Briefly, on why I pay attention to the EA/rationalists: Imagine you have an extremely nerdy friend who, in the mid-2000s, would not shut up about how Donald Trump was going to become president and reshape American politics. "Stop saying weird shit," you say. "He's a joke. He's a clown. The Apprentice isn't even good this season." But this guy won't stop. He's obsessive. Read McLuhan, he says. Read Postman, read Meyrowitz, read Ong, this is where everything is headed. God, he can be so incredibly annoying ... and then, ten years later, Trump becomes president and reshapes American politics. This is the most relatable frame I can think of to explain my experience with EA/rationalist people in the AI space. I became friends with EA folks after my mom died and I found really profound meaning in donating to Against Malaria and GiveDirectly, which struck me as a way to honor a life by saving a life. Then, these peple started talking about AI. And talking, and talking. Constantly. They said AI would solve impossible math problems; that it would mimic PhD-level achievement in a variety of fields; that it would change parts of life like education in ways we couldn't imagine; that it would become the dominant sector in the economy; that it might teach itself to code itself and escape test environments; that it would, in a decade, be the only thing many people talked about in the news. My response then: Stop saying weird shit! You sound deranged. Go back to talking about malaria nets and direct cash aid to poor families. And then, so much of what they said would happen actually happened. And, even crazier, they made it happen. Many of the ppl who contributed to, or were influenced by, all that EA/rationalist stuff ten years ago literally built the damn thing in the labs. Like every group, the EA/rationalist world seems uniform to outsiders, but it has a ton of internal divisions. I still think some of their predictions are nuts. I don't think AI will kill us all. I don't foresee Dyson Spheres in the 2030s or millions of robots making millions of robots in the next few years. These are crazy predictions, and I hope most of them are wrong. But when I see people shitting on the EA/Rationalist worldview, all I can think of is me, 10 years ago, thinking a lot of these folks were crazy for predicting that AI would by the mid-2020s be the center of the the news cycle, the engine of the economy, the hinge-point of geopolitics. That was an insane call. They got many of the details wrong. But they got the big picture right. They said: Pay attention. And they were right about that. The EA/Rationalists deserve skepticism, criticism, and doubt, like any other ideology. But I think it's wise to pay attention to the people who have been saying to pay attention.

New Census study: Yeah, AI is starting to have an impact on college grads 1. "The most AI-exposed decile of college majors saw their likelihood of initial employment decline by 5% points, while initial earnings declined by 13% ..." 2. "Negative changes to these patterns are concentrated in the top decile of majors, which are composed largely of computer science, information systems, and other degree fields closely related to software development."

An exceptional point here: Organizational competence is a hugely underrated piece of AI safety. There's a growing consensus at the frontier that we have to "pace," "go slow," or even pause. But there's no point in going slow just to go slow, or in pausing just to pause. If a company's RL still encourages misalignment, or if its sandboxes are poorly constructed, it doesn't matter that you're going 90mph or 60mph. Operational incompetency is unsafe at any speed. So, we need some way to smartly design, safely experiment with, share honestly, and maybe eventually mandate certain security protocols for advanced AI.

I would like a recognition on the part of the frontier haters that there are no innocents here. - Nvidia partisans want to chipmax, bc ofc they do. - VCs want their non-frontier AI bets to grow and thus root for a path to trillions that doesn’t flow thru OAI/Ant token bills. - Republicans don’t like or trust Anthropic’s evident antipathy toward the admin. - many antitrust folks distrust and dislike any firm with higher productivity/revenue than a corner grocery store Etc The sooner we can get beyond ITS A PSYOP and arrive at “this is a debate among partisans who have both sticky ideologies and naked self-interest” the better

i've tried and failed to make this point as clearly as i want to, but: AI is weird, in that ppl who are optimistic about the technology's growth are often doomy about its implications; while ppl who are extremely skeptical about AI's capabilities are by default optimistic about it being a "normal" technology that won't change much in the world. so you have this weird situation where a lot of AI skeptics who haven't been following AI news for the last few years (bc they wrote the whole thing off as NFTs 2.0) have no idea that there exists an enormous contingent of AI ppl who have for 10+ years said that very fast AI progress could be really bad for the world, and therefore they suspect that a conspiracy was concocted in the last two weeks to invent the case for AI safety

I think this a compelling argument that lots of smart people make and believe and I think it is just flatly wrong. 1. Anthropic — an AI lab that broke away from OpenAI bc of AI safety concerns many years ago — did suddenly not decide that AI safety was important, like, three days ago. 2. Rather than see the commercial viability of the open weight models causing the fears of RSI, I think one should consider that a third variable — AI progress — is leading to BOTH better open weight models AND greater AI automation/autonomy without alignment, and it’s freaking some people out. There is a kind of UChicago/Wharton Brain approach to this story, which sees any effort to increase safety as a regulatory capture strategy. But at least consider the possibility that rising evidence of AI abilities and RSI might actually be scary to the people closest to the fire.

Something I've learned about being too online in the last few years is that some people really truly cannot believe that other people might come to opinions about the world that are different from their own in a way that is natural and fair. Everything has to be an op. There are all sorts of people—mostly conservative but even tech critics like McNamee—who insist that this AI safety moment is a psyop. Have people's feelings about AI safety been shaped by a complex set of factors such as longstanding AI fears, worsening data center politics, the Hugging Face attack and its fallout, and now the Coxon resignation? No, no, no. They're victims of a psyop. It reminds me that I've had a distressingly high number of conversations with leftists who believe that the only reason America isn't a socialist paradise is that Fox News and other conservative media do something special and evil and conspiratorial to brainwash half the country. Look, I do not like Fox News. But I think Fox News is successful because it says what many people have already been thinking. It shapes public opinion at the margins, but mostly it reflects biases back to viewers rather than invent them out of whole cloth. There is a powerful, powerful urge to believe that the only reason the world doesn't agree with you about literally every little thing is that small handful of media-adjacent elites are constantly doing "ops" on the undiscerning public. I don't know, man. People's attitudes are different from yours and mine, because ... their lives are different. They accumulate different biases, different expectations, different values, different frameworks. Difference is normal, not an op.

This is a good breakdown from @DKThomp in @TheArgumentMag, and also points to why so much of the most popular content on TikTok is about e.g. "mental health". People are looking to content on the internet to do what friends are best equipped to do.

This week I had the honor of speaking to Princeton’s entire incoming undergraduate class to address their AI anxieties. I had three messages for them — good news, bad news, and a note of optimism. Here’s a condensed version. The good news We have enough evidence now to conclude that the shrill predictions of rapid, massive job loss were misplaced. Even in a field like software engineering where AI has been rapidly adopted, its effect has been to shift, not replace the role of the human (see the “decide-execute-deliver” framework Similarly, the panic about what to major in is also misplaced. There will be enduring demand for computer science, philosophy, and just about everything else. (In fact, AI companies hiring philosophers has been a big recent trend.) The bad news AI seems to help senior people much more than juniors. I can use AI for coding because I spent 25 years learning how to code, which lets me supervise coding agents effectively. (See my post on the “growth cycle” vs the “dependence spiral” You are in a bind — you can’t offload your skill-building to AI, but you’ll graduate into a market where employers will expect you to get work done with AI. We never faced this dilemma. As a result we haven’t figured out how to revamp our classes to help you do both. You’ll have to help us figure it out. And you’ll need to somehow resist the constant temptation to turn to the shortcut machine. The hope My point is not that AI is bad for learning. It’s an incredibly flexible tool. Is the internet good or bad for learning? Depends — are you using it to find research papers or waste time scrolling? I use AI every day for learning. The key is to use it to increase, not decrease your cognitive load. To learn deeper, not faster. There is no learning without the cognitive sweat. I try to make sure I’m mentally exhausted at the end of the day. I do feel that AI lets me push myself harder than I ever could before, and I have a vision that as AI continues to advance it will enable human-AI “co-superintelligence“. (I talked about this at the end of my ICML keynote.

It was great being back on Plain English to talk with @DKThomp about how the government, AI companies, and households all competing for capital is making everything more expensive and keeping interest rates elevated: via @YouTube

IMO the most interesting thing that happened in society today: The WSJ's leading op-ed today, by Stan Druckenmiller, was entirely AI generated. If you read the text, it's glaringly obvious. There's no way the editors at the WSJ don't have an ear for AI-written prose. They know what AI sounds like; they're not stupid. They published this anyway. Is this the new normal? Does it mean AI writing is finally good enough to publish in the WSJ, and we need to stop being so precious about AI-voice? Or does it mean that if you're famous and important, it's OK to just push out AI-written content so long as your byline is on it and you stand by the consequences? We understand that famous people have speechwriters, and so long as they deliver the speech, we consider it theirs. Maybe that feeling that something AI written is not your authorship is an anachronism that will fade away in a few years.

Interesting: 20 years ago, Friday night was the start of the weekend and a big night for seeing friends. Now it looks like any other weeknight. Why do we think people don't hang with friends on Fridays anymore?

The data center backlash is a product of two mutually reinforcing dynamics: 1) Locally, it's material concerns (noise, water, electricity) and process failure (NDAs, tax subsidies) 2) Nationally, it's broad anti-corporate and anti-AI sentiment (AI companies are screwing you over to get rich off dumb toys) Social media + political campaigns amplify hyperlocal grievances into a broad populist movement, and there's no compelling "pro data center faction" to make the opposite case

I went on the BS Podcast to talk about - why billionaire sports ownership is a moral scandal - the connection between the Lakers, Mark Walter, insurance float, private equity, and AI - the “derivatives market” theory of modern media (the decline of reporting and how “nobody wants to talk about The Thing, everybody wants to talk about people talking about The Thing”) - how the 2016 salary cap spike shaped modern sports commentary and the Bravo sports fan by making pre-agency rumors evergreen