—am not thinking hard enough. it used to be hard to get m-series macs’ fans to speed up. now it is the default condition, provided I am doing my work.

We are living through a repeat of SB 1047 discourse, but this time, many of the risks SB 1047 was intended to address are manifestly happening in the real world rather than largely hypothetical. Same rhetoric, completely different facts on the ground.

one interesting part of thinking about marginal risk of open-weight ai is that the internet is already such a profoundly crime-ridden place. imagine if gangs went into hospitals in America every week and stole people's medical records out of filing cabinets. if that happened in the physical world, we'd rightfully question whether government still possessed practical sovereignty. yet american hospitals are raided constantly in the digital world and we basically tolerate it. the world is more capable of absorbing risk and disorder than one might think.

my new apartment building has a phone app for the keys and I hate it. maybe if it was nfc and I could just hold my phone close to a touchpoint it would be less grating. but you have to open the app every time, which isn't as good as a physical key. more tech is not always better.

I’m afraid to tell you that it is effectively impossible to do the kind of writing I used to do on this website, not because anyone at OpenAI censors me but because of the sheer volume of hostility I get for sharing my analysis as a frontier lab employee. I enjoyed writing quick takes on this website for one basic reason: I could get rapid feedback on my own ideation process in real time. Post the early version of the take here, see the criticism; then refine, sharpen, and repeat. Unfortunately now that feature of this site is gone, because the feedback I get is now almost exclusively colored by resentment at the fact that I work at a frontier lab or other forms of hatred for my employer. The feedback signal is essentially useless now, so writing on here is not fruitful for me anymore. Literally everything I write now is responded to with “of course you said that because .” I am truly just writing what I think and would have written anyway, but everyone reads what I say in the shrieking tone of “this is what openai thinks!!!!” (to be clear, my posts are not what openai thinks). This is an unpleasant and more importantly unproductive pattern for me. I anticipate that the shape of this account will change significantly as a result. I do not currently know how. It will not become a LinkedIn feed. It will change in some other way. It will no longer be a real-time accounting of my own thinking as it develops, since this is precisely the thing that seems impossible to do now. That will have to shift to private channels.

I’m not convinced every human I have met on this website has object permanence, and that may well explain why they’re so angry in my replies and DMs. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to be a full-grown adult who doesn’t have object permanence?