The very heavy reliance of anti-safetyists on this style of argument rather than addressing the stated concerns — just mood affiliation with generalized disposition to favor progress — should raise your alarms.

Are you all really staking your positions on potentially the most world-historical technological breakthrough in centuries based on the weirdness of the EAs who were thinking about this before you? You have your own rational faculties! Form a view on the question itself!

nobody should patronize those who newly have opinions about third party evaluators. non-experts forming opinions fast is part of the american tradition. the constitution itself was, in a very important sense, vibe coded by 20 somethings with concepts of a plan. but newbies being fleeced is also part of the american tradition. “caveat emptor” is a provision of a contract signed by an adult, not some god-given right to be treated as something other than a little child. you will be treated as a child no matter what. you are the buyer. it is your job to beware.

BREAKING: My reporting just uncovered the "rogue swarm" that "hacked" HuggingFace originated from OpenAI, the recipient of a $30 million grant from the Effective Altruism doomer org, Open Philanthropy -- all part of a 9-year master plan to scare the public against AI #falseflag#

EAs, like any weirdos, are tempting targets for a coordinated media frenzy. Very seductive to bash the nerds. It’s not going to work politically, it won’t work on the American people, and it’s divorced from the reality of the technology. But it’s the low-impulse control option.

Listen if your model of what has happened is that the EAs have launched a coup I think you have very bad judgement. Here is what actually happened: a very large number of people have slowly grown aware of the potential AI has to radically transform human society. Most people who contemplate this are uncomfortable with this—because they do not like change, because they do not like ceding agency and control to something they do not understand, because they distrust Silicon Valley, because they fear the apocalypse, because they fear the dystopian-lite future many AI futurists advocate as a the “good” outcome. Take your pick, it could be any of those. The point though is that the majority of people who become aware of the technology’s trajectory are not comfortable with it. For a long time this did not seem to matter because people kept these feelings to themselves. They weren’t confident they understood the issue; the entire problem seemed far-out there and sci-fi; they didn’t want to look bad; and if they were politicians, they did not want to needlessly upset an engine of the National economy. Nevertheless the unease has been growing for months and months and months now and if you did not realize this you were living in a bubble. Well now your bubble has popped. An event occurred that made it suddenly OK for folks to express the anxieties that had slowly been building up this year, and the expression came in one big flood. It is a classic “preference cascade.” The people who are trying to gin this up to some master plan of a group of activists have their head stuck in the ground—it reminds me of the liberals who refused to see Trump’s genuine grassroots popularity until they were whacked in the head by it.

There’s an impulse in American politics, a set of tactics and drives that has proven very effective at extinguishing speech. We once called it McCarthyism. Another time we called it Wokeism. One day in the future we will have some name for the campaign that is underway against all people who believe in serious AI risks, and whatever that name ends up being, it will be yet another name for that old impulse. It’s an ugly one. I recommend you avoid being a part of it, no matter your politics or your thoughts on AI. I suggest you think for yourself. You really do want to worry about the state projecting too much power over AI, centralizing control or robbing us of the unambiguous benefits of the technology in the name of preserving the economic status quo. But there really are grave risks from AI that go beyond what any other mass-market digital technology has posed. These two things aren’t totalizing worldviews that exist in conflict. You don’t need to believe only one or the other. *Both of them are true.* The question should not be “which facts should we ignore, and which should we pay attention to?” The question is: “how do we walk the narrow corridor between all these realities which are in deep tension with one another?” You should think for yourself. Assess other people’s work for yourself rather than allowing powerful people to put a label on them for you. As someone who has been a journey that has taken me to different perceived “sides” of the AI debate, believe me: You’ll find that there are bright and thoughtful people on both the “safety” and “accelerate” sides, and you will also find that both sides have their imbeciles, charlatans, and, occasionally, true cretins. It’s your job to figure out what’s what. Don’t let other people think for you. Don’t be played a fool.

Says the guy who claimed in 2023 that "Al progress in general is slowing down" and that "economic forecasts should assume Al capabilities are relatively close to the current day capabilities." You are no Daniel Kokotajlo, that's for certain.

@sponkostonko I limit my replies when it occurs to me to do so to make it slightly harder for people to threaten me and my family with violence, which happens frequently in my life now. It still happens, but at least with replies limited my wife is less likely to see it.

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

If “but China” is your qualm about pacing the frontier you can’t *also* be for exporting all kinds of chips to China, that’s just “make NVIDIA stock go up” not a real policy toward China or artificial intelligence.

“You AI people are so naive, I live in the REAL world, where [I have been consistently wrong in my predictions about AI and behind the ball on every trend related to AI, routinely making little prognostications that stochastic gradient descent joyfully stomps all over.]”