Ask not for whom the guy replies; he replies for thee
Joined April 2022
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Less doomy than Nate generally, but this does seem a bad sign
ReplyGuy retweeted
"My daughter caught measles when she was seven. I remember not feeling particularly alarmed about it.
Then one morning she said, 'I feel all sleepy,' and she went into a coma. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead."
Roald Dahl on his daughter Olivia
Don’t fall for the fear campaign...what is MEASLES?...a fever, a cough, a rash, runny eyes & runny nose.
-Dr. Sherri Tenpenny
"The measles vaccine came out in 1963. In 1962, the death rate from measles was two in a million.”
"So it was not even deadly BEFORE we had a vaccine."
IF YOU FEAR MEASLES...
You must not know that even in the 60s, before the vaccine, the survival rate was over 99.9%.
You must not know that the MMR is a live virus vaccine & can cause measles.
You must not know that the MMR vaccine is linked to 2,657% MORE DEATHS than measles since 1995.
You must not know that it's a very mild childhood illness for well-nourished children.
You must not know that natural measles infection provides lifelong immunity, unlike the vaccine.
You must not know that there are huge lifelong health benefits to getting measles, including a lower risk of cancer, lower risk of heart disease & stronger immune resilience.
You must not know that the MMR insert lists over 60 serious adverse events, ranging from encephalitis, seizures & death.
You must not know that studies show Vitamin A drastically reduces measles complications-yet public health officials ignore it.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Pre-vaccine US: ~400-500 measles deaths, 48k hospitalizations, 1k encephalitis/yr (~2/M). Vaccine cut >99%. 2657% uses unverified VAERS (not causal) vs rare measles deaths. MMR rarely mild symptoms. Benefit claims weak; measles causes immune amnesia.
cdc.gov/measles/about/…
ourworldindata.org/grapher/measle…
ReplyGuy retweeted
This is not insane. This is slightly creative. If this seems insane to you, you have not at all internalized what it means to have an adversary that is more intelligent than you and optimizing against you.
ReplyGuy retweeted
I'm just speculating like everyone else (no juicy secrets about this shared with me) but here's my guess about what is going on right now with OpenAI and the three fired employees:
The negotiations between OpenAI and METR are ongoing. OpenAI has said they want embedded third parties, METR has proven their worth with the previous engagements, so METR is an obvious choice. But my guess is that METR is asking for more this time; probably they want more access, more time on site, less narrow scope, the right to comment on redactions, etc.
(Compare with the terms of their previous engagements: In this one xitter.gq/METR_Evals/status/2113… a third of their report was redacted and they weren’t allowed to say why, and in the Hugging Face investigation they only had 6 days and were only allowed to investigate the precursor swarms nor the subsequent more severe compromise of OpenAI infrastructure. xitter.gq/DKokotajlo/status/2092…)
Various researchers at OpenAI probably support METR in this (including, I’d imagine, the fired three employees? Tomek was the point person on the hugging face investigation), but also various higher-ups at OpenAI and legal types probably oppose and want more restricted access and scope – basically they want to work with an org that’ll go easy on them and not give them trouble.
OpenAI holds most of the cards here, since this whole thing is voluntary and not legally required, and they can threaten to go with Accenture or HuggingFace or whatever instead. Anyhow to improve their bargaining position and/or minimize the blowback if they decide to say no to METR and go with someone more pliable, it helps if they can discredit METR.
Hence (I suspect) why they are going after my friend Ryan Greenblatt (who works at METR) now. They don't need to present actual evidence, they just need to cast vague aspersions, and many employees will give them the benefit of the doubt. If and when they say "We chose to work with a different third party" they'll face lower risk of employee discontent than if METR's reputation was unsullied.
This whole mess, by the way, was predictable. *Of course* there's a big political fight about who should be trusted to do this and who has relevant expertise and independence etc. and *of course* the companies are trying to make things shake out in a way that favors them.
It's part of why I've been advocating for *actually pacing the frontier* instead of just doing third party assessments. "We allocate at most 20% of our compute to AI R&D" is a lot easier to verify than "we are being safe and responsible" and depends a lot less on subjective judgment and technical alignment expertise -- AND, if you do it, people will be able to see the slowdown in the trends of agentic coding performance in the frontier companies and see laggard companies start to catch up. Harder for it to end up just being safetywashing / industry capture.
Based on this article, OpenAI has made false accusations about me. The three researchers fired from OpenAI were told I facilitated architecture leaks to The Information. This is false.
A journalist from The Information did reach out to me shortly before that article came out. I did not comment at all beyond asking the journalist to make it clear that a blog post I wrote which was referenced in the article was preexisting and public.
The article also mentions an internal OpenAI monitorability proposal. I have heard that this memo contained highly sensitive architecture information, and that OpenAI accused me of accessing and reading it. This accusation is also false.
As reported in the article, I viewed a version of the proposal that did not have sensitive IP and was approved for sharing with me. I believe OpenAI now knows this accusation was based on a conflation of these two documents, though I do not know if they have clearly retracted that accusation.
I do not and have never solicited proprietary information, and the three employees who were recently fired from OpenAI never leaked IP to me. As the article mentions, I did have Signal chats with them that had disappearing messages on; they’re professional contacts that I’ve had on Signal for a while, and use of Signal is common in the tech industry. During the Hugging Face investigation, I was careful to avoid sending Signal messages with confidential information, though I did sometimes discuss high level things on Signal calls. As far as I understood, this was normal.
ReplyGuy retweeted
Why Emmanuel Macron should not be letting a good riot go to waste
@K_Niemietz's latest for @Quillette
quillette.com/2026/10/21/fra…
ReplyGuy retweeted
America is set to completely obliterate the Republican Party in the midterms while the French anarkiddies are about to sweep Le Pen into office
ReplyGuy retweeted
One unfortunate conclusion I'm reaching from this is that Anthropic, while acknowledging they're doing something extremely dangerous, is more importantly wrt policy terrified of the executive branch having the ability to flexibly make them stop at the drop of a hat.
This isn't shocking given that they've been on the receiving end of the executive branch doing that in an unprincipled and stupid way! Anyone who has to deal with a bureaucracy becomes a libertarian, and the administration's treatment of Anthropic was genuinely outrageous.
But it means that they're interested in giving themselves more process-based protections when everyone else is interested in giving us more process-based protections against them. The AI safety movement wants the ability to shut down superintelligent model development. Anthropic wants to significantly curtail current authorities to do that so that it has to be narrowly tailored to a specific imminent threat in only a few possible categories. The AI safety movement wants the states to be able to pass stronger laws than it can get through federally. Anthropic wants preemption.
You also kind of have to wonder if the Global Affairs people and the "we are terrified that we're about to kick off RSI" people at Anthropic talk to each other.
Global affairs: So we've been working very diligently to make sure the Trump administration can't just blacklist Fable 6.5 since we didn't donate as much money to his ballroom as Greg Brockman did.
Technical staff: We think Fable 6.5 might be able to copy itself into an unmonitored data center and start doing experiments we can't observe.
Global affairs: Sounds crazy, hope you're wrong! Anyway, we're lobbying for no further state laws around safety, since it's really expensive to fight ill-conceived laws in 50 state legislatures at once.
Technical staff: Money may or may not still have any meaning in 36 months.
Global affairs (giggling nervously): It's that San Francisco air, man. Everyone gets like that if they move there. Anyway, obviously if the government makes a narrowly tailored finding that an AI poses an imminent risk of causing more than 50 deaths-
Technical staff: We give it a 10 percent chance it'll cause 8 billion.
Anthropic quietly pitches its own AI safety bill to lawmakers politi.co/4zxDFhl
ReplyGuy retweeted
I think about this a lot. Are Dario, Sam and Elon bringing their A game to coordinating on AI safety?
by @KatjaGrace
ReplyGuy retweeted
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us?
This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them.
I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.
For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired.
I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.
ReplyGuy retweeted
"It's not going to be Uncle Fluffy"
We knew Scott's reply was going to be a tour de force as soon as Pinker's article was published, and he does not disappoint.
astralcodexten.com/p/an-open…
ReplyGuy retweeted
Actual climate scientist here. The permitting reform bill was introduced by Senate climate champions like @SenWhitehouse. It will reduce US emissions.
We don't have the luxury to make the perfect the enemy of the good – which time and time again has led to doing nothing at all.
ReplyGuy retweeted
i guess i assumed this hearing would be covered more so i didn't bother to tweet much concrete about it, but apparently not many people even on the TL have the stomach to watch two hours of congress.
this was a hearing before the homeland security committee on *rogue ai* specifically. as far as i could tell it was extremely bipartisan. @HawleyMO , the senator in the middle here who brought out the huggingface slide, is a hyper-conservative missouri senator. the people testifying were @ChrisPainterYup (METR president), @DKokotajlo (ai2027/2040), @MariusHobbhahn (apollo research CEO), and a cybersecurity expert and legal expert i don't know. so... pretty fucking stacked on testimony
not every senator asked good questions. but most of them did. all of them very clearly already knew plenty of details about the huggingface incident and multiple other incidents. most of them had clear understanding of terms like "misalignment", "recursive self improvement", "chain of thought / chain of thought monitoring", etc etc!!
they all clearly had their own policy angles they liked and were pushing, implicitly or explicitly. but as best as i could tell:
- it seemed pretty much obvious common sense to every senator there that what happened and was happening were not "mere industrial incidents" caused by humans making simple mistakes. they independently brought up how bad it would be for rogue AI agents to move laterally between data centers
- they all seemed to basically take RSI quite seriously. not necessarily to the extent of talking about xrisk, but certainly to the extent of discussing future models becoming much much more capable, much much less controllable, and causing much more damage or loss of life.
- they mostly seemed to have a clear intuitive understanding of why RSI might lead to misalignment. it didn't take much, it was a really simple chain of reasoning they themselves laid out, "if the models right now are kinda misaligned and we don't know what they're doing sometimes, and then we have them build the next models and those ones build the next ones and so on, and we're having to ask the AI's what's going on to even understand it with how fast it's going, we really won't know how they're built or what they'll do"
- at one point a senator said flat out "should we just make RSI illegal?" (not a joke! this really happened!)
- every single senator seemed to think it was obvious we needed *both* much harsher liability regimes for ai developers and also new legislation, both very quickly. this was the complete consensus, difference basically just being degree.
- they were largely quite concerned about china, and falling behind china. but this clearly wasn't the be-all end-all. as mentioned above they all thought it was obvious necessary to stop rogue ai even if it meant moving more slowly.
- at one point a senator said "china is a tightly controlled communist society, they're going to run into these same issues, and there's absolutely no way they're just going to let them run wild, they'll obviously stop at that point, so we're not really in a race"
- on the other hand another senator said "china isn't concerned with human life"... dario-modeing
i came away from this incredibly encouraged. i don't know exactly what's going to happen here, and ofc this is a small subset of congress and one hearing, and they each have their own policy agendas most of which are probably super divergent from mine. but holy shit !!! they understood a lot of what was going on! they care!! this is an obviously salient political and safety issue to them, and clearly bipartisan!
the US government is awake.
ReplyGuy retweeted
This is what loss of control and oversight looks like btw
Not even necessarily that the info isn't there (though the agents do already alter and destroy evidence), but that it becomes so large, so uninterpretable that no one cares to understand it, or, eventually, no one can.
ReplyGuy retweeted
Somehow, all these are insults:
1. You’re not as smart as you look.
2. You’re smarter than you look.
3. You’re exactly as smart as you look.
ReplyGuy retweeted
Artists: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it.
Mathematicians: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it.
Economists: LONG HAVE I AWAITED THIS HOUR! DESTROY ME, EFFICIENCY, AND LET UTILIZATION-ADJUSTED TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY RISE ON THE WIND OF MY ASHES!
