I often disagree with Neil, so I want to flag here that I STRONGLY agree with him: we desperately need a definition of RSI that has gone through a bunch of rounds of lawyers kicking its tires. You're a law student, want to get cited for forever? Write this as your journal note.

I’m grateful to Matt Yglesias for his tireless, Sisyphean work in repeatedly emphasizing obviously true points to people who have a strong vested interest in never, ever admitting that what he’s saying is accurate.

There is no better avenue for incoming House & Senate Dems to take than hearings on wtf is going on with NVIDIA + Trump corruption + AI policy in the U.S. It has the virtue of riding the wave of anti-tech populism and directing that energy towards the productive need to stop selling these chips to China.

And if we’re serious about improving healthcare, can we please compensate kidney donors, which could reverse stagnant donation rates and help save the ~10k Americans who die every year waiting for a kidney? There are 47 cosponsors on a bipartisan bill that would do just that:

The authors of the METR AI R&D report estimate that AI is nearly doubling the rate of capabilities progress. This implies dramatic *uplift*: as if researchers experienced time ~10x faster. You probably couldn’t achieve this even if you hired every qualified human in the world.

"A queer-identifying, pro-Palestine Democrat had to call out of work at midnight on election night after she beat a Republican congressman who paid for abortions for his mistresses in a Trump +24 district" would have gotten you a wellness check 72 hours ago

Some bittersweet news, this is my last day at @NiskanenCenter. I couldn't be more grateful for the chance to help build the abundance movement there and work with the best people along the way Next up, I'm very excited to be joining the @coeff_giving Abundance and Growth Fund!

This is obviously true, but “what is the best response that we can actually pass” is at least as important a question as “what is the theoretically optimal legislative response assuming no political constraints.” I think that introducing a *bipartisan* bill as strong as FRONTIER back in July was an incredible achievement that Reps. Obernolte and Trahan deserve a lot of credit for. Things have changed since then, obviously, which is why FRONTIER now has six cosponsors from each party. I think someone should write and introduce the best possible federal pacing bill, in part because it might actually become possible to pass such a bill at some point in the next couple years if we get a lot of new information that makes that proposal more politically compelling. But we also have to write the best oversight + governance bills that we can, because in a lot of likely-seeming political paradigms those are going to be the bills that can actually pick up four republican senators and open up the possibility of a deal being made with the President. If you’re a really cracked lawyer who is or could be good at writing legislation, I think you should consider the question of whether you have a moral obligation to work on this stuff. A lot of new and incumbent members of congress are going to be hiring staffers to work on AI legislation very soon. A lot of states are currently hiring the people who will actually be tasked with implementing and enforcing the first serious laws governing frontier AI development. Lots of work to be done.

It's really something how you can get people to universally denounce "donating money to healthcare for the poor" as unthinkably evil if your analysis of which healthcare to donate to is too callous or weird

I encourage those at frontier AI companies to read this quote, from Ellsberg to Kissinger back in 1968: “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret." “I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you." “First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well." “You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools." “Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn." “In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself." “You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.” "….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet."

This report and reactions from people I trust (like Jake) are making me physically ill. As far as I can tell, Anthropic's central plan is to continue this acceleration of AI capabilities until we're getting decades of AI capabilities growth in a year. Given our very limited ability to understand or control AI systems, this would be extremely reckless and completely unacceptable, and it should be the single top priority of civil society and the US government to stop them and other companies from doing this.

I've always had substantially longer timelines than my friends at Anthropic — I've been concerned that they're in an echo chamber and believing the hype about their own models too much, and that they're underestimating bottlenecks and unknown unknowns. And there have definitely been specific occasions when they have overstated how much uplift they were getting from their models. Nonetheless, if METR is correct here (and I think they are among the most trustworthy sources on this topic), then my Anthropic friends have been much more right about timelines than me. This report is also some evidence that a software-only singularity is plausible. I now think that we are more than 50% likely to have full blown superintelligence in the next 18 months, absent a slowdown. I need to call my family.

This report on AI R&D automation (RSI) is a big update towards ASI within 1-2 years. It says AI progress is sped up by RSI right now by around 2x. In AI 2027, this happens around March 2027. I was seriously wrong about RSI speed up; I previously expected much less in 2026 (around 1.15x-1.3x). It seems as though there was specific privately available evidence that would have changed my mind. I haven't seen an unredacted version of this report; this is purely about the public report. Because so much of the underlying evidence was redacted from the public report, I think conclusions about things other than the observed 2x faster rate of progress on benchmarks depend significantly on trust for the authors of the report. (E.g., conclusions about whether this speed up is from RSI depend on trust.) I do trust the authors of the report a lot to be careful and rigorous and generally do a good job. (Note that I also work at METR.) Less extensive redactions would greatly reduce this need for trust. Since in my current role I may have access to other confidential information that could be relevant to timelines one way or another, I unfortunately cannot state my all-things-considered views on ASI timelines or the probability of a software intelligence explosion right now. Here, I’ve done some analysis of the implications using my previous public statements. A 2x acceleration in overall AI progress from RSI corresponds to a much larger than 2x RSI speed up for AI software R&D (algorithms and data); I did an estimate using my public preexisting modeling of drivers of AI progress and the public report which yielded a very rough estimate of 4.5x for how much RSI is currently accelerating AI software progress (relative to no AI automation). In the AI 2027 scenario, this much acceleration happens around March 2027. Here are the worked details of this estimate based on my public modeling. There are two main reasons RSI speed up of AI software R&D must be larger: - Not all of AI progress is from better software (some is from scaling up compute in training runs). I've previously speculated that around 2/3 of AI progress is from software improvements which implies that 2x overall AI progress acceleration requires 3x faster software progress. - Diminishing returns: A fixed amount of progress requires more work over time, so to ongoingly maintain 3x faster software progress via AI automation, you need increasingly large speed boosts from AI automation (as in, speed ups relative to how fast software R&D would go without AI automation). Based on this report, it seems that there is a substantial amount of additional AI progress from automation that has occurred. We can estimate the effects of diminishing returns by first determining how many additional years of software progress we've seen (relative to the preexisting trend) and then estimating how much software R&D would slow down after a year of software progress if you held inputs fixed due to diminishing returns. I've previously estimated software R&D would slow down by around 2x for each year of software progress if you held inputs fixed ( and based on the report, it seems as though we've perhaps seen roughly 0.35-1.0 years of additional software progress incorporated into trained models so far (geometric mean of ~0.6). This combines to 3 * 2^(~0.6) = ~4.5. (Relevant public modeling and numbers I'm using:

🚨 Federal harmonized liability bill alert! 🚨 @RepLoriTrahan has circulated a discussion draft bill that would ensure that when AI agents engage in conduct that would be a tort or crime for a human, *someone* is liable.