Actual progress comes from hard-to-build technology. Which comes from competitive, creative, free-market capitalism. Which comes from one small, precarious area and then diffuses to the rest of the world. Snuff that out, and it’s global stagnation for an extremely long time.

Models are the last moat in software. AI can train on essays and rewrite them. AI can decompile software and recode it. AI can ingest art and recreate it. But AI itself doesn’t want to be “distilled.” Expect more software to retreat to the server and resist “distillation.”

A new piece in the Financial Times created a great visualization of the results from this study. TL;DR: Rent control helps people whose rents get limited, but it hurts everyone else. It pushes up rents, pushes down new building, and makes cities worse. It is horrible policy.

This stupid communist has been in city hall for 6 YEARS. She was in charge of the Homelessness and Housing Committee for years. She keeps acting like some novel outsider who's gonna shake up government. Lady...you ARE government. You ARE the problem.

I still believe a correct framing on LLM usage is that they can get you 80% of the way upfront, but that last 20% starts to become impossible to overcome. The proper way to use an LLM is to do the difficult manual 20% upfront. Once you have some decent structure, decent API surface area, decent data structures laid out, decent base libraries. Then you can largely prompt your way through the last 80%. While the first 20% which you did manually, intentionally and fully comprehend. That 20% essentially becomes part of your development harness, almost a prompt itself. Where you can steer its overall architecture, or data design, or other critical pieces by keeping a grip on that first manually done 20%. Something real concerning with this. Knowing what to do in that first 20% requires advanced knowledge of the problem domain you are going to deal with. It is a staff or principal level engineer domain. Which most simply can't do. Which means most people are going to run the gauntlet heavily relying on prompts, and are going to cover some incredibly impressive ground very quickly. Because 80% of the way is quite a long ways there. It looks like it could almost be done. But then they will get stuck in that last 20% and will never be able to make it perfectly polished. Nor perfectly sable. Nor remove all the odd quirks. Nor overcome the last pieces of performance or memory issues. It will basically hit a plateau where they lose control of it. Or it becomes unwieldy to take it in a new complex direction, or add some novel complex functionality to it. It will be very hard to tell from the outside if any given company or project is aimed at getting stuck in that last 20%. As they could appear to be kicking some major butt in that first 80%. But then it will reach a plateau where they can no longer do anything substantial without breaking something else, or seem unable to fix every little quirk or issue. A lot of companies will probably get stuck here. With dozens of very impressive things 80% of the way, but seem unable to get over the last final 20% to really perfect it and polish it.

Yeah, "capitalism" is just a sort of minimal framework for societal coercion reduction, given human nature as a prior. Socialism is an extremely heavy handed and ultimately violence-requiring way to deny or re-form human nature in some very ill-fitting mold.

People keep asking me to push for one Mayoral candidate or the other. Trying to decide the best move. Guys...it's over. LA had its chance for a candidate of change back in June, and instead...they voted for continued destruction. Both candidates will make LA worse. I feel like Hank in that late episode of Breaking Bad...he's already shot to hell, Walt is desperately bargaining with the Nazis to spare his life in exchange for all the money he has. He begs Hank to tell them to take the deal. Hank just looks at him and says "you're the smartest guy I ever met. And you're too stupid to see...he made up his mind 10 minutes ago." I hate to break it to you, but the fate of LA is already baked into the cake 3 months ago. There's no more wheeling and dealing, no clever ballot trick, no October surprise that's gonna get you out of it. Your chance was in June, and a lot of you just stayed home. Or voted for Alan Miller. I told you to get ten of your friends to vote, and you didn't do it. Elections have consequences, so I hope you all now appreciate that, and operate with a greater sense of urgency with these things. Vote for governor, you still have a shot. Vote for voter ID. Vote down all the new taxes. But for Mayor, it's too late.

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field. I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so. First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world. The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability. Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended. I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent. Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.) Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration. Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building. [Original text (with links): ]

I was very strongly influenced by rationalism/LessWrong/EA growing up. This is why I don’t emphasize claims that it’s all just a cynical ploy for power. I know what it feels like to sincerely believe these things. And that’s much worse. By and large, I think these people really believe that not just the world but the entire lightcone is at stake, and the only hope for a good outcome is if they totally control AI development, which would require global governance and a surveillance state. And since the stakes are ~infinite, any means are justified in achieving this. A cynical greedy person can be negotiated with and bought off. A true believer can’t. They’re much more dangerous, ironically for the same reason they say AGI will be dangerous: monomaniacal focus on a single goal leads via instrumental convergence to unconstrained power-seeking.

Ayn Rand predicted this Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, and most of hollywood (each worth 10s to 100s of millions) will rabidly insist that Elon is evil simply because he is a billionaire Yet they are living in one of their 3-4 beautiful mansions and he is living in an airstream so he can work on building superintelligence and employing people