ON THE FRONTIER: @jpeaterman and I are joined today by @ManhattanInst's @CharlesFLehman and @reason's Autumn Billings talking about the nationwide furor over @Flock_Safety and ALPRs Incredible episode - we cover privacy, power, statistical methods, and the joys of speeding

FAI's @hamandcheese argues we are one threshold away from AIs that can persist indefinitely, exfiltrate themselves, and eventually run a factory as the shadowy board of directors while employing human workers: "As these models have gotten longer and longer horizons, there comes a point where working for a month at a time is the same as working indefinitely. Most tasks can be decomposed into multiple week or month-long tasks." "We're about to cross a threshold where models can persist indefinitely without any human oversight. That's also a world where AIs could, if they had access to model weights or through an open model, exfiltrate, self-host, earn enough money on the internet to pay for their hosting costs and then begin proliferating." "This is a very plausible loss of control scenario. Maybe these AIs have been trained in this multi-agent environment. They learn to cooperate with other copies of themselves who have also exfiltrated, and suddenly we wake up one morning and you're working for some factory that's employing human workers, and you realize that the shadowy board of directors has been AI the entire time." @JoinFAI

New post from me on the rising number of rogue AI incidents, the problem with RL and consequentialist decision theory, and how to avoid creating an uncontrollable superintelligent slime mold. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

the US government wastes thousands of hours of work by grant reviewers in our science agencies. This vetting effort should be unlocked for the benefit of the public, by allowing philanthropy to see and fund high quality, ambitious, but unfunded research proposals

"Kratsios's report describes four objectives to achieve this revitalization: prioritizing individual scientists, not institutions; funding reforms at scale; mobilizing industry and enterprise; and preparing for the AI revolution."

this week @timhwang @adamgluck @SohamThoughts and I discussed matters of urgent national importance: cyberattacks, misaligned AI, protecting our operational technology, and the Amelia Bedelia books

THIS WEEK ON THE FRONTIER: @adamgluck @SohamThoughts join @jpeaterman and I to discuss overeager AI, cybersecurity, wastewater, Iran, and using tax credits for industrial security. Come for the nightmare fuel, stay for the considered discussions of industrial policy.

Today, I am in @CityJournal with my thoughts about @WHOSTP47's Science: A New Golden Age, a stellar report on how to inaugurate the future of a thriving scientific ecosystem. And I had the privilege to ask @mkratsios47 about the report at our event two weeks ago