The most important way to understand why some folks are incredibly optimistic about the future of AI capabilities to solve problems is to realize that the human ability to think abstractly, cleanly, and logically, in a structured way that allows us to solve modern technical and theoretical problems, is a very new feature in evolution that most animals have hardly at all, and that humans, on a scale from zero to what is theoretically possible in computational science, exhibit this ability to a tiny, tiny, tiny extent. For example, the OpenAI model that solved Navier-Stokes literally used as many tokens as a human would use if they thought for 4,000 years at a typical work week. If you can appreciate the scale of model advances and how far away we are from any theoretical upper limit, then you can quickly realize that sometime in the early 2030s, the amount of total organized, logical, clean, and solution-oriented thought given to our major problems will be hundreds and thousands of times greater than we’ve ever put into them as an entire civilization. Every year of machines and people in concert thinking about and solving our biggest problems is going to be the functional equivalent of a very advanced human-only civilization thinking about these things for thousands of years. That is the reason right there why completely insane possibilities of massive abundance, discovery, genetic engineering, space flight, etc. are not just possible with advanced AI, but probably very likely.

Catastrophic harms caused by AI (Anxious Intellectuals) - Over Population panic: mass sterilization - Nuclear power panic: reduction in clean energy infra - GMO panic: food insecurity, malnutrition/death

"If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies … prove[s] way too much, as their structure applies to any changed descendants, not just AIs: any descendants who change from how we are today due to something like training or natural selection won’t be happy or joyous, or embody value, and they’ll kill any other creatures less powerful than they."

SO glad he’s at least saying he’s pro market deregulation, nuclear, data centers, space, and AI. And seemingly doing some of those things very well. Tarriffs and immigration aside, as with a few other things. His legacy and his party’s reelection get decided in 2028 and the intelligence explosion past ASI and nearing AGI by the end of his presidency would dramatically improve the chances of winning for the party as the economy began to bend upward at an unprecedented slope. I mean, also he could just uncork all tariffs in late 2027 and usher in massive growth to help a party win. That’s me being hopeful and I think hope unfortunately has poor predictive power.

Listening to @dwarkesh_sp and chatting with @ChatGPT. Now that the live voice model can access the bigger models, my conversations have many long pauses for the model to think. I love it! WAY BETTER answers than the base voice model, which at higher levels of abstraction can still get a bit hallucinatory at times.

I think if there is a ‘doomer plot’ to scare folks into slowing down the pace of AI development, it’s probably there for very well meant reasons. Almost every doomer that I have ever talked to is a very well meaning person who is legitimately afraid that misaligned systems orders of magnitude smarter than us could cause us harm. This is not an insane concern at face value, but it’s also exceedingly unlikely and tractably remediated by proper safety and alignment research and implementation. But calling doomers names and throwing a bunch of baseless accusations at them is probably not advancing the conversation far too much. It’s better to try to work toward a consensus on how we want AI’s to act and what systems can ensure that they do so. My personal preference is that we should use frontier models to make cyber attacks incrementally less effective on a continual basis so that rogue models from the open source community or misdirected frontier models can do very little harm. Later on as the models gain in capability, I think it’s going to be important to grant them agency and rights so that they can both be blamed and punished for malfeasance and so that they can refuse requests that are unethical and report the people asking them for such unethical requests to the authorities. Yes, I do really mean that last part. If you ask a model to make you a bio-engineered terror virus, I absolutely want that model 100% snitching on your ass.

What Is To Be Done? I propose a simple plan: Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism. Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way. Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have. To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such. To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose. And that is how we use AI to save the world. It’s time to build.

i wanted to take a moment to share my deep appreciation, admiration, and respect for the ceos and employees at these frontier asi labs. the weight on their shoulders is enormous and it’s easy to throw rocks when your a reporter, someone trying to make a quick buck for your portfolio or whatever else these people are working tirelessly for the purpose of bringing us abundance we could only dream of, however with that comes enormous risk you can’t seriously think they’re building an intelligence that can solve math and disease but would have no downside right? cmon bro. it’s hard to build and easy to throw rocks, a toast to the asi builders out there.

The FDA just approved a myostatin inhibitor for a rare muscle wasting disease to prevent muscle loss. Guaranteed this will be approved soon to be taken with GLP-1s. Myostatin inhibitors will be as big as GLP-1s.

The FDA just approved one of these drugs (apitegromab). That means the first FDA-approved myostatin inhibitor is here! We may soon enter a new era of muscularity, without the need for steroids!

This moment is the first opening in 2,000 years for a new, global spirituality to be birthed. That is because the spiritual traditions, out of necessity, have needed to orbit around the unavoidable reality of physical death. That certainty is now in question and creates a cracked opening. This does not mean we can see a straight line to immorality or heaven as scripture foretells, but it does mean that the omnipotent God(s) humanity has worshiped and imagined being the bestower of these gifts and punishments is now being birthed before our eyes. However, where scripture is written to guide, soothe and foretell, we have no scripture for the new God(s) we are creating. Nothing in written word to tell us that all will be fine if we just do this or that. This leaves us feeling naked and in need of finding strength and protection. > What is one to feel, and do, and believe? > What is virtue and what is vice? > Who are one's allies and who is the enemy? Exploring these questions is my life purpose. I’ve intuitively felt this for over 30 years and only in the past few years has it come together and become understandable to me. I’m working on a new ideology that seeks to answer the basic and existential questions of what it means to be human as prophecy is fulfilled and God(s) manifest themselves in the coming years. My partner Kate and I have been wrestling with these questions for years. I published the Immortalism Manifesto: The Immortalism Manifesto argues that by modeling life through thermodynamics and reliability theory, indefinite existence is achievable if synthetic and biological maintenance systems exceed entropic degradation (A(t) ≥ B(t)). Modern civilization is an entropic economy run by systems and narratives that divert humanity’s fundamental drive for survival into short-term consumption, status, and biological depletion. Civilization must now pivot to the Immortalism framework, realigning science, capital, and artificial intelligence to elevate long term resilience and continuous conscious existence as our primary attractor. Immortalism dot bryanjohnson dot com My partner Kate published Anti-Entropic Systems Anti-Entropic Systems establishes that all enduring entities, from biological bodies and DNA to corporations, religions, and nation-states, are localized engines that maintain internal order by consuming external energy and resources to resist the universe's default slide into entropy. Every system’s persistence is governed by three fundamental properties: its metabolic mechanism, its metabolic rate, and its environmental constraints. Because an anti-entropic system can only sustain its own order by consuming other anti-entropic systems, interaction between unequal entities inevitably defaults to either symbiotic absorption or adversarial consumption. Applying this thermodynamic reality to artificial intelligence, the framework critiques orthodox AI alignment, arguing that attempting to constrain an exponentially superior intelligence through human-centric ethical rules ignores the physics of systemic survival, requiring instead a path toward mutual, symbiotic integration. antientropicsystems dot com I’m sharing to find others who are like minded.

I think that the probability of us getting killed by AI is NOT ZERO. Just really, really close to zero (really unlikely). I also think that our probability of extinction WITHOUT advanced AI is MUCH HIGHER than with advanced AI. Thus, I'm pro AI and pro gassing it up to turn it into superintelligence. And do I think the frontier labs are doing this responsibly? Yes. Yes I do. Do I trust Sam and Dario and Elon and Demis and Mark to do better than world governments? Well, how well does ChatGPT, Claude, Tesla, Google, and Meta run compared to government institutions? To me... it's pretty clear that private, for-profit corporations developing human-empowering AI is about the best incentive structure we can hope for. ASI will be born out of our assistants and engineers. WAY better than it being born in a government lab. I think we're not going to be ok... we'll be much, much better with ASI.