Working for a good future
Berkeley
Joined October 2021
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Rachel retweeted
My views on AI have radically shifted over the past few weeks, after spending way too much time reading about it and watching interviews of industry leaders and experts.
First, I really love the tools. I spend $200 on Claude every month and the product is worth every penny for me. Probably even more. I think the existing tools can deliver significant increase to future GDP and help us solve major global challenges faced by humanity.
However, I just cannot comprehend why the industry is not much more regulated, as its leaders and employees seem to request themselves. I meet a lot of people who have heard of the hugging face incident but don’t know the actual chain of events. If you don’t, you definitely should spend a least an hour reading about it.
I also do not know why we need to follow the path that frontier labs are following, to develop ever more powerful models. It seems to me that they are enormous gains that are readily available if we deploy the current technology in economic and scientific organizations without pursuing a super intelligence that they say might kill us and more likely wreak havoc in society. I know a lot of people think these warnings are marketing tricks, and that’s a reasonable assumption. But I don’t see the point of taking such risks.
My median scenario is that of many economists: AI will diffuse slowly and lift gdp growth by a percentage point or so, will cause some economic disruption on the way, but ultimately people will get new jobs and maybe work less.
However, I am deeply uncomfortable with the absolutely wild level of uncertainty around this prediction. And to be honest, even setting the doom scenarios aside, I find the utopia scenarios of some industry leaders actually dystopian. And I think a large majority of the public would agree if they paid attention to what they’re saying. To their credit, they themselves agree publicly that they should not be the ones making these choices. A large majority of the public is now very skeptical of AI as a source of human progress, in particular among younger adults who use it the most. They should have a say.
I don’t want to convince you of anything but to get informed about this topic, express yourself and vote accordingly.
sorry but this is so alien. people need to get a grip, make real friendships, and live a good life
“And when you speak at Manifest, do people nod and say "wow what's your Twitter" or do they silently turn to get another Spindrift?”
A funny thing about the deluge of wealth about to hit SF is that SF tech has always been about arcane status and legibility games much more so than money, and as we're about to mint a whole generation of UHNWs: there's nothing to buy.
The nicest houses in SF top out at $30M. We do not have Malibu-style $100M+ mansion compounds, and we don't have NYC-style $20M+ ultra-luxury apartments. There are a few penthouses at the Avery and a few other buildings and that's it. A handful of $50M+ estates available in the South Bay, but there's nothing these people hate more than commuting to where the cool events are. Megayachts would be out of gauche and out-of-place in the Bay. To a large extent, the real estate that you would associate with the kind of wealth about to befall Anthropic employee #100 simply does not exist and will take years to build as a physical matter and much more than that as a regulatory matter.
The consequence of this is that the arcane status and legibility games will come to matter much more than ever before -- if there's so much wealth that you can't really differentiate yourself on wealth, then everything ends up coming down to social proof games. Ah you have money? But does so-and-so follow you on Substack? And when you speak at Manifest, do people nod and say "wow what's your Twitter" or do they silently turn to get another Spindrift?
It’s kinda bananas how banana republic makes really good basics, knitwear, and workwear adjacents. I forgot they existed until a bunch of banker egirls were linking to them in their shopmy
Driving through the mission before Halloween weekend and I can’t tell if people are dressed up for Halloween or if it’s just normal San Francisco
I just received my second grant for the proto-org! Thank you BlueDot Rapid Grants for being so rapid, that's pretty cool of you
Rachel retweeted
honestly degrading the idea of “existential safety” — the biggest problem humanity has ever faced — by lumping it together with things like spam, “toxicity”, political unwanted content, deepfakes etc has been a huge disaster for ai safety and polarized a lot of people
Rachel retweeted
Wow, Gameto—a fertility tech startup I've written about a couple of times that aims to make IVF and egg freezing easier—just got acquired in a $1.4b deal.
Gameto has signed an agreement under which Ferring Pharmaceuticals would acquire the company. Completion remains subject to customary and other closing conditions.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Rachel retweeted
SITUATION EXPLAINED: A months-old startup founded by ex-DOGE staffers used AI agents to break into Anthropic in under 12 hours.
• Cathedral found paths to Anthropic's meeting transcripts, salary and job-offer details, and Slack messages about its advanced models
• It got in through weaknesses in third-party business software, after days of failing to break into Anthropic directly
• Anthropic says no customer prompts, Claude responses, source code, or model weights were touched, and it cut off access the same day
• The test was authorized under Anthropic's bug bounty program, but Anthropic says Cathedral didn't disclose all of its activity
• Cathedral is valued at $1.4B with backing from a16z and Sequoia, and 3 federal agencies already contract with it
• Its co-founders include Luke Farritor, who helped decode the ancient Herculaneum scrolls with AI
@theojaffee: "If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially the Chinese aren't far behind. Aren't far behind? If anything, they're far ahead."
Rachel retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: In less than 12 hours, a group of ex-DOGE cyber researchers were able to penetrate Anthropic’s systems using AI agents — including Slack channels where the most sensitive models are discussed.
This is just weeks after
Anthropic whistleblower Joseph Coxon charged the company w/launching “a hubristic gamble” from a “private company’s Slack.”
Read our story here (gift link):
wapo.st/4smNlsC
I love working on complex projects with friends. I love seeing how talented and competent my friends are. I love the friend who just referenced page 17 on a planning doc she made.
gaslighting myself into doing some basic prepping by just getting things that I would also want while camping
Rachel retweeted
The Y2K bug and the hole in the ozone layer were both serious problems that we chose to fix. It took a lot of work!
