Data Science at @ThePropelApp. Formerly: Stitch Fix, Opendoor, Twitter, Facebook, neuroscience.
New York, NY
Joined August 2008
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Chris Said retweeted
My latest article is an important one:
I've written a paper. It shows, virtually dispositively--using causal designs--that vaccines do not cause autism.
You can read it here: cremieux.xyz/p/vaccines-dont…
If you want to fight the mad race to ASI, the most important thing you can do is shed your fear of sounding naive.
You need to put Stop inside the Overton Window.
What if Anthropic just...stopped? Unilaterally? Right now?
I talked to @DKokotajlo @_NathanCalvin @geoffreyirving about why it's time to stop framing AI as a prisoner's dilemma and just do the right thing.
I hope a lot of people inside and outside Anthropic read this
🧵 1/n
Chris Said retweeted
LFG
Like many in tax world, I’ve been dismayed at how bipartisan the tax revolt has become. Exempting more people and income from taxes. How do we combat these bad ideas? Fund the tax police again to restore credibility. My guest piece for @SearchlightInst. open.substack.com/pub/search…
Chris Said retweeted
The most prescient AI forecasters I know:
* Carl Shulman
* Daniel Kokotajlo (What 2026 looks like, AI 2027)
* Leopold (Situational Awareness)
* Ryan Greenblatt (#2 in 2025 forecasting competition)
All seem to expect broadly beyond-human AI 2028-2029.
Chris Said retweeted
My plea to all AI lab staff: reassess if your current project is your best opportunity to delay RSI, or stop it blowing up in our face.
If it's not, move immediately.
There's no time to waste even a week to inertia or politeness.
The strategic situation is shifting under our feet, so if you haven't reassessed your options recently, you could easily be wasting your time or possibly making things worse.
You have access to info I don't, but here's 8 ways priorities seem to have shifted to me, which I elaborate on in the video:
1. Helping with capabilities advances looks worse than in the past, especially bringing forward RSI
2. Safety & alignment evals need a credibility revolution to stop misleading the public
3. 'Pacing the frontier' is unambiguously necessary, and working to make it happen is a huge new opportunity for talent
4. Chain-of-thought monitoring probably stops working without a big technical and regulatory push to keep it
5. It's worse than ever to patch surface indications of deep structural problems you know aren't getting fixed
6. There's ever less need for altruists to help with primarily commercial work
7. Staff have an ever-shrinking window to organise as a group and collectively shape events
8. There are new opportunities for research impact outside frontier companies that are worth considering
I know you're probably some combination of exhausted, overwhelmed, and anxious already.
But unfortunately there's no way to escape the need to regularly check in on the high level strategic picture and see where you can slot in to maximum effect.
I wish I could do it for you but nobody far from your situation can. Godspeed my friends.
(From the 80,000 Hours Podcast, links below.)
It is the stated goal of many AI developers to avoid ending up in the permanent underclass
We obviously won’t keep the same social contract in a world of ASI; we will get a much worse one.
The social contract we have today was premised on the state/ruling class’s need for lots of human beings to make stuff and to shoot guns.
This allowed the human beings who supplied these needs to extract concessions over time, like rights to free speech and universal suffrage.
But if robots can make all the things and shoot all the guns, then there is simply no basis upon which the vast majority of human beings can negotiate concessions from the ruling class; we will cease to have any kind of leverage at all. At best, this terminates in a kind of permanent techno-feudalism, an infinite future of subjugation under the boot of successive generations of Peter Thiels. At worst, it terminates in a (possibly very slow) genocide of the vast majority of people on earth, because the people who own the robots and the machine intelligences will have no reason to distribute any of the machines’ output to the vast majority of people who lack such ownership stakes.
Arguably, our main hope for “survival” in such a future is that the ruling class might have, in this scenario, one final need: a need for subjects to rule over.
The psychological need for adoration, for power, for social inferiors. The last thing that we’ll have with which to buy our bread will be supplication to the egos of people like Elon Musk. A future of laughing at a cringe trillionaire’s bad jokes to earn your UBI—more or less directly.
I’m learning about the Dyophysitism/Miaphysitism debate that drove the Oriental Orthodox Church to split off from the rest of the Church, and it’s inspiring how much intellectual progress we have made since then.
You may think this is overwrought but most versions of the “good” scenario for AGI do not sound good, and we should try to stop it.
We obviously won’t keep the same social contract in a world of ASI; we will get a much worse one.
The social contract we have today was premised on the state/ruling class’s need for lots of human beings to make stuff and to shoot guns.
This allowed the human beings who supplied these needs to extract concessions over time, like rights to free speech and universal suffrage.
But if robots can make all the things and shoot all the guns, then there is simply no basis upon which the vast majority of human beings can negotiate concessions from the ruling class; we will cease to have any kind of leverage at all. At best, this terminates in a kind of permanent techno-feudalism, an infinite future of subjugation under the boot of successive generations of Peter Thiels. At worst, it terminates in a (possibly very slow) genocide of the vast majority of people on earth, because the people who own the robots and the machine intelligences will have no reason to distribute any of the machines’ output to the vast majority of people who lack such ownership stakes.
Arguably, our main hope for “survival” in such a future is that the ruling class might have, in this scenario, one final need: a need for subjects to rule over.
The psychological need for adoration, for power, for social inferiors. The last thing that we’ll have with which to buy our bread will be supplication to the egos of people like Elon Musk. A future of laughing at a cringe trillionaire’s bad jokes to earn your UBI—more or less directly.
Chris Said retweeted
The whole premise of the modern age of mass politics is that states had to make novel concessions to the great majority of people, thanks to the advent of print (and thus coordinated public opinion), guns (and thus levied citizen armies), and industry (and thus concentrated proletarian labor).
This is the material basis on which democracy (and economic redistribution) became possible. Even the “good” AGI scenario obliterates these three things; information would tightly controlled by whoever owns the models, drones replace human soldiers, and robots replace human workers. We’d have no leverage at all. There’d be no need to concede anything to the rest of us—certainly not agency or political power, not any control over our own lives and not even resources. There’d be little downside to simply letting the rest of us starve.
I haven’t heard a good answer from anyone why this wouldn’t happen
Stopping AI is the perfect issue for the Left but they are dropping the ball!
Asking meekly because Rationalists don’t know how to organize and we need your help.
Chris Said retweeted
You might like Anthropic. You might think they're the good one.
They might even be reaching the conclusion that they don't want, say, an authoritarian government shutting them down capriciously in good faith.
But this is actually pretty illustrative of why a for-profit race to superintelligence just doesn't work: push comes to shove their incentive is to block federal limits on their work. It's why we need government to set the guardrails here, not the AI companies.
xitter.cf/politico/status/211121…
Anthropic quietly pitches its own AI safety bill to lawmakers politi.co/4zxDFhl
Chris Said retweeted
Many people with relevant expertise think there's a real chance that AI could kill us all in the not too distant future. Others disagree. I've written a post, aimed principally at mathematicians, detailing my struggles to decide what to make of this.
gowers.wordpress.com/2026/10…
Chris Said retweeted
Some of this is plausible or even correct, but the framing—the most unhinged critics were wrong—sets a very low bar. DOGE supporters themselves set much more ambitious goals than “the apocalypse will not materialize.”
As a result the article doesn’t address obvious DOGE failures:
— Spending is up meaningfully;
— Corruption at the highest levels of government is up dramatically;
— Certain departments (DHS, DoJ, and State most obviously) now perform at third world levels;
— The biggest personnel cuts in absolute terms were to what the author refers to as the “Department of War,” which proceeded to lose a war.
DOGE worked. Most importantly, the civil service is 12% smaller than it was in Jan 2025.
In the Fall @CityJournal, I show they were not replaced by contractors, the biggest cuts were to middle managers, and the predictions of disaster were proven false. city-journal.org/article/dog…
Chris Said retweeted
Anthropic's leaders need to stop commenting on the emergence of RSI like a local news anchor reporting on traffic on the 101, and acknowledge that they are the traffic, and they're not going to build something that they don't want to exist.
They should move beyond "pacing" language, commit to specific policies and red lines, explain why those lines are red, and then use that costly signal to build an international consensus around norms.
It's not that I trust the CCP, or that I think global lab monitoring and verification is imminent. But the status quo is absurd.
You've got US lab leaders writing (or favorably quote-tweeting) essays about slowing down while simultaneously saying "things are moving faster and faster" and "btw, our internal models finished mathematics on Tuesday, next up: physics."
The effect is the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning race after race while using his press conferences to bemoan the dangerous speed of modern sprinting on one's legs so would everybody please try a little less hard next race, and then ... breaking his 100m record again the following month. Honestly ask yourself: If you were China, why would you take this pausing/pacing stuff seriously?
Chris Said retweeted
Yeah, everything the labs are saying is, "We're not ready for RSI." It's not even clear they think we're ready for just slightly better models short of RSI. But also, they're trying to do RSI! It's inherently absurd. And dangerous.
Anthropic's leaders need to stop commenting on the emergence of RSI like a local news anchor reporting on traffic on the 101, and acknowledge that they are the traffic, and they're not going to build something that they don't want to exist.
They should move beyond "pacing" language, commit to specific policies and red lines, explain why those lines are red, and then use that costly signal to build an international consensus around norms.
It's not that I trust the CCP, or that I think global lab monitoring and verification is imminent. But the status quo is absurd.
You've got US lab leaders writing (or favorably quote-tweeting) essays about slowing down while simultaneously saying "things are moving faster and faster" and "btw, our internal models finished mathematics on Tuesday, next up: physics."
The effect is the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning race after race while using his press conferences to bemoan the dangerous speed of modern sprinting on one's legs so would everybody please try a little less hard next race, and then ... breaking his 100m record again the following month. Honestly ask yourself: If you were China, why would you take this pausing/pacing stuff seriously?
