Author name: Mike M.

Dating Roundup #5: Opening Day

Dating / Mike M. / May 28, 2025

Previously: #1, #2, #3, #4.

Since we all know that dating apps are terrible, the wise person seeks to meet prospective dates in other ways, ideally in the physical world.

Alas, this has gotten more difficult. Dating apps and shifting norms mean it is considered less appropriate, and riskier, to approach strangers, especially with romantic intent, or to even ask people you know out on a date, which has a fat tail of life changing positive consequences.

People especially men are increasingly more afraid of rejection and other negative consequences, including a potential long tail of large negative consequences. Also people’s skills at doing this aren’t developing, which both decreases chances of success and increases risk. So a lot of this edition is about tackling those basic questions, especially risk, rejection and fear.

There’s also the question of how to be more hot and know roughly how hot you are, and what other traits also help your chances. And there’s the question of selection. You want to go after the targets worth going after, especially good particular matches.

Not all approaches and opens are wanted, which is fine given the risk versus reward. Also it’s worth noting that this is actually a remarkably small amount of not being attracted to the approacher?

Alexander: I have updated this chart on the old article, because it was confusing some people.

As stated in the article, these responses were not mutually exclusive. 50% of women did not say that they didn’t want to be approached exclusively because a man was unattractive. Only 16% of the women who said they experienced an unwanted approach cited unattractiveness exclusively.

This was also not the full female sample – 34% of women did not have an unwanted approach experience at all.

I have added an UpSet plot to the article if you want to visualise the sets of responses. But what it basically boils down to is that 84% of women who had an unwanted approach experience cited something aside from a mere lack of attraction.

Remember, these are exclusively unwanted approaches.

Presumably, in the wanted approaches, the women was indeed attracted.

This still leaves the ‘there were other problems but you were sufficiently attractive that I disregarded them’ problem. Not getting any bonus points is already enough to make things tricky, you’ll need otherwise stronger circumstances. It does seem clear that men are far too worried about being insufficiently attractive to do approaches.

Big B (19.5m views): I hate when yall applaud men for doing the bare minimum.

Honey Badger Radio (20m views): Genuine question. What is the ‘bare minimum’ for women?

Punished Rose: 6’5”, blue eyes, still has all his hair, good job in position of power with many underlings, ubers me everywhere, buys me diamonds, kind to animals, wants 3-4 children, good relationship with mother, spontaneous and romantic, PhD with no corrections, homeowner.

[Here’s what you get in return from her, men!]

Aella: I think it’s less how exactly men have their stat points distributed, and more how many total stat points there are. Women will often tolerate dump stats if there’s enough perks to balance out other areas.

You have to notice the perks for them to count, which is tough on dating apps if the dump stat is too visible, but mostly yeah, and I think it’s true for everyone. Each person will usually have some particular actual dealbreaker-level requirements or at least very expensive places to miss, plus some things really do override everything else, but mostly everything is trade-offs.

Amit Kumar: Smile at cute strangers and shouted upon 😂

Blaine Anderson: I surveyed >13,000 single women last year and exactly 95% said they wish they were approached more often IRL by men.

If women *shoutwhen you approach, you’re doing something wrong ❤️

Poll of my friend Ben Daly’s Instagram following, which is virtually all single 18-34 yr old women in the U.S. and U.K.

For anyone trying to learn, I teach a program called Approach Academy (~$100).

I have no idea if Approach Academy is any good, and doubtless there are lots of free resources out there too. Either way, it’s an important skill to have, and if you are single, don’t want to be single and don’t have the skill it’s worth learning.

If you’re literally not trying at all, that’s definitely not going to work. Alas, from what I can tell Alexander is correct here, in that even the very spaces where the You Had One Job was ‘actually approach women’ are increasingly coming out firmly against the one thing that ever works, and moving from an agentic narrative where you can make it work to an anti-agentic one where you shouldn’t try.

Alexander: Of everything I have ever posted, nothing has received more pushback from the manosphere than pointing out that half of young men have not asked a woman on a date in the past year, and a quarter have never asked a woman on a date ever.

The “male loneliness crisis” is largely self-imposed.

That you must approach women and ask them on a date, assuming you do not want to be perpetually single, would be the most obvious and basic advice you would have been given on early pickup artistry or relationship advice forums.

When I write of the relationship advice becoming increasingly negative, this is what I mean. Instead of ascribing agency to men and giving them the most obvious and “actionable advice” (“you need to talk to women”), the entire space is littered with narrative excuses for why men cannot!

“But what about MeToo?”

“Women do not want to be approached.”

“Women only want a ‘Chad’ type.”

“Women are not good enough to approach.”

“It is not men’s fault—the entire fabric of society needs to change to make it easy for men to approach.”

Anti-agentic narratives. Excuses. None of these are “actionable advice.” No one telling you these things is giving you a “solution.” They are just complaining and want to vent their victimhood.

Occasionally the feedback I receive is, “You describe things well, but provide no advice.”

Probably true! I do not really make self-help content. Yet I do regularly tell you all the very basic things that work:

You need to talk to women.

You need exciting, social hobbies that put you in contact with women and that women like.

You need to rid yourself of antisocial vices, hobbies, and habits.

You need to hit the gym and lose weight.

You need to fix your physical appearance.

You are all free to work the details of these things out however you please, but these are the basics that cover how you meet women and if you pass the initial bar of attraction. They are obvious and do not require you to know any hidden secrets or subscribe to any fringe ideological beliefs.

The manosphere overall, as well as individual subcultures within it like the Red Pill, have shifted from agentic messaging to anti-agentic messaging over time.

It used to be, “It’s really easy to put yourself in the top 10% of men.” Now you are much more likely to see lamentations that women only want the top 10% – and they are so unreasonable and unfair for that!

Narratives used to be primarily individualistic and agentic: you can self-improve and fundamentally change. You can get the results you want in life.

Now the narratives are collectivist and social: society is responsible for men’s romantic outcomes. They copy the language and paradigms of left-wing social justice movements. Men are victims – men are not at fault nor responsible for their own life trajectories. The only solution is a massive change to the culture, laws, and society at large.

Matthew Yglesias: We need industrial policy for asking girls out.

Do today’s young men know about negging? Peacocking? Do we need a Game Czar to address this crisis?

Matthew Yglesias: If you ask a bunch of girls out, some of them will go out with you, whereas if you don’t, none of them will.

As in, in order to open, you need to be there at all, and that’s the 80% for showing up.

Nick Gray: his is a message for single men that are tired of online dating

I made a post 6 months ago about what I should text a woman that I was going on a date with

The date was great. In fact we have spent almost every day since then together

Now she’s my girlfriend

Guys if you’re frustrated with online dating I have some advice

Delete your dating apps and start going out every single day

You need to the gym, go to the grocery store, go work from cafes

You need to try a new group fitness class every other day, go to yoga and pilates, and join meetups for things you’re interested in

Be someone who is out and about

Talk to strangers, make friendly conversation, add value, and don’t be sketchy

[continues but you can guess the rest, the central idea is ‘irl surface area.’]

Yet, despite knowing that fortune favors the bold, many continue not to ever try.

Julian: Today my dad asked me if I ever approach beautiful women on the street to ask them out. I told him that I’ve literally never done that, and I saw true sorrow in his eyes.

“You see dad there’s this thing called hinge, it’s a lot easier really, it’s not as scary.” 😢

Having a tweet go viral is actually almost never good. now nearly 2 million people know I am scared of talking to women.

Twitter when I have a cool idea about AI safety to share: 😴💤🛌🥱

Twitter when my dad implies I have no rizz: 👀‼️🚨

Implies? Flat out tells you. Or you flat out telling him. Do better.

Indeed, we seem to keep hearing stories like this reasonably often? It’s not this easy, but also it can be a lot easier than people think.

Val: How do people get girlfriends? I’m being serious.

Critter: A college friend of mine was single his whole life. He was getting depressed and asked for my advice. I told him to ask out 20 people on casual dates. He asked two; the second one became his girlfriend. It’s that simple.

“But no, I want to swipe from the bathroom and have a series of convoluted online conversations that go nowhere.” Okay, do that then. Enjoy.

My friend was average-looking, 5 feet 8 inches tall, and deaf, but keep enjoying your fantasy that you have it hard.

Nobody: Got a girlfriend once because I accidentally smiled and waved at her, thinking she was someone I knew.

Konrad Curze: I literally asked a coworker on a date once because I heard her talking about wanting to see a movie and not having a ride to the theater, so I just asked her if she wanted to go a bit before her shift ended. We’re not together anymore, but it really is that easy—just ask someone in person.

liberforce: I once talked to a complete stranger at the train station. She was a tourist in her first week in my country. After losing sight of each other, one year later we got married. We have been married for the past 10 years and have a 7-year-old son. Be polite. Be confident. Try.

Critter: “What is a low-key date?”

It’s a date that’s a small investment and easy to say yes to. Lunch this weekend. Studying together in the library. Getting coffee. Going to a local event.

Think of something you might say yes to if a friend asked, even if you… Do I ask friends/acquaintances?

Be careful; asking someone out can possibly damage your network of friends, employee relations, etc. I wouldn’t ask 20 coworkers out; you will get a reputation.

Only ask friends or coworkers if you have some confidence it’s a yes.

Asking strangers is cost-free, but we’re busy.

“Then who do I ask?”

I’ve gone on dates with waitresses (ask after their shift), Starbucks employees, and girls on the subway. If you’re attracted to someone, be cool and direct, and just ask.

“What do I say?”

Ask as if you were asking someone for the time or where the nearest gas station is.

“Hey, I think you’re really beautiful. Can I buy you lunch/coffee sometime this weekend?”

It’s *betterto chat them up first, but if you can’t, just ask.

“How do I avoid seeming creepy/awkward?”

This isn’t risk-free. Some may think you’re a creep, others will be flattered. Outcomes are hard to control; intent is what matters.

Try not to get too wound up; creepiness is a result of intensity. Timing matters, but just relax and ask.

Many such cases. When single, and it’s safe and appropriate, always be flirting.

Annie: this is why as a prolific slut I just flirt with any person up to my standards and escalate until I receive any sort of pushback.

That might actually be correct, if you’re good at noticing subtle pushback, at least within the realm of the deniable and until they clearly know you’re flirting. If they can’t tell you’re flirting, then you kind of aren’t flirting yet, so you’re probably fine to escalate a bit, repeat until they notice.

Online makes it even trickier, what even is flirting? It turns out Lolita’s likes here were on Instagram, where I am led to believe this is indeed how this works, whereas on Twitter the odds this is what is happening are lower – but yeah, DM her anyway if you’re interested.

The Catholic Engineer: Attention boys. This is how girls shoot their shot on Twitter. Take note.

Lolita: I just wanna let everyone know (since apparently this is everyone’s business now🤣) that he indeed texted me [on Instagram], he isn’t as [stupid] as men on twitter, thank God. ☝🏻😌

Divia: Tag yourself I’m the “I’m not sure how old you are” married person who follows and likes a few posts just because.

Linch: I feel someone calling themselves “Lolita” may have a non-standard opinion of good dating strategies, or norms.

Divida: lol yes ty I missed that part.

Ian Hines: I’m the guy who has apparently flirted with dozens of women without realizing it.

Andrew Rettek: By this standard a lot of unavailable women are flirting with me on Twitter.

Normie MacDonald: Something I routinely find myself telling people in regards to dating in relationships is that they have no reason to be creating these arbitrary meaningless ego saving rules for themselves. Ok congratulations you don’t “text first” you saved your imaginary dignity while the other girl gets an engagement ring

The dance matters. Ideally you want to do the minimum required to get an escalation in response, where that escalation will filter for further interest and skill. I would certainly try to do that first. But if it doesn’t work, and this wasn’t a marginal situation? Time to escalate anyway.

The deniability is not only key to the system working and enabling you to make moves you wouldn’t otherwise be able to make. It’s also fun, at least for many women.

Also, it’s essential. As in, you try to think of a counterexample, and you fail:

Emmett Shear: What is (flirting minus plausible deniability)?

Misha: “Hey there handsome.” Is flirtatious and undeniable.

As confirmed by Claude, there’s still plenty of plausible deniability there, and full uncertainty on how far you intend to go with it. Ambiguity and plausible deniability between ‘harmless fun’ flirting versus ‘actually going somewhere’ flirting is a large part of the deniability, and also the core mechanism.

Periodically we rediscover the classic tricks, which is half of what TikTok is good for. In this case, something called ‘sticky eyes,’ where you make eye contact until they make eye contact back, then act like you’re caught and look away. Then look at them, and this time when they match don’t look away, and often they’ll walk right to you.

I do not believe any of this below is how any of this worked in literal detail, but…

WoolyAI: That stupid fucking hat.

This is doing the rounds and, like all gender and feminist discourse, it’s fundamentally dishonest. You can read two dozen other restacks laying out the limitations of this article, all ignoring that she’s a freelance writer, ie poor, and she’s writing for clicks; hate the game, not the player.

I still cannot get over that stupid fucking hat. It worked.

Look, that hat worked. That stupid fucking hat got Mystery laid more than I’ve been laid in my entire life unless 90% of what was written in “The Game” is a lie. Women like the hat. Women slept with him over the hat. And we can’t be honest about it.

It worked on me. It worked on all of us. 20 effing years later that stupid hat is still the #1 image of PUAs and Mystery is still the most famous of them, not because of anything he did, but just because if you put that stupid fucking hat in a thumbnail, people will click on it because we can’t not pay attention to that stupid fucking hat.

That stupid fucking hat worked and I wouldn’t wear it and you wouldn’t wear it but it brought him more sex and fame than anyone reading this has ever got and we can’t be honest about it and that’s why the discourse never goes anywhere.

If you actually read the book, Mystery is an insanely broken individual but he lived a literal rockstar lifestyle because he was willing to wear that stupid fucking hat and I kinda envy him for it. Just the shameless “I want women, women want the hat, therefore I will wear the hat.”

But the discourse feels stuck because women are ashamed they like the stupid fucking hat and men would be ashamed to wear the stupid fucking hat so we all lie about it so we don’t have to live with the shame of who we are.

(Pictured: That fucking hat.)

The stupid fucking hat was successful for Mystery in particular, as it played into the rest of what he was doing, leading interactions down predictable paths he trained for in various ways, and that he figured out how to steer in the ways he wanted.

But also, yes, it was his willingness to wear the stupid fucking hat, if that’s what it took to make all that work. That doesn’t mean you should go out and wear your own literal stupid fucking hat, but… be willing, as needed, to wear the metaphorical stupid fucking hat. If that’s what it takes.

Cosmic Cowgirl: The only dating strategy worth your time is to be as weird as humanly possible and see who rocks with it

The best part abt this tweet is seeing all the people responding that the way they met their partners/spouses is by being weird ❤️ there is hope for us weirdos yet!

Not quite. You should be exactly as weird as you are. Being intentionally extra weird would backfire. But yes, you mostly want to avoid hiding your weird once you are finished ‘getting reps.’

Should you put your small painted war figurines in your profile? One woman says no but many men say yes.

Shoshana Weissmann: Hey men, please don’t put the small war figurines you’ve painted in your Hinge profiles. This does not help.

We will date you sometimes despite this, but…

Yes, they were well-painted. Please stop asking.

Jarvis: It can’t hurt.

Shoshana: No, Jarvis.

If you’re looking to maximize total opportunities, you definitely don’t put things like painted war figurines in your photo.

However they offer positive selection to the extent you consider the relevant selection positive, so it depends, and a balance must be struck. I would only include them if I really, really cared about war figurines.

Teach the debate: Andrew Rettek versus Razib Khan on letting your interest flags fly. Should you worry about most of the attractive women losing interest if you talk about space exploration, abstruse philosophy and existential risk? Only to the extent you’d be interested in them despite knowing they react that way. So gain, ideally, once you’ve got your reps in, no.

As usual, if you’re still on the steep part of the dating learning curve, one must first ‘get the reps’ before it wise to overly narrow one’s focus.

You can also make other life choices to increase your chances. If you are a furry, you might do well to go into nuclear engineering, if that otherwise interests you? At some point the doom loop cannot be stopped, might as well go with it.

Eneasz Brodski suggests to straight men: Look for a woman who likes men. As in, a woman who says outright that by default men are good and cool people to be around. He says this is rare, and thus not all that actionable. I think it’s not that rare.

I would say that the specific positive version could be hard to act on, but the generalized negative version seems like fine advice across the board and highly actionable. If someone actively dislikes people in your key reference classes, whichever reference classes those might be, then probably don’t date them. The more of your reference classes they actively like by default, the better.

The same principles are true for women seeking men, and the same is true for physical goals. You should care relatively little about general appeal, and care more about appeal to those you find appealing as long term partners.

Antunes: Dear women, We don’t want you with muscles. We want you slim, delicate and cute. Take notes.

The rich: Dear women, muscles are hot, and there are many fit gym rats who would love a workout partner. Appealing to the average man is a bad idea; better to appeal to a small group that is very interested in you (with favorable gender ratios).

Daniel: I still think he’s wrong about the average man not wanting a fit woman.

In particular, the men like Antues who actively mock anyone who disagrees on this? Turning them off actively is not a bug. It’s a feature.

Isabel: Question for women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, etc: what are women in their twenties not considering that they should be considering?

Mason: Waste zero time on men who don’t want the same things you want, you will not look back fondly on relationships built on the hope that someone else would change.

The original thread has much other advice, also of the standard variety. I would modify Mason’s note slightly, do not waste time on the chance someone else will change what they want. But of course there are other ways for time to be well spent.

On the flip side:

Girl explains why she does not like ‘extreme gym guy’ bodies, she wants the mechanic with real muscles in natural settings.

Freia: Every woman i talk to is like nooo too much muscle is weird and they’re imagining competition season mr. olympia in their head or something but every guy i talk to is like yeah i started lifting and all of a sudden women found me 10 times funnier.

This is an easy one.

Up to a point more muscle is good.
Too much ‘unnatural’ or ‘gym style’ muscle is weird.
If you never do muscle poses you do not have too much such muscle.
If you are musclephotomaxing, you may have too much muscle for other purposes.

Choose your fighter.

Rachel Lapides: The undergrad creative writing class I’m teaching has 19 girls and 1 boy.

I think a lot of you in the replies would benefit from a class or two.

Zina Sarif: Who will tell them?

Vers La Lune: This needs to be said. Reading is not an attractive hobby to women. Back in 2018ish I A/B tested it and hid my books and actively lied about not reading a book since college and it worked 10x better than honesty.

It’s attractive hobby “in theory” but most people don’t read shit anyway, maybe they read Literotica fairy smut or something but you’ll never see panties drier than if you reference David Foster Wallace or some history book or something.

The rest of that chart is fine. Knowing languages and instruments are absolutely the most attractive to them.

Robin Hanson: Would this result hold up in a larger randomized trial?

I think Vers is right about this. Reading is attractive in theory.

In practice, it is not unattractive. But that is a different thing. You need to have a hook that is attractive in practice.

Reading can and does help with that. Reading leads to knowledge and skills and being interesting, which are themselves attractive. You want to be readmaxing. But that, too, is a different thing.

When 98.2% of women said reading was ‘attractive’ in a binary choice, that was answering the wrong question. Associating with reading simply is not exciting. It does not offer a joint experience or a good time. It won’t work.

Whereas the other top activities represent skills and demonstrations of value and joint activities. So they’re great for this.

The flip side are the actively unattractive hobbies. Reading is not unattractive, it will almost never actively cost you points, but Magic, anime and crypto definitely will be highly unattractive and turn off a large percentage of women, if you force them to deal with those things front and center. If you don’t center them, my guess is they are like reading, they don’t end up counting much for or against you then.

Of course, there will be some women that does find almost any hobby attractive, and the positive selection as noted above is palpable. But you only get so many such filters, so choose carefully which ones you deploy. It’s not strictly limit one, but it’s close.

JD Vance gave up Magic: the Gathering because girls weren’t into it. I notice how much I dislike that reaction, but I understand it. It’s a real cost, so how much was he into casting a paper version of Yawgmoth’s Bargain, when he could instead get the same experience going to Yale Law School?

Liv Boeree points out that one place women can look for a good man is in their friend group, where you might already have some known-to-be-good men in your friend zone. And she can say that, because that this is how she met Igor. So she advises to make sure to take a second look at those guys at some point.

I’d add to that ‘because only you can make that move, they mostly can’t.’

We alas lack a good mechanism whereby people can attempt to be ‘unfriendzoned,’ or indicate their interest in being unfriendzoned, without risking destroying the friendship. There are obvious possible coordination mechanisms (e.g. to ensure that only reciprocal interest is revealed) but no way to get others to implement them. The rationalists have tried to fix this at least once, but I think that faded away even there.

Here’s a very different strategy, from Bryan Caplan, that we have discussed in prior episodes. Why would you, a man, even look for her, a woman, in America? Your hand in marriage is a green card easily worth six figures and you’re going to waste that on someone who already lives here? When you could instead be (in relative terms) instantly super high status to boot?

His answer is adverse selection. You have to worry the woman does not actually like you. He does not discuss strategies to minimize this risk, such as avoiding services for women actively seeking such arrangements.

You want to seek the women who are not actively seeking for you to seek them. Tricky.

The other obvious problems are logistics and cultural compatibility. And also, as one commenter warns, how you look to her from afar might not be a good prediction of how you look to her once she arrives.

Mason: I don’t have a big problem with passport brokers, to be honest.

I get the sense that most of them are just average men who want to settle down after some bad luck in love and are very excited, and naive, about encountering a pool of young women who want to do that quickly.

I’d guess that about 90 percent of the time there isn’t anything overtly political or misogynistic about it, even if there are a number of reasons it may not be a good idea.

The perhaps 10 percent who see themselves as actively snubbing Western women who are too damaged to love are, yes, distasteful.

But so are the largely female onlookers who seem, more than anything, angry at the idea of an average-looking, average-earning man getting someone “out of his league.”

If there’s something disturbingly transactional about dating women from poorer countries online, there’s an equally economic paradigm implicit in the idea that two people can’t truly love each other unless they’re matched on social class and relative status.

I think the important problems are entirely practical issues of logistics, cultural distance and adverse selection. Those are big problems, and reason most people should choose different strategies.

‘Could’ backfire massively and ruin your life or career is not ‘could plausibly’ or ‘is likely to’ but if you don’t know that, it will have the same impact on your decisions.

Air Katakana: We need to talk about the real reason no one is getting married: western society has gone so woke that a man showing any interest in a woman in any situation could lead to his career and life being ruined. The only place you can even feasibly meet someone now is via dating apps.

Harvey Michael Pratt: Like seriously who are these people who don’t know how to express romantic interest without seeming threatening I’ve heard this one over and over and just don’t get it.

Misha: It’s not just about seeming threatening, I think it’s about the distribution of outcomes feeling like it’s net negative.

Imagine in the past it was something like

Every time you hit on someone, roll a d20. On a 1, she slaps you. On a 16 or higher, you get a date.

Now, it’s more like

On a 1 you get fired, on a 2-5 you get mocked or have a really awkward time, on a 20 you get a date.

Now obviously, all these numbers are fake and the real numbers are probably something else.

But on a visceral level it’s hard to believe in the real numbers, and our expectation of the risk/reward of interacting in certain ways is influenced by our social environments.

I think this is particularly pernicious for guys who haven’t been in relationships because they have no direct experience of positive outcomes, they only have negative outcomes and stories you see about other people’s negative outcomes are more viral.

Even if we round down the risk of getting canceled/mocked/fired to zero (which I think is probably correct) you can still expect to be rejected a ton of times before you get a relationship, which is extremely discouraging.

I do think part of the problem is overromanticizing of the past though. You’re much more likely for various reasons to hear about all the relationships that came before instead of the people who died alone. I don’t know if it was ever actually easy to get married.

My understanding is that sufficiently far in the past, asking was actually deadly. You risked violence, including deadly violence, or exile. You indeed had to be very careful.

Then there was a period where you were much more free to do whatever you wanted. You really could view the downside mostly as ‘you get slapped,’ which is fine even if the odds are substantially worse than above.

Now things have swung back somewhat. The tail risk is small but it’s there. And the reports are among the sufficiently young that many think trying to date people you actually know Just Isn’t Done, except of course when it is anyway.

I also presume, given other conditions, that we are now trending back down on the risks-other-than-rejection of asking front.

Partly of course it is a skill issue.

The rejection part sucks, too, of course. But you can try to have it suck less?

One of the most important dating skills is learning to handle and not fear rejection.

Rudy Julliani: This is worse than a gunshot to the head.

Allie: This type of rejection is a super normal part of dating and was delivered about as politely as it could’ve been.

Zoomers are so emotionally strung out that this kind of thing feels catastrophic when it should just be “aww darn, I had high hopes for that one.”

Shoshana: dude fuck what I’d give for men to be this adult and straightforward!

Allie: Half the time people just ghost these days!

The replies are full of ‘at least she was honest and did not ghost you.’

So first of all, wow those are low standards.
We don’t actually know she was honest, only that you can safely move on.
I do totally see how ‘you did nothing wrong’ can be worse than a ‘you suck.’
But seriously, you need to be able to take this one in stride. One date.

Being unusually averse to rejection, as Robin Hanson reports here, really sucks and is something one should work to change, as it is highly destructive of opportunity, and the aversion mostly lacks grounding in or correlation to any consequences beyond the pain of the rejection.

Robin Hanson: I’m unusually averse to rejection. Some see that as irrational; I should get over. I guess as they don’t think it makes sense to have preferences directly over such a complex thing; prefs should be on simpler outcomes. But how do I tell which outcomes are okay to matter?

Zvi: It’s not simple, its terminal outcomes (final goods) versus signals for how things are going (learning feedback systems and intermediate goods and correlations with ancestral Env. dangers, etc)?

You know what actually feels great?

When you ask, and you get turned down, and you realize you played correctly and that there’s no actual price to getting a no except that you can’t directly try again.

Nothing was lost, since they weren’t into you anyway. Indeed you got valuable experience and information, and you helped conquer your fears and build good habits.

That includes looking back afterwards. Indeed, I’m actively happy, looking back, with the shots I did take, that missed, as opposed to the 100% of shots that I didn’t take. Many of those, I do regret.

Such a strange question to have to even ask, when you think about it: Is having to reject others even worse? Some people actually say it is?

It’s not the common sentiment, but it’s there.

Kali Karmilla: The most depressing part of dating apps isn’t even getting rejected. It’s having to reject so many people. They put themselves out there, asking for someone to care for them, and you have to be like, “Not my type” a hundred times in a row. Makes me feel evil, honestly.

I don’t think the human mind was built to realize that so many people are lonely at one time, and it certainly wasn’t built to see that and react with indifference (swipe left, and they stop existing). I do not know, man; it’s just sad. I wish I were frozen in ice like a cartoon caveman.

Me: It feels like dating apps are asking me to dehumanize other people.

This person: It’s okay because people are just like commodities, and the apps are just digital marketplaces. 👍

Brother, I never want to be like you in my life.

If you reject someone in the swiping stage, and you feel evil about it, don’t. It’s unfortunate that you need to be doing this rather than the algorithm handling it, but it’s no different than being at the club with 100 other people and ignoring most of them. You’re being fooled by having the choices be one at a time and highlighted.

Of course so many people are lonely at one time. There are so many people.

If you reject someone after a match, then that is like actually rejecting them, so yes treat them like a real person with actual feelings, but everyone involved signed up for this, and stringing things along when you don’t want to be there or keep talking to them is not better. If you can’t get there with someone, tell them that, and send them home.

Anything else is cruel, not kind.

Tracing Woods: Worse than this, I think, is the occasional decision not to immediately reject someone you should have, playing with their heart a bit on the way to rejection. People expose their hearts incredibly quickly while dating, and it’s easy to stumble into hurting someone.

My worst moments when dating, looking back, were when I went on a first date with someone who was clearly desperate for an affection I could not honestly provide. Everyone wants to be loved, but nobody wants to be pity-dated.

Of all the lessons of The Bachelor, this might be the biggest one, to not string people along, you see this on various similar shows. The candidates who are rejected early mostly shrug. Some are hit hard, but not that hard. The farther along they go, the worse it gets, also much time is wasted.

Same goes in real life. If you know you must reject, mostly the sooner and clearer the better, with the least interaction beforehand. It will suck less, for both of you.

I do admit that sometimes the person you reject does not make it easy on you, including those who don’t accept it.

Holly Elmore: Having people not accept the rejection feels like having to strangle them or walking away and letting them bleed out. It’s way more intense than any one instance of being swiped left on or hearing “no”.

Yes, of course having to tell people no sucks. Having to dump someone sucks a lot.

But it’s still way better than getting dumped when you didn’t want to be.

Allie: A lot of the best things in life fall into the “scary but worth it” category

– Leaving home

– Falling in love

– Driving

– Buying a house

– Marriage

– Children

– Travel

We used to focus on the “worth it” aspect, now we hyper focus on the “scary” and we’re paralyzed by the fear

Shoshana Weissman: Damn straight. Lotta people paralyzed by fear of doing normal good things that all involve some risk but lots of payoff.

Yep. Normal good things are scary. You have to do them anyway.

The other stuff matters, but hey, it couldn’t hurt.

Here is a chart of how men and women said they viewed various beauty strategies. Full article here.

Alexander: Revisiting the original list, we also see very strong agreement between men and women – both men and women know that these things aren’t actually attractive to men!

It turns out that what is attractive essentially falls into two categories: “don’t be fat” and “basic grooming.”

As a woman you need to not be overweight, work out, shave, and have nice teeth – all of which is just as true for men.

I mostly believe this list. My guess is ‘dye your hair blonde’ is underrated, because they are asking in a context where you know and are thinking about the fact that the color is fake and that you’re ‘being fooled,’ which is not real world conditions, and I predict what is likely a smaller similar miscalibration for breast implants.

Women were highly unsuccessful in attempting to pick photos to look hotter.

Aella: the actual finding (after paranoid checking against dumb mistakes): I had women submit an “average” photo of themselves, and a photo of them “at their best,” total n=102.

Men rated the “at their best” photos about 0.3/10 points hotter than the “average” photos. But there was pretty decent variance.

About a third of women had their “hotter” photos rated either equal to or worse than their “average” photo.

Women were also highly unsuccessful at knowing how hot men would think they are.

Here is the full post. One way to make people less biased is to ask them how they compare to others of the same gender, another is to ask people who is in their league.

The more unattractive you were, the more ‘delusional’ you were, as in your estimate was too high by a higher margin. I don’t buy Aella’s explanation for this, though, because I don’t think you need it – this result is kind of mathematically inevitable, once you accept everyone is overestimating.

And wow, loss aversion is a thing here:

My followers (incomes $30k-$300k) would, on average, pay $12,517 (median $3k) to gain 1 point of attractiveness.

They would pay on average $94,083 (median $10k) to avoid losing 1 point of attractiveness. (n=462)

Counter to my prediction, there was basically no correlation between how hot someone rated themselves as, and the amount they would pay to gain a point or avoid losing a point.

And also, people say they’d pay more to be 6/10 than 10/10, I presume they’re confused.

Only paying $12k for a permanent extra point of attractiveness, were it for sale, is insane. Go into debt if you have to, as they say. You’ll get it back plus extra purely in higher earnings from lookism on the job. If you can do it multiple times, keep hitting that button (and if they let you go above 10, do that and then go to Hollywood!).

At $94k the trade stops being obvious for those on the lower end of the income spectrum, but if you can afford it this still seems like quite the steal, as many times as they’ll sell it to you.

(I’d be a little scared to know what happens beyond 10, but you bet that if it was for sale I would find out.)

Aella runs the ‘which AI faces are hot according to the opposite gender’ test with male faces, and reports the results. Male average ratings for AI-generated female faces clustered around 5.5 then fell off sharply with a slightly longer left than right tail, whereas female ratings of male AI faces averaged about 4.7 and had a longer right tail that died suddenly.

The patterns as you go from 1 up to 9 on the normalized hotness scale are very clear, especially at the top, where there is clearly one top look. Can you pull it off?

Emmett Shear: Percentage reporting yes on experiencing “god mode”, according to my poll.

SF: women 50%, men 28%

NYC: women 43%, men 67%

Other: women 56%, men 37%

It turns out SF is just about normal for women in this metric and varies relatively little, the main story is SF sucks for men lol.

The main story of San Francisco is that it is a rough place all around, with only 39% god mode, versus 46% for those in neither NYC nor SF. The men are 9% less likely to report ‘god mode’ and the women are 6% less likely, which is within the margin of error here. Whereas New York has 55% god mode, which is much better than 46%, and a major slant towards men.

Note that this is a stable equilibrium, because in their system one partner must pay but not both for a match to occur:

Jake Kozloski (Keeper): Single women are typically surprised to learn that 85% of our paying matchmaking clients are men. They often assume men aren’t interested in commitment.

Cody Zervas (Keeper): Men assume the platform is mostly men and women assume it’s mostly women. Both are surprised to hear we have the other.

Jake Kozloski: Yes on the flip side our total pool is 80% women which tends to surprise men who are used to the terrible ratios on dating apps.

It makes sense that men are more likely to pay for such a service, knowing that women won’t pay for it, and also that they have more ability to pay and can feel less bad about doing so. They have to pay.

It then makes sense that women are more likely to be willing to sign up for free, since many men already paid. And indeed, you could argue that they’re better off not paying. Who wants to match with the guys who signed up for Keeper… for free?

Thus the ultimate version of the guy picking up the check.

And as a result, the women greatly outnumber the men, because it’s a lot more attractive to sign up for free. Which in turn makes it more attractive for men to pay.

Some very bad pickup lines.

Another swing and a miss.

A bold move.

Finally a version you can trust.

Discussion about this post

Dating Roundup #5: Opening Day Read More »

After Mr. Deepfakes shut down forever, one creator could face a $450K fine

AI, australia, deepfake porn, Deepfakes, defamation, nudify apps, Policy, take it down act / Mike M. / May 27, 2025

“Get an arrest warrant if you think you are right,” Rotondo reportedly told officials prior to the sanctions hearing, the Brisbane Times reported.

Later, in front of the judge, he unsuccessfully argued that he didn’t intend to out his victims by email. He claimed he didn’t know the court order was attached to the email or that it contained his victims’ names, The Guardian reported.

“The email I received had more than 80 pages of writing,” Rotondo said. “I didn’t read all the pages. I just forwarded the email.”

Eventually, Rotondo gave police his passwords to delete the images posted on Mr. Deepfakes. But the judge noted that Rotondo appeared resistant to removing deepfakes and continued creating an unknown number of deepfakes—which may include further charges from Queensland police that he possibly targeted “a number” of facilities and businesses on the day he allegedly hit the high school. He perhaps was motivated to leave the images online, as toxic Mr. Deepfakes uploaders could earn as much as $1,500 for convincing non-consensual deepfakes of public figures.

“The history of the matter suggests that, were he still at liberty and perhaps in another country, he would not have been so accommodating,” Derrington said.

Australia seeks to end “incalculable devastation”

Governments globally are grappling with a stark rise in non-consensual deepfake porn, with an ever-widening lens that targets not just the people who create and share images or the sites that host and sell them, but also the social media platforms that don’t catch and delete the harmful content. Earlier this month, the US passed a law threatening heavy fines and prison time for platforms that don’t remove the images when they’re reported. Under that law, the Take It Down Act, Wired reported that platforms risk roughly $50,000 in penalties per violation if deepfakes aren’t removed within 48 hours of receiving a report.

In Australia, Inman Grant wants to find a way to end the “lingering and incalculable devastation” that she said predominantly female victims must endure because it’s “shockingly” free and easy to use “thousands of open-source AI apps” to make deepfake porn.

Because Rotondo seems to represent the kind of unapologetic repeat deepfaker who digs his heels in to defend his AI-generated fake sex images, Inman Grant asked for the maximum penalties on Monday. The eSafety commission’s spokesperson told The Guardian that the request “reflected the seriousness of the breaches” and “the significant impacts on the women targeted.”

“The penalty will deter others from engaging in such harmful conduct,” the spokesperson said.

After Mr. Deepfakes shut down forever, one creator could face a $450K fine Read More »

F1 in Monaco: No one has ever gone faster than that

Cars, F1, Formula 1, monaco, racing / Mike M. / May 27, 2025

The principality of Monaco is perhaps the least suitable place on the Formula 1 calendar to hold a Grand Prix. A pirate cove turned tax haven nestled between France and Italy at the foot of the Alps-Maritimes, it has also been home to Grand Prix racing since 1929, predating the actual Formula 1 world championship by two decades. The track is short, tight, and perhaps best described as riding a bicycle around your living room. It doesn’t even race well, for the barrier-lined streets are too narrow for the too-big, too-heavy cars of the 21st century. And yet, it’s F1’s crown jewel.

Despite the location’s many drawbacks, there’s something magical about racing in Monaco that almost defies explanation. The real magic happens on Saturday, when the drivers compete against each other to set the fastest lap. With overtaking as difficult as it is here, qualifying is everything, determining the order everyone lines up in, and more than likely, finishes.

Coverage of the Monaco Grand Prix is now filmed in vivid 4k, and it has never looked better. I’m a real fan of the static top-down camera that’s like a real-time Apple TV screensaver.

Nico Hulkenberg of Germany drives the (27) Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber C45 Ferrari during the Formula 1 TAG Heuer Gran Premio di Monaco 2025 at Circuit de Monaco in Monaco on May 25, 2025. — The cars need special steering racks to be able to negotiate what’s now called the Fairmont hairpin. Credit: Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Although native-Monegasque Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc tried to temper expectations for the weekend, the Ferraris were in a good place in Monaco. With no fast corners, the team could run the car low to the ground without risking a penalty, and this year’s car is very good at low-speed corners, of which Monaco has plenty.

A 10th of a second separated comfortably being in Q2 from being relegated to the last couple of rows in the grid, and a very long Sunday. Mercedes’ new teenage protegé, Kimi Antonelli, failed to progress from Q1, spinning in the swimming pool chicane. Unlike Michael Schumacher in 2006, Antonelli didn’t do it on purpose, but he did bring out a red flag. His teammate George Russell similarly brought a halt to Q2 when he coasted a third of the way around the circuit before coming to a stop in the middle of the tunnel, requiring marshals to push him all the way down to turn 10.

F1 in Monaco: No one has ever gone faster than that Read More »

Feds charge 16 Russians allegedly tied to botnets used in cyberattacks and spying

Biz & IT, botnet, russian hacking, Security, syndication / Mike M. / May 24, 2025

The hacker ecosystem in Russia, more than perhaps anywhere else in the world, has long blurred the lines between cybercrime, state-sponsored cyberwarfare, and espionage. Now an indictment of a group of Russian nationals and the takedown of their sprawling botnet offers the clearest example in years of how a single malware operation allegedly enabled hacking operations as varied as ransomware, wartime cyberattacks in Ukraine, and spying against foreign governments.

The US Department of Justice today announced criminal charges today against 16 individuals law enforcement authorities have linked to a malware operation known as DanaBot, which according to a complaint infected at least 300,000 machines around the world. The DOJ’s announcement of the charges describes the group as “Russia-based,” and names two of the suspects, Aleksandr Stepanov and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, as living in Novosibirsk, Russia. Five other suspects are named in the indictment, while another nine are identified only by their pseudonyms. In addition to those charges, the Justice Department says the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS)—a criminal investigation arm of the Department of Defense—carried out seizures of DanaBot infrastructure around the world, including in the US.

Aside from alleging how DanaBot was used in for-profit criminal hacking, the indictment also makes a rarer claim—it describes how a second variant of the malware it says was used in espionage against military, government, and NGO targets. “Pervasive malware like DanaBot harms hundreds of thousands of victims around the world, including sensitive military, diplomatic, and government entities, and causes many millions of dollars in losses,” US attorney Bill Essayli wrote in a statement.

Since 2018, DanaBot—described in the criminal complaint as “incredibly invasive malware”—has infected millions of computers around the world, initially as a banking trojan designed to steal directly from those PCs’ owners with modular features designed for credit card and cryptocurrency theft. Because its creators allegedly sold it in an “affiliate” model that made it available to other hacker groups for $3,000 to $4,000 a month, however, it was soon used as a tool to install different forms of malware in a broad array of operations, including ransomware. Its targets, too, quickly spread from initial victims in Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Australia to US and Canadian financial institutions, according to an analysis of the operation by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

Feds charge 16 Russians allegedly tied to botnets used in cyberattacks and spying Read More »

Have we finally solved mystery of magnetic moon rocks?

asteroids, astrophysics, core dynamo, geology, magnetism, moon rocks, paleomagnetism, Science, the Moon / Mike M. / May 24, 2025

NASA’s Apollo missions brought back moon rock samples for scientists to study. We’ve learned a great deal over the ensuing decades, but one enduring mystery remains. Many of those lunar samples show signs of exposure to strong magnetic fields comparable to Earth’s, yet the Moon doesn’t have such a field today. So, how did the moon rocks get their magnetism?

There have been many attempts to explain this anomaly. The latest comes from MIT scientists, who argue in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances that a large asteroid impact briefly boosted the Moon’s early weak magnetic field—and that this spike is what is recorded in some lunar samples.

Evidence gleaned from orbiting spacecraft observations, as well as results announced earlier this year from China’s Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 missions, is largely consistent with the existence of at least a weak magnetic field on the early Moon. But where did this field come from? These usually form in planetary bodies as a result of a dynamo, in which molten metals in the core start to convect thanks to slowly dissipating heat. The problem is that the early Moon’s small core had a mantle that wasn’t much cooler than its core, so there would not have been significant convection to produce a sufficiently strong dynamo.

There have been proposed hypotheses as to how the Moon could have developed a core dynamo. For instance, a 2022 analysis suggested that in the first billion years, when the Moon was covered in molten rock, giant rocks formed as the magma cooled and solidified. Denser minerals sank to the core while lighter ones formed a crust.

Over time, the authors argued, a titanium layer crystallized just beneath the surface, and because it was denser than lighter minerals just beneath, that layer eventually broke into small blobs and sank through the mantle (gravitational overturn). The temperature difference between the cooler sinking rocks and the hotter core generated convection, creating intermittently strong magnetic fields—thus explaining why some rocks have that magnetic signature and others don’t.

Or perhaps there is no need for the presence of a dynamo-driven magnetic field at all. For instance, the authors of a 2021 study thought earlier analyses of lunar samples may have been altered during the process. They re-examined samples from the 1972 Apollo 16 mission using CO₂ lasers to heat them, thus avoiding any alteration of the magnetic carriers. They concluded that any magnetic signatures in those samples could be explained by the impact of meteorites or comets hitting the Moon.

Have we finally solved mystery of magnetic moon rocks? Read More »

Musk’s DOGE used Meta’s Llama 2—not Grok—for gov’t slashing, report says

AI, azure ai, department of government efficiency, doge, elon musk, grok, Llama 2, Meta, microsoft, Policy, xAI / Mike M. / May 24, 2025

Why didn’t DOGE use Grok?

It seems that Grok, Musk’s AI model, wasn’t available for DOGE’s task because it was only available as a proprietary model in January. Moving forward, DOGE may rely more frequently on Grok, Wired reported, as Microsoft announced it would start hosting xAI’s Grok 3 models in its Azure AI Foundry this week, The Verge reported, which opens the models up for more uses.

In their letter, lawmakers urged Vought to investigate Musk’s conflicts of interest, while warning of potential data breaches and declaring that AI, as DOGE had used it, was not ready for government.

“Without proper protections, feeding sensitive data into an AI system puts it into the possession of a system’s operator—a massive breach of public and employee trust and an increase in cybersecurity risks surrounding that data,” lawmakers argued. “Generative AI models also frequently make errors and show significant biases—the technology simply is not ready for use in high-risk decision-making without proper vetting, transparency, oversight, and guardrails in place.”

Although Wired’s report seems to confirm that DOGE did not send sensitive data from the “Fork in the Road” emails to an external source, lawmakers want much more vetting of AI systems to deter “the risk of sharing personally identifiable or otherwise sensitive information with the AI model deployers.”

A seeming fear is that Musk may start using his own models more, benefiting from government data his competitors cannot access, while potentially putting that data at risk of a breach. They’re hoping that DOGE will be forced to unplug all its AI systems, but Vought seems more aligned with DOGE, writing in his AI guidance for federal use that “agencies must remove barriers to innovation and provide the best value for the taxpayer.”

“While we support the federal government integrating new, approved AI technologies that can improve efficiency or efficacy, we cannot sacrifice security, privacy, and appropriate use standards when interacting with federal data,” their letter said. “We also cannot condone use of AI systems, often known for hallucinations and bias, in decisions regarding termination of federal employment or federal funding without sufficient transparency and oversight of those models—the risk of losing talent and critical research because of flawed technology or flawed uses of such technology is simply too high.”

Musk’s DOGE used Meta’s Llama 2—not Grok—for gov’t slashing, report says Read More »

Gouach wants you to insert and pluck the cells from its Infinite e-bike battery

batteries, e-bike, e-bike battery, e-bike conversion kit, gouach, Tech / Mike M. / May 24, 2025

“It was really a setback for the company [Gouach] at the time,” Vallette said. “But we knew that the technology itself was good, so we designed our own casing.” Gouach’s casing is now rated IP67, Vallette said, and meets UL 2271 standards.

Gouach’s video demonstrating its battery case’s fire resistance.

Unexpected resistance

There are three avenues for selling the Infinite Battery, as Vallette sees it. One is working with e-bike makers to incorporate Gouach’s tech. Another is targeting e-bike owners and small bike shops who, this far into e-bikes’ history, might be dealing with dead batteries. And then there are folks looking to build their own e-bikes.

The Infinite Battery will be made available in 36 V and 48 V builds, and Gouach’s app promises to help owners connect it to a wide variety of bikes. Actually fitting the battery case onto your bike is a different matter. Some bikes can accommodate the Gouach kit where their current battery sits, while others may end up mounting to a rack, or through creative, but hopefully secure, frame attachments.

One of the biggest compatibility challenges, Vallette said, was finding a way to work with Bosch’s mid-drive motors. The communications between a Bosch motor and battery are encrypted; after “a serious effort,” Gouach’s app and battery should work with them, Vallette said.

Gouach, having raised more than $220,000 on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo from about 500 backers, and $3.5 million in venture funding, is getting close to offering the batteries through its own storefront. Gouach’s roadmap puts them in mass production at the moment, with assorted bugs, certifications, and other matters to clear. EU-based backers should get their kits in June, with the US, and an open online store, to follow, barring whatever happens next in international trade. Vallette said in mid-May that the US’s momentary 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports disrupted their plans, but work was underway.

If nothing else, Gouach’s DIY kit shows that a different way of thinking about e-bike batteries—as assemblages, not huge all-in-one consumables—is possible.

Gouach wants you to insert and pluck the cells from its Infinite e-bike battery Read More »

CDC can no longer help prevent lead poisoning in children, state officials say

applesauce, CDC, health, lead, Robert F. Kennedy / Mike M. / May 23, 2025

Amid the brutal cuts across the federal government under the Trump administration, perhaps one of the most gutting is the loss of experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who respond to lead poisoning in children.

On April 1, the staff of the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was terminated as part of the agency’s reduction in force, according to NPR. The staff included epidemiologists, statisticians, and advisors who specialized in lead exposures and responses.

The cuts were immediately consequential to health officials in Milwaukee, who are currently dealing with a lead exposure crisis in public schools. Six schools have had to close, displacing 1,800 students. In April, the city requested help from the CDC’s lead experts, but the request was denied—there was no one left to help.

In a Congressional hearing this week, US health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told lawmakers, “We have a team in Milwaukee.”

But Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis told NPR that this is false. “There is no team in Milwaukee,” he said. “We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there.”

Kennedy has also previously told lawmakers that lead experts at the CDC who were terminated would be rehired. But that statement was also false. The health department’s own communications team told ABC that the lead experts would not be reinstated.

CDC can no longer help prevent lead poisoning in children, state officials say Read More »

AI #117: OpenAI Buys Device Maker IO

openai / Mike M. / May 23, 2025

What a week, huh? America signed a truly gigantic chip sales agreement with UAE and KSA that could be anything from reasonable to civilizational suicide depending on security arrangements and implementation details, Google announced all the things, OpenAI dropped Codex and also bought Jony Ive’s device company for $6.5 billion, Vance talked about reading AI 2027 (surprise, in a good way!) and all that other stuff.

Lemon, it’s Thursday, you’ve got movie tickets for Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning (19th and Broadway AMC, 3pm), an evening concert tonight from Light Sweet Crude and there’s a livestream from Anthropic coming up at 12: 30pm eastern, the non-AI links are piling up and LessOnline is coming in a few weeks. Can’t go backwards and there’s no time to spin anything else out of the weekly. Got to go forward to go back. Better press on.

So for the moment, here we go.

Earlier this week: Google I/O Day was the ultimate ‘huh, upgrades’ section. OpenAI brought us their Codex of Ultimate Vibing (and then Google offered their version called Jules). xAI had some strong opinions strongly shared in Regarding South Africa. And America Made a very important AI Chip Diffusion Deal with UAE and KSA, where the details we don’t yet know could make it anything from civilizational suicide to a defensible agreement, once you push back the terrible arguments made in its defense.

Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. So, spend more on health care, then?
Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Not when you fabricate the data.
Huh, Upgrades. We already covered Google, so: Minor Claude tweaks, xAI’s API.
Codex of Ultimate Vibing. A few more takes, noting the practical barriers.
On Your Marks. AlphaEvolve is probably a big long term deal.
Choose Your Fighter. A handy guide to the OpenAI model that’s right for you.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Know it when you see it.
Copyright Confrontation. A bunch of absolute losers.
Regarding South Africa. Zeynep Tufekci gives it the NYT treatment.
Cheaters Gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat. Cheat or be cheated.
They Took Our Jobs. Small reductions in fixed time costs can bear big dividends.
The Art of the Jailbreak. System prompt for Gemini Diffusion.
Get Involved. Anthropic social, AI grantmaking and grants, whistleblowing.
In Other AI News. Bunker subscriptions are on the rise.
Much Ado About Malaysia. The supposedly big AI deal that wasn’t.
Show Me the Money. LMArena sells out, OpenAI buys IO from Jony Ive.
Quiet Speculations. More straight lines on graphs.
Autonomous Dancing Robots. Everybody do the household chores.
The Quest for Sane Regulations. It’s not looking good.
The Mask Comes Off. OpenAI is still trying to mostly sideline the nonprofit.
The Week in Audio. Bengio, Nadella, Hassabis, Roose, and Whitmer on OpenAI.
Write That Essay. Someone might read it. Such as VPOTUS JD Vance.
Vance on AI. Remarkably good thoughts! He’s actually thinking about it for real.
Rhetorical Innovation. Where could that data center possibly be?
Margaritaville. You know it would be your fault.
Rhetorical Lack of Innovation. Cate Metz is still at it.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. No, seriously.
Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Have it think different.
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Might want to get on that.
The Lighter Side. The new job is better anyway.

AI scientist announces potential major discovery, a promising treatment for dry AMD, a major cause of blindness. Paper is here.

Nikhil Krishnan sees health care costs going up near term due to AI for three reasons.

There is a lot more scrutiny of those using AI to prevent paying out claims, than there is for those using AI to maximize billing and fight to get claims paid.
Health care companies will charge additional fees for their use of ‘add on’ AI. Like everything else in health care, this will cost $0.05 and they will charge $500.
People who use AI to realize they need health care will consume more health care.

This seems right in the near term. The entire health care system is bonkers and bans real competition. This is the result. In the medium term, it should radically improve health care productivity and outcomes, and then we can collectively decide how much to spend on it all. In the long term, we will see radical improvements, or we won’t need any health care.

In a related story, ChatGPT helps students feign ADHD. Well, not really. The actual story is ‘a 2000 word document created via ChatGPT, in a way that ordinary prompting would not easily duplicate, helps students feign ADHD.’ So mostly this is saying that a good guide helps you fake ADHD, and that with a lot of effort ChatGPT can produce one. Okie dokie.

Let’s check in on AlphaEvolve, a name that definitely shouldn’t worry anyone, with its results that also definitely shouldn’t worry anyone.

Deedy: Google’s AI just made math discoveries NO human has!

—Improved on the best known solution for packing of 11 and 12 hexagons in hexagons.

—Reduced 4×4 matrix multiplication from 49 operations to 48 (first advance in 56 years!) and many more.

AlphaEvolve is the AlphaGo ‘move 37’ moment for math. Insane.

Here’s another easy to understand one:

Place 16 points in 2D to minimize the maximum to minimum distance between them.

Improved after 16yrs. I highly recommend everyone read the paper.

AI improves European weather forecasts 20% on key indicators. Progress on whether forecasters is also impressive, but harder to measure.

AI helping executives handle their inboxes and otherwise sift through overwhelming amounts of incoming information. My read is the tools are just now getting good enough that power users drowning in incoming communications turn a profit, but not quite good enough for regular people. Yet.

As usual, that’s if you dismiss them out of hand and don’t use them, such as Judah Diament saying this is ‘not a breakthrough’ because ‘there have been such tools since the late 1980s.’ What’s the difference between vibe coding and Microsoft Visual Basic, really, when you dig down?

Curio AI stuffed toys, which seem a lot like a stuffed animal with an internet connection to a (probably small and lame) AI model tuned to talk to kids, that has a strict time limit if you don’t pay for a subscription beyond 60 days?

MIT economics department ‘conducted an internal, confidential review’ of this paper and concluded it ‘should be withdrawn from public discourse.’ It then clarifies this was due to misconduct, and that the author is no longer at MIT, and that this was due to ‘concerns about the validity of the research.’

Here is abstract of the paper that we should now treat as not real, as a reminder to undo the update you made when you saw it:

That was a very interesting claim, but we have no evidence that it is true. Or false.

Florian Ederer: It is deeply ironic that the first AI paper to have hallucinations was not even written by an AI.

Jonathan Parker: We don’t know that.

I was going to call MIT’s statement ‘beating around the bush’ the way this WSJ headline does saying MIT ‘can no longer stand behind’ the paper, but no, to MIT’s credit they very clearly are doing everything their lawyers will allow them to do, the following combined with the student leaving MIT is very clear:

MIT Economics: Earlier this year, the COD conducted a confidential internal review based upon allegations it received regarding certain aspects of this paper. While student privacy laws and MIT policy prohibit the disclosure of the outcome of this review, we are writing to inform you that MIT has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper. Based upon this finding, we also believe that the inclusion of this paper in arXiv may violate arXiv’s Code of Conduct.

Our understanding is that only authors of papers appearing on arXiv can submit withdrawal requests. We have directed the author to submit such a request, but to date, the author has not done so. Therefore, in an effort to clarify the research record, MIT respectfully request that the paper be marked as withdrawn from arXiv as soon as possible.

It seems so crazy to me that ‘student privacy’ should bind us this way in this spot, but here we are. Either way, we got the message. Which is, in English:

Cremieux: This paper turned out to be fraudulent.

It was entirely made up and the experiment never happened. The author has been kicked out of MIT.

A (not new) theory of why Lee Sedol’s move 78 caused AlphaGo to start misfiring, where having a lot of similar options AlphaGo couldn’t differentiate between caused it to have to divide its attention into exponentially many different lines of play. My understanding is it was also objectively very strong and a very unlikely move to have been made, which presumably also mattered? I am not good enough at Go to usefully analyze the board.

Paper finds LLMs produce ‘five times less accurate’ summaries of scientific research than humans, warning of ‘overgeneralization’ and omission of details that limit scope. All right, sure, and that’s why you’re going to provide me with human summaries I can use instead, right, Anakin? Alternatively, you can do what I do and ask follow-up questions to check on all that.

DeepSeek powers a rush of Chinese fortune telling apps, in section IV of the type of article, here on the rise of Chinese superstitious and despairing behavior, that could be charting something important but could easily be mostly hand picked examples. Except for the rise in scratch-off lottery tickets, which is a hugely bearish indicator. I also note that it describes DeepSeek as ‘briefly worrying American tech companies,’ which is accurate, except that the politicians don’t realize we’ve stopped worrying.

Claude’s Research now available on mobile, weird that it wasn’t before.

Some changes were made to the Claude 3.7 system prompt.

xAI’s API now can search Twitter and the internet, like everyone else.

Some more takes on Codex:

Sunless: IMO after couple of hours using it for my SWE job I feel this is the most “AGI is coming” feel since ChatGPT in the early December of 2022. Async ability is the true God mode. It is currently going through my tech debt like plasma knife through butter. Incredible.

Diamond Bishop: Played with codex on two projects this weekend. Will keep using it, but my daily loadout for now will still be cursor in agent mode, accompanied by some light dual wielding with claude code. First impressions:

1. Overall feel – very cool when it works and being able to fire off a bunch of tasks feels like more autonomy then anything else.

2. No internet – don’t like this. makes a bunch of testing just impossible. This should be optional, not required.

3. Delegation focused handoff UI/UX – great when things work, but most of the time you need to reprompt/edit/etc. This will make sense when models get better but in current form it seems premature. Need a way to keep my IDE open for edits and changes to collaborate with when I want to rather then just hand off completely. Doing it only through github branches adds too much friction.

Sunless highlights that in many ways the most valuable time for something like Codex is right after you get access. You can use it to suddenly do all the things you had on your stack that it can easily do, almost for free, that you couldn’t do easily before. Instant profit. It may never feel that good again.

I strongly agree with Diamond’s second and third points here. If you close the IDE afterwards you’re essentially saying that you should assume it’s all going to work, so it’s fine to have to redo a bunch of work if something goes wrong. That’s a terrible assumption. And it’s super hard to test without internet access.

How big a deal is AlphaEvolve? Simeon thinks it is a pretty big deal, and most other responses here agree. As a proof of concept, it seems very important to me, even if the model itself doesn’t do anything of importance yet.

How OpenAI suggests you choose your model.

Charly Wargnier: Here’s the rundown ↓

🧠 GPT 4o: the everyday assistant

↳ Emails, summaries, and quick drafts

🎨 GPT 4.5: the creative brain

↳ Writing, comms, and brainstorming

⚡ o4 mini: the fast tech helper

↳ Quick code, STEM, visual tasks

🧮 o4 mini high: the deep tech expert

↳ Math, complex code, science explainer

📊 o3: the strategic thinker

↳ Planning, analysis, multi-step tasks

🔍 o1 pro: the thoughtful analyst

↳ Deep research, careful reasoning, high-stakes work

In practice, my answer is ‘o3 for everything other than generating images, unless you’re hitting your request limits, anything where o3 is the wrong choice you should be using Claude or Gemini.’

Seriously, I have a harder and harder time believing anyone actually uses Grok, the ultimate two-handed language model.

This is indeed how it feels these days.

Rory McCarthy: Professional art forgery detectors can tell with something like 90% accuracy if something’s a fake in a few seconds upon seeing it, but can only tell you why after a good while inspecting details. I feel like people are picking that up for AI: you just *know*, before you know how.

Instantaneously we can see that this is ‘wrong’ and therefore AI, then over the course of a minute you can extract particular reasons why. It’s like one of those old newspaper exercises, ‘spot all the differences in this picture.’

Rory McCarthy: I was thinking about it with this pizza place I saw – I wonder if people get that much AI art/illustration currently has the vibe of Microsoft clip art to promote your company; it just seems sort of cheap, and thus cheapens the brand (a place like this probably wouldn’t mind)

I find the obviously fake art here does make me less inclined to eat here. I don’t want you to spend a ton of time on marketing, but this is exactly the wrong way and amount to care, like you wanted to care a lot but didn’t have the budget and you aren’t authentic or detail oriented. Stay away. The vibe doesn’t jive with caring deeply about the quality of one’s pizza.

Since IGN already says what I’d say about this, I turn over the floor:

IGN: Fortnite launched an AI-powered Darth Vader modeled after the voice of James Earl Jones and it’s going as well as you might expect [link has short video]:

Actually, after watching the video, it’s going way better than expected. Love it.

Here is another way to defend yourself against bot problems:

Gavin Leech: A friend just received a robocall purporting to be from a criminal holding me to ransom. But the scambot went on to describe me as “handsome of stature, grave of gait, rich and sonorous of voice, eloquent of speech”.

This is because, some years ago, I put this on my blog:

Is it morally wrong to create and use fully private AI porn of someone who didn’t consent? Women overwhelmingly (~10:1) said yes, men said yes by about 2.5:1.

Mason: I don’t believe our brains can really intuit that photorealistic media is different from reality; we can understand logically that visual effects aren’t real, but once we’ve seen someone we actually know personally do something, it’s hard to compartmentalize it as pure fantasy.

I don’t think that’s it. I think we are considering this immoral partly because we think (rightly or wrongly) that porn and sex and even thinking about other people sexually (even with permission and especially without it) is gross and immoral in general even if we don’t have a way to ban any of it. And often we try anyway.

Even more central, I think, is that we don’t trust anything private to stay truly private, the tech is the same for private versus public image (or in the future video or even VR!) generation, we have a concept of ownership over ‘name and likeness,’ and we don’t want to give people the ‘it was only private’ excuse.

Not AI but worth noting: Ben Jacobs warns about a scam where someone gets control of a contact’s (real) Telegram, invites you to a meeting, then redirects you to a fake zoom address which asks you to update zoom with a malicious update. I recommend solving this problem by not being on Telegram, but to each their own.

Ideally we’d also be warning the scammers.

Misha: Starting to get lots of AI voiced phone spam and I gotta say, we really need to start punishing spammers with the death penalty. I guess this is why The Beekeeper is so popular.

The creatives continue to be restless. Morale has not improved.

Luiza Jarovsky: “The singer and songwriter said it was a ‘criminal offence’ to change copyright law in favour of artificial intelligence companies.

In an interview on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, John said the government was on course to ‘rob young people of their legacy and their income,’ adding: ‘It’s a criminal offence, I think. The government are just being absolute losers, and I’m very angry about it.'”

That’s not what ‘criminal offense’ means, but point taken.

Zeynep Tufekci writes up what happened to Grok in the New York Times, including providing a plausible triggering event to explain why the change might have been made on that particular day, and ties it to GPT-4o being an absurd sycophant as a general warning about what labs might choose to do with their bots. This, it seems, is what causes some to worry about the ‘safety’ of bots. Okay then.

And those not cheating will use AI too, if only to pass the AI filters? Oh boy. I mean, entirely unsurprising, but oh boy.

Julie Jargon (WSJ): Students don’t want to be accused of cheating, so they’re using artificial intelligence to make sure their school essays sound human.

Teachers use AI-detection software to identify AI-generated work. Students, in turn, are pre-emptively running their original writing through the same tools, to see if anything might be flagged for sounding too robotic.

Miles Pulvers, a 21-year-old student at Northeastern University in Boston, says he never uses AI to write essays, but he runs all of them through an AI detector before submitting them.

“I take great pride in my writing,” says Pulvers. “Before AI, I had peace of mind that whatever I would submit would be accepted. Now I see some of my writing being flagged as possibly being AI-generated when it’s not. It’s kind of annoying, but it’s part of the deal in 2025.”

AI detectors might sound the alarm if writing contains too many adjectives, long sentences and em dashes—one of my own favorite forms of punctuation. When that happens to Pulvers, he rewrites the sentences or paragraphs in question. He tests the essay again, as often as needed until the detector says it has a low probability of bot involvement.

The tragedy of all this is that when they do catch someone using AI, they typically get away with it, but still everyone has to face this police state of running everything through the checkers.

It also highlights that your AI checker has to be able to defeat a student who has access to an AI checker. Right now the system is mostly not automated, but there’s nothing stopping one from creating a one-button agent that takes an essay – whether it was an AI or a human that wrote the original – feeding it into the public AI detector, and then iterating as needed until the essay passes. It would then be insane not to use that, and ‘who gets detected using AI’ by default becomes only those who don’t know to do that.

The only way to get around this is to have the AI checker available to teachers be superior to the one used by students. It’s like cybersecurity and other questions of ‘offense-defense balance.’ And it is another illustration of why in many cases you get rather nasty results if you simply open up the best functionality to whoever wants it. I don’t see a way to get to a future where this particular ‘offense-defense balance’ can properly favor the AI detectors actually catching cheaters.

Unless? Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Rather than ask ‘did an AI write this?’ you could ask ‘did this particular student write this?’ That’s a better question. If you can require the student to generate writing samples in person that you know are theirs, you can then do a comparison analysis.

Tyler Cowen bites all the bullets, and says outright ‘everyone’s cheating, that’s good news.’ His view is essentially that the work the AI can do for you won’t be valuable in the future, so it’s good to stop forcing kids to do that work. Yes, right now this breaks the ‘educational system’ until it can adjust, but that too is good, because it was already broken, it has to change and it will not go quietly.

As is typically true with Tyler, he gets some things that AI will change, but then assumes the process will stop, and the rest of life will somehow continue as per normal, only without the need for the skills AI currently is able to replace?

Tyler Cowen: Getting good grades maps pretty closely to what the AIs are best at. You would do better to instill in your kids the quality of taking the initiative…You should also…teach them the value of charisma, making friends, and building out their networks.

It is hard for me to picture the future world Tyler must be imagining, with any expectation it would be stable.

If you are assigning two-month engineering problems to students, perhaps check if Gemini 2.5 can spit out the answer. Yes, this absolutely is the ‘death of this type of coursework.’ That’s probably a good thing.

Peter Wildeford: You have to feel terrible for the 31 students who didn’t just plug the problem into Gemini 2.5 and then take two months off

Olivia Moore: An Imperial College eng professor gave four LLMs a problem set that graduate students had two months to solve.

He had TAs grade the results blind alongside real submissions.

Meta AI and Claude failed. ChatGPT ranked 27 of 36 students…while Gemini 2.5 Pro ranked 4 of 36 🤯

Something tells me that ‘ChatGPT’ here probably wasn’t o3?

In a new study from Jung Ho Choi and Chloe Xie, AI allowed accountants to redirect 8.5% of their time away from data entry towards other higher value tasks and resulted in a 55% increase in weekly client support.

Notice what happens when we decompose work into a fixed cost in required background tasks like data entry, and then this enables productive tasks. If a large percentage of time was previously data entry, even a small speedup in that can result in much more overall productivity.

This is more generally true than people might think. In most jobs and lives, there are large fixed maintenance costs, which shrinks the time available for ‘real work.’ Who among us spends 40 hours on ‘real work’? If you speed up the marginal real work by X% while holding all fixed costs fixed, you get X% productivity growth. If you speed up the fixed costs too, you can get a lot more than X% total growth.

This also suggests that the productivity gains of accountants are being allocated to increased client support, rather than into each accountant serving more clients. Presumably in the long term more will be allocated towards reducing costs.

The other big finding is that AI and accountants for now remain complements. You need an expert to catch and correct errors, and guide the AI. Over time, that will shift into the AI both speeding things up more and not needing the accountant.

At Marginal Revolution, commenters find the claims plausible. Accounting seems like a clear example of a place where AI should allow for large gains.

Tyler Cowen also links us to Dominic Coey who reminds us that Baumol’s Cost Disease is fully consistent with transformative economic growth, and to beware arguments from cost disease. Indeed. If AI gives us radically higher productivity in some areas but not others, we will be vastly richer and better off. Indeed in some ways this is ideal because it lets us still have ‘jobs.’

Will Brown: if you lost your software engineering job to AI in early 2024 that is entirely a skill issue sorry

Cate Hall: Pretty much everyone’s going to have a skill issue sooner or later.

It is a question of when, not if. It’s always a skill issue, for some value of skill.

A hypothesis that many of the often successful ‘Substack house style’ essays going around Substack are actually written by AI. I think Will Storr here has stumbled on a real thing, but that for now it is a small corner of Substack.

Robert Scoble provides us another example of what we might call ‘human essentialism.’ He recognizes and expects we will likely solve robotics within 10 years and they will be everywhere, we will have ‘dozens of virtual beings in our lives,’ expects us to use a Star Trek style interface with computers without even having applications. But he still thinks human input will be vital, that it will be AIs and humans ‘working together’ and that we will be ‘more productive’ as if the humans are still driving productivity.

Erick: You left off… nobody will be needed to work. Then what?

Roberto Scoble: We will create new things to do.

I don’t see these two halves of his vision as compatible, even if we do walk this ‘middle path.’ If we have robots everywhere and don’t need 2D screens or keyboards or apps, what are these ‘new things to do’ that the AI can’t do itself? Even if we generously assume humans find a way to retain control over all this and all existential-style worries and instability fall away, most humans will have nothing useful to contribute to such a world except things that rely on their human essentialism – things were the AI could do it, but the AI doing it would rob it of its meaning, and we value that meaning enough to want the thing.

They took our jobs and hired the wrong person?

John Stepek: Turns out AI hires candidates based on little more than “vibes”, then post-rationalises its decision.

So that’s another traditional human function replaced.

David Rozado: Do AI systems discriminate based on gender when choosing the most qualified candidate for a job? I ran an experiment with several leading LLMs to find out. Here’s what I discovered.

Across 70 popular professions, LLMs systematically favored female-named candidates over equally qualified male-named candidates when asked to choose the more qualified candidate for a job. LLMs consistently preferred female-named candidates over equally qualified male-named ones across all 70 professions tested.

The models all also favored whoever was listed first and candidates with pronouns in bio. David interprets this as LLMs ‘not acting rationally,’ instead articulating false reasons that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

And yes, all of that is exactly like real humans. The AI is correctly learning to do some combination of mimic observed behavior and read the signs on who should be hired. But the AIs don’t want to offer explicit justifications of that any more than I do right now, other than to note that whoever you list first is sometimes who you secretly like better and AI can take a hint because it has truesight, and it would be legally problematic to do so in some case, so they come up with something else.

Tyler Cowen calls this ‘politically correct LLMs’ and asks:

Tyler Cowen: So there is still some alignment work to do here? Or does this reflect the alignment work already?

This is inherent in the data set, as you can see from it appearing in every model, and of course no one is trying to get the AIs to take the first listed candidate more often. If you don’t like this (or if you do like it!) do not blame it on alignment work. It is those who want to avoid these effects who want to put an intentional thumb on the scale, whether or not we find that desirable. There is work to do.

Scott Lincicome asks, what if AI means more jobs, not fewer? Similar to the recent comments by JD Vance, it is remarkable how much such arguments treat the prior of ‘previous technologies created jobs’ or ‘AI so far hasn’t actively caused massive unemployment’ as such a knock-down arguments that anyone doubting them is being silly.

Perhaps a lot of what is going on is there are people making the strawman-style argument that AI will indeed cause mass unemployment Real Soon Now, and posts like this are mainly arguing against that strawman-style position. In which case, all right, fair enough. Yet it’s curious how such advocates consistently try to bite the biggest bullets along the way, Vance does it for truck drivers and here Scott chooses radiologists, where reports of their unemployment have so far been premature.

While AI is offering ‘ordinary productivity improvements’ and automating away some limited number of jobs or tasks, yes, this intuition likely holds, and we won’t have an AI-fueled unemployment problem. But as I keep saying, the problem comes when the AI also does the jobs and tasks you would transfer into.

Here’s the Gemini Diffusion system prompt.

Anthropic hosting a social in NYC in mid-June for quants considering switch careers, submissions due June 9th.

Job as an AI grantmaker at Schmidt Sciences.

Georgetown offering research funding from small size up to $1 million for investigation of dangers from internal deployment of AI systems. Internal deployment seems like a highly neglected threat model. Expressions of interest (~1k words) due June 30, proposal by September 15. Good opportunity, but we need faster grants.

A draft of a proposed guide for whistleblowers (nominally from AI labs, but the tactics look like they’d apply regardless of where you work), especially those who want to leave the USA and leak classified information. If the situation does pass the (very very high!) bar for justifying this, you need to do it right.

Google One now has 150 million subscribers, a 50% gain since February 2024. It is unclear the extent to which the Gemini part of the package is driving subscriptions.

The Waluigi Effect comes to Wikipedia, also it has a Wikipedia page.

Kalomaze: getting word that like ~80% of the llama4 team at Meta has resigned.

Andrew Curran: WSJ says 11 of the original 14 are gone.

Financial Times reports that leading models have a bias towards their own creator labs and against other labs, but Rob Wiblin observes that this bias does not seems so large:

This seems about as good as one could reasonably expect? But yes there are important differences. Notice that Altman’s description here has his weakness as ‘the growing perception that’ he is up to no good, whereas Sonnet and several others suggest it is that Altman might actually be up to no good.

Vanity Fair: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Explains How He’s Making Himself Obsolete With AI. If anything it seems like he’s taking it too far too fast.

Remember that time Ilya Sutskever said OpenAI were ‘definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI’?

Rob Bensinger: This is concerning for more than one reason.

I suppose it’s better to at least know you need a plan and think to build a bunker, even if you don’t realize that the bunker will do you absolutely no good against the AGI itself, versus not even realizing you need a plan. And the bunker does potentially help against some other threats, especially in a brief early window?

The rest of the post is about various OpenAI troubles that led to and resulted in and from The Battle of the Board, and did not contain any important new information.

Reports of a widening data gap between open and closed models, seems plausible:

finbarr: In the areas of ML research I’m specifically familiar with, the data gap between open and private models is massive. Probably the biggest gap separating open and closed models

xjdr: This is the largest I’ve seen the gap since the GPT 4 launch

Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett analyze how Apple’s AI efforts went so wrong, in sharp contrast to Google’s array of products on I/O day. ‘This is taking a bit longer than expected’ is no longer going to cover it. Yes, Apple has some buffer of time, but I see that buffer running low. They present this as a cultural mismatch failure, where Apple was unwilling to invest in AI properly until it knew what the product was, at which point it was super fall behind, combined with a failure of leadership and their focus on consumer privacy. They’re only now talking about turning Siri ‘into a ChatGPT competitor.’

It isn’t actually meaningful news, but it is made to sound like it is, so here we are: Malaysia launches what it calls the region’s ‘first sovereign full-stack AI infrastructure,’ storing and managing all data and everything else locally in Malaysia.

They will use locally run models, including from DeepSeek since that is correctly the go-to open model because OpenAI’s hasn’t released yet, Meta is terrible and Google has failed marketing forever. But of course they could easily swap that if a better one becomes available, and the point of an open model is that China has zero control over what happens in Malaysia.

Malaysia is exactly the one country I singled out, outside of the Middle East, as an obvious place not to put meaningful quantities of our most advanced AI chips. They don’t need them, they’re not an important market, they’re not important diplomatically or strategically, they’re clearly in China’s sphere of influence and more allied to China than to America, and they have a history of leaking chips to China.

And somehow it’s the place that Sacks and various companies are touting as a place to put advanced AI chips. Why do you think that is? What do you think those chips are for? Why are we suddenly treating selling Malaysia those chips as a ‘beat China’ proposal?

They are trying to play us, meme style, for absolute fools.

One element of Trump’s replacement regulations, Bloomberg News has reported, will be chip controls on countries suspected of diverting US hardware to China — including Malaysia.

…

Trump officials this year pressured Malaysian authorities to crack down on semiconductor transshipment to China. The country is also in the cross hairs of a court case in Singapore, where three men have been charged with fraud for allegedly disguising the ultimate customer of AI servers that may contain high-end Nvidia chips barred from China. Malaysian officials are probing the issue.

And yet, here we are, with Sacks trying to undermine his own administration in order to keep the chips flowing to China’s sphere of influence. I wonder why.

It’s one thing to argue we need a strategic deal with UAE and KSA. I am deeply skeptical, we’ll need a hell of a set of security procedures and guarantees, but one can make a case that we can get that security, and that they bring a lot to the table, and that they might actually be and become our friends.

But Malaysia? Who are we even kidding? They have played us for absolute fools.

It almost feels intentional, like those who for some unknown reason care primarily about Nvidia’s market share and profit margins choosing the worst possible example to prove to us exactly what they actually care about. And by ‘they’ I mean David Sacks and I also mean Nvidia and Oracle.

But also notice that this is a very small operation. One might even say it is so small as to be entirely symbolic.

The original announced intent was to use only 3,000 Huawei chips to power this, the first exported such chips. You know what it costs to get chips that could fill in for 3,000 Ascend 910Cs?

About 14 million dollars. That’s right. About 1% of what Malaysia buys in chips from Taiwan and America each month right now, as I’ll discuss later. It’s not like they couldn’t have done that under Biden. They did do that under Biden. They did it every month. What are we even talking about?

Divyansh Kaushik: Isolated deployments like this are part of China’s propaganda push around Huawei datacenters designed to project a narrative of technological equivalence with the U.S.

In reality, Huawei cannot even meet domestic Chinese demand, much less provide a credible export alternative.

Importantly, the BIS has clarified that using Huawei Ascend hardware directly violates U.S. export controls. Support from any government for such projects essentially endorses activities contrary to established U.S. law.

Now some will buy into this propaganda effort, but let’s be real. Huawei simply cannot match top-tier American hardware in AI today. Their latest server is economically unviable and depends entirely on sustained state-backed subsidies to stay afloat. On top of that they have and will continue to have issues with scaling.

I presume that, since this means the Malaysian government is announcing to the world that it is directly violating our export controls, combined with previous smuggling of chips out of Malaysia having been allowed, we’re going to cut them off entirely from our own chips? Anakin?

It’s weird, when you combine all that, to see this used as an argument against the diffusion rules, in general, and that the administration is telling us that this is some sort of important scary development? These words ‘American AI stack’ are like some sort of magical invocation, completely scope insensitive, completely not a thing in physical terms, being used as justification to give away our technology to perhaps the #1 most obvious place that would send those chips directly to the PCR and has no other strategic value I can think of?

David Sacks: As I’ve been warning, the full Chinese stack is here. We rescinded the Biden Diffusion Rule just in time. The American AI stack needs to be unleashed to compete.

The AI Investor: Media reported that Malaysia has become the first country outside China to deploy Huawei chips, servers, and DeepSeek’s large language model (LLM).

This would be the literal first time that any country on Earth other than China was deploying Huawei chips at all.

And it wasn’t even a new announcement!

Lennart Heim: This isn’t news. This was reported over a month ago and prominently called “the first deployment outside the China market.”

This needs to be monitored, but folks: it’s 3k Ascend chips by 2026.

Expect more such announcements; their strategic value is in headlines, not compute.

It was first reported here, on April 14.

One might even say that the purpose of this announcement was to give ammunition to people like Sacks to tout the need to sell billions in chips where they can be diverted. The Chinese are behind, but they are subtle, they think ahead and they are not dumb.

For all this supposed panic over the competition, the competition we fear so much that Nvidia says is right on our heels has deployed literally zero chips, and doesn’t obviously have a non-zero number of chips available to deploy.

So we need to rush to give our chips to these obviously China-aligned markets to ‘get entrenched’ in those markets, even though that doesn’t actually make any sense whatsoever because nothing is entrenched or locked in, because in the future China will make chips and then sell them?

And indeed, Malaysia has recently gone on a suspiciously large binge buying American AI chips, with over a billion in purchases each in March and April? As in, even with these chips our ‘market share’ in Malaysia would remain (checks notes) 99%.

I told someone in the administration it sounded like they were just feeding American AI chips to China and then I started crying?

I’ve heard of crazy ‘missile gap’ arguments, but this has to be some sort of record.

But wait, there’s more. Even this deal doesn’t seem to involve Huawei after all?

Mackenzie Hawkins and Ram Anand (Bloomberg): When reached for comment by Bloomberg News on Tuesday, Teo’s office said it’s retracting her remarks on Huawei without explanation. It’s unclear whether the project will proceed as planned.

Will we later see a rash of these ‘sovereign AI’ platforms? For some narrow purposes that involve sufficiently sensitive data and lack of trust in America I presume that we will, although the overall compute needs of such projects will likely not be so large, nor will they mostly require models at the frontier.

And there’s no reason to think that we couldn’t supply such projects with chips in the places it would make any sense to do, without going up against the Biden diffusion rules. There’s no issue here.

Update your assessment of everyone’s credibility and motives accordingly.

LMArena raises $100 million at a $600 million valuation, sorry what, yes of course a16z led the funding round, or $20 per vote cast on their website, and also I think we’re done here? As in, if this wasn’t a bought and paid for propaganda platform before, it sure as hell is about to become one. The price makes absolutely no sense any other way.

OpenAI buys AI Device Startup from Jony Ive for $6.5 billion, calls Ive ‘the deepest thinker Altman’s ever met.’ Jony Ive says of his current prototype, ‘this is the best work our team has ever done,’ this from a person who did the iPhone and MacBook Pro. So that’s a very bold claim. The plan is for OpenAI to develop a family of AI-powered devices to debut in 2026, shipping over 100 million devices. They made a nine minute announcement video. David Lee calls it a ‘long-shot bet to kill the iPhone.’

Great expectations, coming soon, better to update later than not at all.

Scott Singer: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: “When the current budget was negotiated, we thought AI would only approach human reasoning around 2050. Now we expect this to happen already next year”

What do they plan to do about this, to prepare for this future? Um… have a flexible budget, whatever that means? Make some investments, maybe? I wonder what is on television.

Here are some better-calibrated expectations, as METR preliminarily extends its chart of how fast various AI capabilities are improving.

Thomas Kwa: We know AI time horizons on software tasks are currently ~1.5hr and doubling every 4-7 months, but what about other domains? Here’s a preliminary result comparing METR’s task suite (orange line) to benchmarks in other domains, all of which have some kind of grounding in human data:

Observations

Time horizons agentic computer use (OSWorld) is ~100x shorter than other domains. Domains like Tesla self-driving (tesla_fsd), scientific knowledge (gpqa), and math contests (aime), video understanding (video_mme), and software (hcast_r_s) all have roughly similar horizons.

My guess is this means models are good at taking in information from a long context but bad at acting coherently. Most work requires agency like OSWorld, which may be why AIs can’t do the average real-world 1-hour task yet.

There are likely other domains that fall outside this cluster; these are just the five I examined

Note the original version had a unit conversion error that gave 60x too high horizons for video_mme; this has been fixed (thanks @ryan_greenblatt )

Rate of improvement varies significantly; math contests have improved ~50x in the last year but Tesla self-driving only 6x in 3 years.

HCAST is middle of the pack in both.

Note this is preliminary and uses a new methodology so there might be data issues. I’m currently writing up a full post!

Is this graph believable? What do you want to see analyzed?

Will future algorithmic progress in an intelligence explosion be bottlenecked by compute? Epoch AI says yes, Ryan Greenblatt says no. In some sense everything is bottlenecked by compute in a true intelligence explosion, since the intelligences work on compute, but that’s not the question here. The question is, will future AIs be able to test and refine algorithmic improvements without gigantic test compute budgets? Epoch says no because Transformers, MoE and MQA are all compute-dependent innovations. But Ryan fires back that all three were first tested and verified at small scale. My inclination is strongly to side with Ryan here. I think that (relatively) small scale experiments designed by a superintelligence should definitely be sufficient to choose among promising algorithmic candidates. After I wrote that, I checked and o3 also sided mostly with Ryan.

New paper in Science claims decentralized populations of LLM agents develop spontaneous universally adopted social conventions. Given sufficient context and memory, and enough ‘social’ interactions, this seems so obviously true I won’t bother explaining why. But the study itself is very clearly garbage, if you read the experimental setup. All it is actually saying is if you explicitly play iterated pairwise coordination games (as in, we get symmetrically rewarded if our outputs match), agents will coordinate around some answer. I mean, yes, no shit, Sherlock.

Popular Mechanics writes up that Dario Amodei and other tech CEOs are predicting AI will allow humans to soon (as in, perhaps by 2030!) double the human lifespan or achieve ‘escape velocity,’ meaning a lifespan that increases faster than one year per year, allowing us to survive indefinitely.

Robin Hanson: No, no it won’t. Happy to bet on that.

I’d be happy to bet against it too if the deadline is 2030. This is a parlay, a bet on superintelligence and fully transformational AI showing up before 2030, combined with humanity surviving that, and that such life extension is physically feasible and we are willing to implement and invest in the necessary changes, all of which would have to happen very quickly. That’s a lot of ways for this not to happen.

However, most people are very much sleeping on the possibility of getting to escape velocity within our lifetimes, as in by 2040 or 2050 rather than 2030, which potentially could happen even without transformational AI, we should fund anti-aging research. These are physical problems with physical solutions. I am confident that with transformational AI solutions could be found if we made it a priority. Of course, we would also have to survive creating transformational AI, and retain control sufficiently to make this happen.

Nikita Bier predicts that AI’s ability to understand text will allow much more rapid onboarding of customization necessary for text-based social feeds like Reddit or Twitter. Right now, such experiences are wonderful with strong investment and attention to detail, but without this they suck and most people won’t make the effort. This seems roughly right to me, but also it seems like we could already be doing a much better job of this, and also based on my brief exposure the onboarding to TikTok is actually pretty rough.

What level of AI intelligence or volume is required before we see big AI changes, and how much inference will we need to make that happen?

Dwarkesh Patel: People underrate how big a bottleneck inference compute will be. Especially if you have short timelines.

There’s currently about 10 million H100 equivalents in the world. By some estimates, human brain has the same FLOPS as an H100.

So even if we could train an AGI that is as inference efficient as humans, we couldn’t sustain a very large population of AIs.

Not to mention that a large fraction of AI compute will continue to be used for training, not inference.

And while AI compute has been growing 2.25x so far, by 2028, you’d be push against TSMC’s overall wafer production limits, which grows 1.25x according to AI 2027 Compute Forecast.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: If you think in those terms, seems the corresponding prediction is that AI starts to have a real impact only after going past the 98th percentile of intelligence, rather than average human intelligence.

Dwarkesh Patel: I wouldn’t put it mainly in terms of intelligence.

I would put it in terms of the economic value of their work.

Long term coherence, efficient+online learning, advanced multimodality seem like much bigger bottlenecks to the value of these models than their intelligence.

Eliezer’s point here confused some people, but I believe it is that if AI is about as intelligent as the average human and you are trying to slot it in as if it was a human, and you have only so many such AIs to work with due to limits to algorithmic improvements, say 114 million in 2028, then 25% growth per year, then you would only see big improvements to the extent the AI was able to do things those humans couldn’t. And Patel is saying that depends more on other factors than intelligence. I think that’s a reasonable position to have on the margins being discussed here, where AI intelligence is firmly in the (rather narrow) normal human range.

However, I also think this is a clearly large underestimate of the de facto number of AIs we would have available in this spot. An AI only uses compute during active inference or training. A human uses their brain continuously, but most of the time the human isn’t using it for much, or we are context shifting in a way that is expensive for humans but not for AIs, or we are using it for a mundane task where the ‘required intelligence’ for the task detail being done is low and you could have ‘outsourced that subtask to a much dumber model.’ And while AI is less sample-efficient at learning than we are, it transfers learning for free and we very, very much don’t. This all seems like at least a 2 OOM (order of magnitude) effective improvement.

I also find it highly unlikely that the world could be running on compute in 2028, we hit the TSMC wafer limit, and using even those non-superintelligent AIs and the incentives to scale them no one figures out a way to make more wafers or otherwise scale inference compute faster.

The humanoid robots keep rapidly getting better, at the link watch one dance.

Andrew Rettek (QTing SMB below): This is the worst take ever.

SMB Attorney: I’m going to say this over and over again:

No one wants these weird robots walking around inside their homes or near their children.

Use case will be limited to industrial labor.

Plenty of people were willing to disprove this claim via counterexample.

Kendric Tonn: I don’t know exactly what I’d be willing to pay for a creepy robot that lives in my basement and does household chores whenever it’s not on the charging station, but uhhhhhhhhh a lot

The only real question is what voice/personality pack I’d want to use. Marvin? Threepio? GLaDOS? Honestly, probably SHODAN.

Gabriel Morgan: The answer is always Darkest Dungeon Narrator Guy.

Kendric Tonn: Good one. Or Stanley Parable Narrator Guy.

Mason: If they can actually do most household tasks competently, just about everyone is going to want one

A housekeeper with an infinitely flexible schedule who never gets tired, never gets sick, never takes vacation, can’t steal or gossip, and can’t judge the state of your home or anything you need it to do?

Like, yeah, people will want the robot

Robert Bernhardt: yeah and they’re gonna be used for tasks which just haven’t been done so far bc they were too much effort. it’s gonna be wild.

the real edge with robots isn’t strength or speed. it’s cost per hour. robots aren’t just about replacing humans. they’re about making previously ridiculous things affordable.

James Miller: Everyone suffering from significant health challenges that impairs mobility is going to want one.

ib: “No one will want these weird robots”

Yeah, man, if there’s anything we’ve learned about people it’s that they really hate anthropomorphizable robots. So much!

Moses Kagan: I’ll take the other side of this.

*Lotsof marriages going to be improved by cheap, 24 hr robot domestic help.

SMB Attorney (disproving Rettek by offering a worse take): Should those marriages be saved?

Moses Kagan: Have you ever been divorced?!

SMB Attorney (digging deeper than we thought possible): You talking this week or ever?

I would find it very surprising if, were this to become highly affordable and capable of doing household chores well, it didn’t become the default to have one. And I think Robert is super on point, having robots that can do arbitrary ‘normal’ physical tasks will be a complete lifestyle game changer, even if they are zero percent ‘creative’ in any way and have to be given specific instructions.

Frankly I’d be tempted to buy one if it even if literally all it could do was dance.

Joe Weisenthal: It’s really surprising OpenAI was founded in California, when places like Tennessee and North Carolina have friendlier business climates.

A general reminder that Congress is attempting to withdraw even existing subsidies to building more electrical power capacity. If we are hard enough up for power to even consider putting giant data centers in the UAE, the least we could do is not this?

Alasdair Phillips-Robins and Sam Winter-Levy write a guide to knowing whether the AI Chips deal was actually good. As I said last week, the devil is in the details. Everything they mention here falls under ‘the least you could do,’ I think we can and must do a lot better than this before I’d be fine with a deal of this size. What I especially appreciate is that giving UAE/KSA the chips should be viewed as a cost, that we pay in order to extract other concessions, even if they aren’t logically linked. Freezing China out of the tech stack is part of the deal, not a technical consequence of using our chips, the same way that you could run Gemma or Llama on Huawei chips.

It’s insane I have to keep quoting people saying this, but here we are:

Divyansh Kaushik: find the odd one out.

Peter Wildeford: NVIDIA: Export controls are a failure (so let us sell chips to the CCP military so they can develop AI models)

Reality: export controls are the main thing holding CCP domestic AI back

David Sacks attempts to blame our failure to Build, Baby, Build on the Biden Administration, in a post with improved concreteness. I agree that Biden could have been much better at turning intention into results, but what matters is what we do now. When Sacks says the Trump administration is ‘alleviating the bottlenecks’ what are we actually doing here to advance permitting reform and energy access?

Everyone seems to agree on this goal, across the aisle, so presumably we have wide leeway to not only issue executive orders and exemptions, but to actually pass laws. This seems like a top priority.

The other two paragraphs are repetition of previous arguments, that lead to questions we need better answers to. A central example is whether American buildout of data centers is actually funding constrained. If it is, we should ask why but welcome help with financing. If it isn’t, we shouldn’t be excited to have UAE build American data centers, since they would have been built anyway.

And again with ‘Huawei+DeepSeek,’ what exactly are you ‘selling’ with DeepSeek? And exactly what chips is China shipping with Huawei, and are they indeed taking the place of potential data centers in Beijing and Shanghai, given their supply of physical chips is a limiting factor? And if China can build [X] data centers anywhere, should it concern us if they do it in the UAE over the PRC? Why does ‘the standard’ here matter when any chip can run any model or task, you can combine any set of chips, and model switching costs are low?

In his interview with Ross Douthat, VP Vance emphasized energy policy as the most important industrial policy for America, and the need to eliminate regulatory barriers. I agree, but until things actually change, that is cheap talk. Right now I see a budget that is going to make things even worse, and no signs of meaningfully easing permitting or other regulatory barriers, or that this is a real priority of the administration. He says there is ‘a lot of regulatory relief’ in the budget but I do not see the signs of that.

If we can propose, with a straight face, an outright moratorium on enforcing any and all state bills about AI, how about a similar moratorium on enforcing any and all state laws restricting the supply of electrical power? You want to go? Let’s fing go.

We now have access to a letter that OpenAI sent to California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Garrison Lovely: The previously unreported 13-page letter — dated May 15 and obtained by Obsolete — lays out OpenAI’s legal defense of its updated proposal to restructure its for-profit entity, which can still be blocked by the California and Delaware attorneys general (AGs). This letter is OpenAI’s latest attempt to prevent that from happening — and it’s full of surprising admissions, denials, and attacks.

What did we learn that we didn’t previously know, about OpenAI’s attempt to convert itself into a PBC and sideline the nonprofit without due compensation?

First of all, Garrison Lovely confirms the view Rob Wilbin and Tyler Whitmer have, going in the same direction I did in my initial reaction, but farther and with more confidence that OpenAI was indeed up to no good.

Here is his view on the financing situation:

The revised plan appears designed to placate both external critics and concerned investors by maintaining the appearance of nonprofit control while changing its substance. SoftBank, which recently invested $30 billion in OpenAI with the right to claw back $10 billion if the restructuring didn’t move forward, seems unfazed by the company’s new proposal — the company’s finance chief said on an earnings call that from SoftBank’s perspective, “nothing has really changed.”

The letter from OpenAI’s lawyers to AG Bonta contains a number of new details. It says that “many potential investors in OpenAI’s recent funding rounds declined to invest” due to its unusual governance structure — directly contradicting Bloomberg’s earlier reporting that OpenAI’s October round was “oversubscribed.”

There is no contradiction here. OpenAI’s valuation in that round was absurdly low if you had been marketing OpenAI as a normal corporation. A substantial price was paid. They did fill the round to their satisfaction anyway with room to spare, at this somewhat lower price and with a potential refund offer. This was nominally conditional on a conversion, but that’s a put that is way out of the money. OpenAI’s valuation has almost doubled since then. What is SoftBank going to do, ask for a refund? Of course nothing has changed.

The most important questions about the restructuring are: What will the nonprofit actually have the rights to do? And what obligations to the nonprofit mission will the company and its board have?

The letter resolves a question raised in recent Bloomberg reporting: the nonprofit board will have the power to fire PBC directors.

The document also states that “The Nonprofit will exchange its current economic interests in the Capped-Profit Enterprise for a substantial equity stake in the new PBC and will enjoy access to the PBC’s intellectual property and technology, personnel, and liquidity…” This suggests the nonprofit would no longer own or control the underlying technology but would merely have a license to it — similar to OpenAI’s commercial partners.

A ‘substantial stake’ is going to no doubt be a large downgrade in their expected share of future profits, the question is how glaring a theft that will be.

The bigger concern is control. The nonprofit board will go from full direct control to the ability to fire PBC directors. But the power to fire the people who decide X is very different from directly deciding X, especially in a rapidly evolving scenario, and when the Xs have an obligation to balance your needs with the maximization of profits. This is a loss of most of the effective power of the nonprofit.

Under the current structure, OpenAI’s LLC operating agreement explicitly states that “the Company’s duty to this mission and the principles advanced in the OpenAI, Inc. Charter take precedence over any obligation to generate a profit.” This creates a legally binding obligation for the company’s management.

In contrast, under the proposed structure, PBC directors would be legally required to balance shareholder interests with the public benefit purpose. The ability to fire PBC directors does not change their fundamental legal duties while in office.

…

So far, no Delaware PBC has ever been held liable for failing to pursue its mission — legal scholars can’t find a single benefit‑enforcement case on the books.

The way I put this before was: The new arrangement helps Sam Altman and OpenAI do the right thing if they want to do the right thing. If they want to do the wrong thing, this won’t stop them.

As Tyler Whitmer discusses on 80,000 Hours, it is legally permitted to write into the PBC’s founding documents that the new company will prioritize the nonprofit mission. It sounds like they do not intend to do that.

OpenAI has, shall we say, not been consistently candid here. The letter takes a very hard stance against all critics while OpenAI took a public attitude of claiming cooperation and constructive dialogue. It attempts to rewrite the history of Altman’s firing and rehiring (I won’t rehash those details here). It claims ‘the nonprofit board is stronger than ever’ (lol, lmao even). It claims that when the letter ‘Not For Private Gain’ said OpenAI planned to eliminate nonprofit control that this was false, while their own letter elsewhere admitted this was indeed exactly OpenAI’s plan, and then when they announced their change in plans characterized the change as letting the board remain in control, thus admitting this again, while again falsely claiming the board would retain its control.

Garrison also claims that OpenAI is fighting dirty against its critics beyond the contents of the letter, such as implying they are working with with Elon Musk when OpenAI had no reason to think this was not the case, and indeed I am confident it is not true.

Yoshua Bengio TED talk on his personal experience fighting AI existential risk.

Rowan Cheung interviews Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, largely about agents.

Demis Hassabis talks definitions of AGI. If the objection really is ‘a hole in the system’ and a lack of consistency in doing tasks, then who among us is a general intelligence?

As referenced in the previous section, Rob Wiblin interviews litigator Tyler Whitmer of the Not For Private Gain coalition. Tyler explains that by default OpenAI’s announcement that ‘the nonprofit will retain control’ means very little, ‘the nonprofit can fire the board’ is a huge downgrade from their current direct control, this would abrogate all sorts of agreements. In a truly dangerous scenario, having to go through courts or otherwise act retroactively comes too late. And we can’t even be assured the ‘retaining control’ means even this minimal level of control.

This is all entirely unsurprising. We cannot trust OpenAI on any of this.

The flip side of the devil being in the details is that, with the right details, we can fight to get better details, and with great details, in particular writing the non-profit mission in as a fiduciary duty of the board of the new PBC, we can potentially do well. It is our job to get the Attorney Generals to hold OpenAI to account and ensure the new arrangement have teeth.

Ultimately, given what has already happened, the best case likely continues to mostly be ‘Sam Altman has effective permission to do the right thing if he chooses to do it, rather than being legally obligated to do the wrong thing.’ It’s not going to be easy to do better than that. But we can seek to at least do that well.

Kevin Roose reflects on Sydney, and how we should notice how epic are the fails even from companies like Microsoft.

Will OpenAI outcompete startups? Garry Tan, the head of YC, says no. You have to actually build a business that uses the API well, if you do there’s plenty of space in the market. For now I agree. I would be worried that this is true right up until it isn’t.

You’d be surprised who might read it.

In the case of Situational Awareness, it would include Ivanka Trump.

In the case of AI 2027, it would be Vice President JD Vance, among the other things he said in a recent interview with Ross Douthat that was mostly about immigration.

Patrick McKenzie: Another win for the essay meta.

(Object level politics aside: senior politicians and their staff are going to have an information diet whether you like them or not. Would you prefer it to be you or the replacement rate explainer from Vox or a CNBC talking head?)

It is true that I probably should be trying harder to write things in this reference class. I am definitely writing some things with a particular set of people, or in some cases one particular person, in mind. But the true ‘essay meta’ is another level above that.

What else did Vance say about AI in that interview?

First, in response to being asked, he talks about jobs, and wow, where have I heard these exact lines before about how technology always creates jobs and the naysayers are always wrong?

Vance: So, one, on the obsolescence point, I think the history of tech and innovation is that while it does cause job disruptions, it more often facilitates human productivity as opposed to replacing human workers. And the example I always give is the bank teller in the 1970s. There were very stark predictions of thousands, hundreds of thousands of bank tellers going out of a job. Poverty and commiseration.

What actually happens is we have more bank tellers today than we did when the A.T.M. was created, but they’re doing slightly different work. More productive. They have pretty good wages relative to other folks in the economy.

I tend to think that is how this innovation happens. You know, A.I.

I consider that a zombie argument in the context of AI, and I agree (once again) that up to a point when AI takes over some jobs we will move people to other jobs, the same way bank tellers transitioned to other tasks, and all that. But once again, the whole problem is that when the AI also takes the new job you want to shift into, when a critical mass of jobs get taken over, and when many or most people can’t meaningfully contribute labor or generate much economic value, this stops working.

Then we get into territory that’s a lot less realistic.

Vance: Well, I think it’s a relatively slow pace of change. But I just think, on the economic side, the main concern that I have with A.I. is not of the obsolescence, it’s not people losing jobs en masse.

You hear about truck drivers, for example. I think what might actually happen is that truck drivers are able to work more efficient hours. They’re able to get a little bit more sleep. They’re doing much more on the last mile of delivery than staring at a highway for 13 hours a day. So they’re both safer and they’re able to get higher wages.

I’m sorry, what? You think we’re going to have self-driving trucks, and we’re not going to employ less truck drivers?

I mean, we could in theory do this via regulation, by requiring there be a driver in the car at all times. And of course those truck drivers could go do other jobs. But otherwise, seriously, who are you kidding here? Is this a joke?

I actually agree with Vance that economic concerns are highly secondary here, if nothing else we can do redistribution or in a pinch create non-productive jobs.

So let’s move on to Vance talking about what actually bothers him. He focuses first on social problems, the worry of AI as placebo dating app on steroids.

Vance: Where I really worry about this is in pretty much everything noneconomic? I think the way that people engage with one another. The trend that I’m most worried about, there are a lot of them, and I actually, I don’t want to give too many details, but I talked to the Holy Father about this today.

If you look at basic dating behavior among young people — and I think a lot of this is that the dating apps are probably more destructive than we fully appreciate. I think part of it is technology has just for some reason made it harder for young men and young women to communicate with each other in the same way. Our young men and women just aren’t dating, and if they’re not dating, they’re not getting married, they’re not starting families.

There’s a level of isolation, I think, mediated through technology, that technology can be a bit of a salve. It can be a bit of a Band-Aid. Maybe it makes you feel less lonely, even when you are lonely. But this is where I think A.I. could be profoundly dark and negative.

I don’t think it’ll mean three million truck drivers are out of a job. I certainly hope it doesn’t mean that. But what I do really worry about is does it mean that there are millions of American teenagers talking to chatbots who don’t have their best interests at heart? Or even if they do have their best interests at heart, they start to develop a relationship, they start to expect a chatbot that’s trying to give a dopamine rush, and, you know, compared to a chatbot, a normal human interaction is not going to be as satisfying, because human beings have wants and needs.

And I think that’s, of course, one of the great things about marriage in particular, is you have this other person, and you just have to kind of figure it out together. Right? But if the other person is a chatbot who’s just trying to hook you to spend as much time on it, that’s the sort of stuff that I really worry about with A.I.

It seems weird to think that the three million truck drivers will still be driving trucks after those trucks can drive themselves, but that’s a distinct issue from what Vance discusses here. I do think Vance is pointing to real issues here, with no easy answers, and it’s interesting to see how he thinks about this. In the first half of the interview, he didn’t read to me like a person expressing his actual opinions, but here he does.

Then, of course, there’s the actual big questions.

Vance: And then there’s also a whole host of defense and technology applications. We could wake up very soon in a world where there is no cybersecurity. Where the idea of your bank account being safe and secure is just a relic of the past. Where there’s weird shit happening in space mediated through A.I. that makes our communications infrastructure either actively hostile or at least largely inept and inert. So, yeah, I’m worried about this stuff.

I actually read the paper of the guy that you had on. I didn’t listen to that podcast, but ——

Douthat: If you read the paper, you got the gist.

Those are indeed good things to worry about. And then it gets real, and Vance seems to be actually thinking somewhat reasonably about the most important questions, although he’s still got a way to go?

Douthat: Last question on this: Do you think that the U.S. government is capable in a scenario — not like the ultimate Skynet scenario — but just a scenario where A.I. seems to be getting out of control in some way, of taking a pause?

Because for the reasons you’ve described, the arms race component ——

Vance: I don’t know. That’s a good question.

The honest answer to that is that I don’t know, because part of this arms race component is if we take a pause, does the People’s Republic of China not take a pause? And then we find ourselves all enslaved to P.R.C.-mediated A.I.?

Fair enough. Asking for a unilateral pause is a rough ask if you take the stakes sufficiently seriously, and think things are close enough that if you pause you would potentially lose. But perhaps we can get into a sufficiently strong position, as we do in AI 2027. Or we can get China to follow along, which Vance seems open to. I’ll take ‘I’d do it if it was needed and China did it too’ as an opening bid, so long as we’re willing to actually ask. It’s a lot better than I would have expected – he’s taking the situation seriously.

Vance: One thing I’ll say, we’re here at the Embassy in Rome, and I think that this is one of the most profound and positive things that Pope Leo could do, not just for the church but for the world. The American government is not equipped to provide moral leadership, at least full-scale moral leadership, in the wake of all the changes that are going to come along with A.I. I think the church is.

This is the sort of thing the church is very good at. This is what the institution was built for in many ways, and I hope that they really do play a very positive role. I suspect that they will.

It’s one of my prayers for his papacy, that he recognizes there are such great challenges in the world, but I think such great opportunity for him and for the institution he leads.

If the Pope can help, that’s great. He seems like a great dude.

As a reminder, if you’re wondering how we could possibly keep track of data centers:

A zombie challenge that refuses to go away is ‘these people couldn’t possibly believe the claims they are making about AI, if they did they would be doing something about the consequences.’

I understand why you would think that. But no. They wouldn’t. Most of these people really do believe the things they are saying about AI maybe killing everyone or disempowering humanity, and very definitely causing mass unemployment, and their answer is ‘that’s not my department.’

The originating example here is one of the most sympathetic, because (1) he is not actively building it, (2) he is indeed working in another also important department, and (3) you say having unlimited almost free high quality doctors and teachers like it’s a bad thing and assume I must mean the effect on jobs rather than the effect on everyone getting education and health care.

Unusual Whales: Bill Gates says a 2-day work week is coming in just 10 years, thanks to AI replacing humans ‘for most things,’ per FORTUNE.

Today, proficiency in medicine and teaching is “rare,” Gates noted, saying those fields depend on “a great doctor” or “a great teacher.” But in the next 10 years, he said, “great medical advice [and] great tutoring” will be widely accessible and free, thanks to advances in AI.

Bill Gates says AI will replace doctors and teachers in 10 years.

James Rosen-Birch: The people who make these claims don’t believe it in any meaningful way.

If they did, there would be a lot more emphasis on building the social safety nets and mechanisms of redistribution to make it possible. And support for a slow tapering of work hours.

But there isn’t.

Kelsey Piper: I think this is too optimistic. there are people who I believe sincerely think they’ll displace almost all jobs by automation and are just going “and it’s not my job to figure out what happens after that” or “well if the AIs do kill us all at least we had a good run”

it’s tempting to call people insincere about their beliefs when they are taking what seem to be unreasonable risks given their beliefs but I think reasonably often they’re sincere and just not sure what to do about it.

Catherine: i think it is underestimated how often solvable problems become intractable because everyone in a position to do anything about them goes “oh well I’ll pass off the hot potato to the next guy by then!”

I do think Bill Gates, given he’s noticed for a long time that we’re all on track to die, should have pivoted (and still could pivot!) a substantial portion of his foundation towards AI existential risk and other AI impacts, as the most important use of marginal funds. But I get it, and that’s very different from when similar talk comes from someone actively working to create AGI.

Emmett Shear: The blindingly obvious proposition is that a fully independently recursive self-improving AI would be the most powerful [tool or being] ever made and thus also wildly dangerous.

The part that can be reasonably debated is how close we are to building such a thing.

Tyler Cowen clarifies (if I’m parsing this correctly) that he doesn’t think it’s crazy to think current AIs might be conscious, but that it is crazy to be confident that they are conscious, and that he strongly thinks that they are not (at least yet) conscious. I notice I continue to be super confused about consciousness (including in humans) but to the extent I am not confused I agree with Tyler here.

A good way of describing how many people are, alas, thinking we will create superintelligence and then have it all work out. Gabriel explains some reasons why that won’t work.

Gabriel: There is an alignment view that goes:

– LLMs look nice

– This means they are aligned

– If we use them to align further AIs, they’ll be aligned too

– We can do this up to superintelligence

In this article, I explain why this view is wrong.

There are many definitions for alignment. The one that I use is “An entity is aligned with a group of people if it reliably acts in accordance with what’s good for the group“.

What’s good might be according to a set of goals, principles, or interests.

The system might be an AI system, a company, markets, or some group dynamics.

Intention Alignment is more of an intuition than a well-defined concept. But for the purpose of this article, I’ll define it as “An entity is aligned in its intentions with a group of people if it wants good things for the group“.

The core thing to notice is that they are different concepts. Intention Alignment is not Alignment.

[because] Figuring out what’s good for someone is hard, even after identifying what’s good, finding out the best way to achieve it is hard, what’s good for a complex entity is multi-faceted, managing the trade-offs is hard, and ensuring that “good” evolves in a good way is hard.

[also] intention alignment is vague.

…

The Niceness Amplification Alignment Strategy is a cluster of strategies that all aim to align superintelligence (which is also sometimes called superalignment).

This strategy starts with getting an AGI to want to help us, and to keep wanting to help us as it grows to ASI. That way, we end up with an ASI that wants to help us and everything goes well.

There are quite a few intuitions behind this strategy.

We, as humans, are far from solving ASI Alignment. We cannot design an ASI system that is aligned. Thus we should look for alternatives.

Current AI systems are aligned enough to prevent catastrophic failures, and they are so because of their intentions.

Without solving any research or philosophical problem, through mere engineering, there is a tractable level of intention alignment that we can reach to have AIs align the intentions of the next generations of AIs.

We can do so all the way to ASI, and end up with an ASI aligned in its intentions.

An ASI that is aligned in its intentions is aligned period.

[Gabriel agrees with #1 and #5, but not #2, #3 or #4].

I think there are also major caveats on #5 unless we are dealing with a singleton. Even on the others, his explanations are good objections but I think you can go a lot farther about why these intentions are not this coherent or reliable thing people imagine, or something one can pass on without degrading quality with each iteration, and so on. And more than that, why this general ‘as long as the vibes are good the results will be good’ thing (even if you call it something else) isn’t part of the reality based community.

Connor Leahy: This quite accurately represents my view on why ~all current “alignment” plans do not work.

For your consideration:

Nick Whitaker: There is a funny leftist critique of tech that it’s all reprehensible trans-humanist succession planning, except the one field that is outwardly doing trans-humanist succession planning, which is fake because the tech occasionally makes mistakes.

Parmy Olson entitles her latest opinion piece on AI “AI Sometimes Deceives to Survive. Does Anybody Care?” and the answer is mostly no, people don’t care. They think it’s cute. As she points out while doing a remarkably good summary of various alignment issues given the post is in Bloomberg, even the most basic precautionary actions around transparency for frontier models are getting killed, as politicians decide that all that matters is ‘race,’ ‘market share’ and ‘beat China.’

Daniel Kokotajlo is correct that ‘the superintelligent robots will do all the work and the humans will lay back and sip margaritas and reap the benefits’ expectation is not something you want to be counting on as a default. Not that it’s impossible that things could turn out that way, but it sure as hell isn’t a default.

Indeed, if this is our plan, we are all but living in what I refer to as Margaritaville – a world sufficiently doomed, where some people say there’s a woman to blame but you know it’s your own damn fault, that honestly at this point you might as well use what time you have to listen to music and enjoy some margaritas.

What’s an example of exactly that fallacy? I notice that in Rob Henderson’s quote and link here the article is called ‘how to survive AI’ which implies that without a good plan there is danger that you (or all of us) won’t, whereas the currently listed title of the piece by Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit is actually ‘AI will change what it means to be human. Are you ready?’ with Bari Weiss calling it ‘the most important essay we have run so far on the AI revolution.’

This essay seems to exist in the strange middle ground of taking AI seriously without taking AI seriously.

Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit: Are we helping create the tools of our own obsolescence?

…

Both of us have an intense conviction that this technology can usher in an age of human flourishing the likes of which we have never seen before. But we are equally convinced that progress will usher in a crisis about what it is to be human at all.

…

AI will not create an egalitarian utopia. One thing that living with machines cannot change is our nature…Since we will all be ranked below some other entity on intelligence, we will need to find new and different outlets for status competition.

I mean, yes, obviously we are helping create the tools of our own obsolescence, except that they will no longer be something we should think about as ‘tools.’ If they stay merely ‘tools of our own obsolescence’ but still ‘mere tools’ and humans do get to sit back and sip their margaritas and search for meaning and status, then this kind of essay makes sense.

As in, this essay is predicting that humans will share the planet with minds that are far superior to our own, that we will be fully economically obsolete except for actions that depend on other humans seeing that you are human and doing things as a human. But of course humans will stay fully in control and continue to command increasingly rich physical resources, and will prosper if we can only ‘find meaning.’

If you realize these other superintelligent minds probably won’t stay ‘mere tools,’ and certainly won’t do that by default, and that many people will find strong reasons to make them into (or allow them to become) something else entirely, then you also realize that no you won’t be able to spend your time sipping margaritas and playing status games that are unanchored to actual needs.

Demoralization is the central problem in the scenario in exactly the scenario Kokotajlo warns us not to expect, where superintelligent AI serves us and makes our lives physically amazing and prosperous but potentially robs us of its meaning.

But you know what? I am not worried about what to do in that scenario! At all. Because if we get to that scenario, it will contain superintelligent AIs. Those superintelligent AIs can then ‘do our homework’ to allow us to solve for meaning, however that is best done. It is a problem we can solve later.

Any problem that can be solved after superintelligence is only a problem if it runs up against limits in the laws of physics. So we’ll still have problems like ‘entropy and the heat death of the universe’ or ‘the speed of light puts most matter out of reach.’ If it’s things like ‘how does a human find a life of meaning given we are rearranging the atoms the physically possible best way we can imagine with this goal in mind?’ then rest, Neo. The answers are coming.

Whereas we cannot rest on the question of how to get to that point, and actually survive AI while remaining in control and having the atoms get rearranged for our benefit in line with goals we would endorse on reflection, and not for some other purpose, or by the result of AIs competing against each other for resources, or for some unintended maximalist goal, or to satisfy only a small group of anti-normative people, or some harmful or at least highly suboptimal ideology, or various other similar failure modes.

There is perhaps a middle ground short term problem. As in, during a transition period, there may come a time when AI is doing enough of the things that meaning is difficult to retain for many or even most people, but we have not yet gained the capabilities that will later fully solve this. That might indeed get tricky. But in the grand scheme it doesn’t worry me.

It is amazing that The New York Times keeps printing things written by Cate Metz. As always, my favorite kind of terrible AI article is ‘claims that AI will never do [thing that AI already does].’

Cate Metz (NYT, The Worst, also wrong): And scientists have no hard evidence that today’s technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Claims of A.G.I.’s imminent arrival are based on statistical extrapolations — and wishful thinking.

According to various benchmark tests, today’s technologies are improving at a consistent rate in some notable areas, like math and computer programming. But these tests describe only a small part of what people can do.

Humans know how to deal with a chaotic and constantly changing world. Machines struggle to master the unexpected — the challenges, both small and large, that do not look like what has happened in the past. Humans can dream up ideas that the world has never seen. Machines typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before.

AI is already superhuman at recognizing irony, and at expressing empathy in practice in situations like doctor bedside manner. Humans ‘typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before’ or do something stupider that.

“The technology we’re building today is not sufficient to get there,” said Nick Frosst, a founder of the A.I. start-up Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered A.I. researcher of the last 50 years.

Guess who ‘the most revered A.I. researcher’ this refers to is?

Alexander Berger: It’s a bit funny to hype up the authority of this “AGI is not imminent” person by pointing out that he studied under Geoffrey Hinton, who is now ~100% focused on ~imminent risks from AGI

The reference link for ‘studied under’ is about how Hinton was quitting Google to spend his remaining time warning about the threat of AI superintelligence killing everyone. These people really just do not care.

Beyond that, it’s like a greatest hits album of all the relevant zombie arguments, presented as if they were overwhelming rather than a joke.

Here is a thread with Eliezer righteously explaining, as he often does, why the latest argument that humans will survive superintelligent AI is incorrect, including linking back to another.

Is it wrong to title your book ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies’ if you are not willing to say that if anyone builds it, 100% no matter what, everyone dies? Xlr8harder asked if Eliezer is saying p(doom | AGI) = 1, and Eliezer quite correctly pointed out that this is a rather ludicrous Isolated Demand for Rigor and book titles are short which is (one reason) why they almost never including probabilities in their predictions. Later in one part of the thread they reached sufficient clarity that xlr8harder agreed that Eliezer was not, in practice, misrepresenting his epistemic state.

The far more common response of course is to say some version of ‘by everyone dies you must mean the effect on jobs’ or ‘by everyone dies you are clearly being hyperbolic to get our attention’ and, um, no.

Rob Bensinger: “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superintelligent AI Would Kill Us All: No Really We Actually Mean It, This Is Not Hyperbole (Though It Is Speaking Normal Colloquial English, Not Mathematical-Logician, It’s Not A Theorem)” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.

Hell, that’s pretty close to what the book website says:

Book Website (from the book): If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.

We do not mean that as hyperbole. We are not exaggerating for effect. We think that is the most direct extrapolation from the knowledge, evidence, and institutional conduct around artificial intelligence today. In this book, we lay out our case, in the hope of rallying enough key decision-makers and regular people to take AI seriously. The default outcome is lethal, but the situation is not hopeless; machine superintelligence doesn’t exist yet, and its creation can yet be prevented.

Sean: …I presume you’re talking about the impact on jobs.

… The “Everyone dies” claim appears to be referencing the song “Kill the Boer”, which-

As a Wise Academic Elder, I can tell you this is Clearly a Psyops by Yudkowsky and Soares to make AI sound more cool and sell more AI to AI buyers. Because telling people AI will kill everyone is a super good marketing strategy in my view as an academic w no idea about money.

…What Bensinger NEGLECTS to mention is that we’re all dying a little bit every day, so we’ll all die whether we build it or not! Maximum gotcha 100 points to me.

FFS people we need to STOP talking about why AI will kill everyone and START talking about the fact that training a frontier LLM uses as much water as running an average McDonalds franchise for 2 hrs 32 minutes. Priorities ppl!!!

Can we PLEASE talk about how killing everyone erases the lived experience of indigenous peoples from the face of the computronium sphere.

I kind of hate that the “bUt WhAt AbOuT cApItAlIsM” people kind of have a point on this one.

Nonsense! As I demonstrated in my 1997, 2004, 2011 and 2017 books, Deep Learning Is Hitting A Wall.

Yanco:

Here is another case from the top thread in which Eliezer is clearly super frustrated, and I strive not to talk in this way, but the fact remains that he is not wrong (conversation already in progress, you can scroll back up first for richer context but you get the idea), first some lead-in to the key line:

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Sorry, explain to me again why the gods aren’t stepping on the squishy squirrels in the course of building their factories? There was a tame slave-mind over slightly smarter than human which built a bomb that would destroy the Solar System, if they did? Is that the idea?

Kas.eth: The ‘gods’ don’t step on the squishy squirrels because they are created as part of an existing civilization that contains not only agents like them (and dumber than them) but also many advanced “systems” that are not agents themselves, but which are costly to dismantle (and that happen to protect some rights of dumber pre-existing agents like the ‘squirrels’).

The ‘gods’ could coordinate to destroy all existing systems and rebuild all that is needed from scratch to get 100% of whatever resources are left for themselves, but that would destroy lots of productive resources that are instrumentally useful for lots of goals including the goals of the gods. The systems are ‘defended’ in the local cost-benefit sense: a system that controls X units of resources ensures Y>X resources will be wasted before control is lost (your bomb scenario is Y>>X, which is not needed and ultra-high Y/X ratios will probably not be allowed).

What systems are considered ‘secure’ at a time depend on the technology levels and local prices of different resources. It seems plausible to me for such systems to exist at all levels of technology, including at the final one where the unit of resources is free energy, and the dissipation-defense property holds for some construction by theoretical physics.

And here’s the line that, alas, summarizes so much of discourse that keeps happening no matter how little sense it makes:

Eliezer Yudkowsky: A sophisticated argument for why gods won’t squish squirrels: Minds halfway to being gods, but not yet able to take squirrels in a fight, will build mighty edifices with the intrinsic property of protecting squirrels, which later gods will not want to pay to tear down or rebuild.

Basically all sophisticated arguments against ASI ruin are like this, by the way.

I’ve heard this particular one multiple times, from economists convinced that “powerful entities squish us” scenario just *hasto have some clever hidden flaw where it fails to add in a term.

No, I am not an undergrad who’s never heard of comparative advantage.

That’s a reasonable lead-in to David Brin offering his latest ‘oh this is all very simple, you fools’ explanation of AI existential risks and loss of control risks, or what he calls the ‘Great Big AI Panic of 2025’ as if there was a panic (there isn’t) or even as much panic as there were in previous years (2023 had if anything more panic). Eliezer Yudkowsky, who he addresses later, not only is not pancing nor calling for what Brin says he is calling for, he has been raising this alarm since the 2000s.

To his great credit, Brin acknowledges that it would be quite easy to screw all of this up, and that we will be in the position of the ‘elderly grandpa with the money’ who doesn’t understand these young whippersnappers or what they are talking about, and he points out a number of the problems we will face. But he says you are all missing something simple and thus there is a clear solution, which is reciprocal accountability and the tendency of minds to be individuals combined with positive-sum interactions, so all you have to do is set up good incentives among the AIs.

And also to his credit, he has noticed that we are really dropping the ball on all this. He finds it ‘mind-boggling’ that no one is talking about ‘applying similar methods to AI’ which is an indication of both not paying close enough attention – some people are indeed thinking along similar lines – but more than that a flaw in his sci-fi thinking to expect humans to focus on that kind of answer. It is unlikely we do a dignified real attempt even at that, let alone a well-considered one, even if he was right that this would work and that it is rather obviously the right thing to investigate.

As in, even if there exist good ‘rules of the road’ that would ensure good outcomes, why would you (a sci-fi author) think our civilization would be likely to implement them? Is that what you think our track record suggests? And why would you think such rules would hold long term in a world beyond our comprehension?

The world has lots of positive-sum interactions and the most successful entities in the world do lots of positive-sum trading. That does not mean that fundamentally uncompetitive entities survive such competition and trading, or that the successful entities will have reason to cooperate and trade with you, in particular.

His second half, which is a response to Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a deeply disappointing but unsurprising series of false or irrelevant or associative attacks. It is especially disappointing to see ‘what Eliezer will never, ever be convinced of is [X], which is obviously true’ as if this was clearly about Eliezer thinking poorly and falling for ‘sci-fi cliches’ rather than a suggestion that [X] might be false or (even if [X] is true!) you might have failed to make a strong argument for it.

I can assume David Brin, and everyone else, that Eliezer has many times heard David’s core pitch here, that we can solve AI alignment and AI existential risk via Western Enlightenment values and dynamics, or ‘raising them as our children.’ Which of course are ‘cliches’ of a different sort. To which Eliezer will reply (with varying details and examples to help illustrate the point), look at the physical situation we are going to face. think about why those solutions have led to good outcomes historically, and reason out what would happen, that is not going to work. And I have yet to see an explanation for how any of this actually physically works out, that survives five minutes of thinking.

More generally: It is amazing how many people will say ‘like all technologies, AI will result or not result in [X]’ or ‘like always we can simply do [Y]’ rather than ~~go to therapy~~ consider whether that makes any physical or logical sense given how AI works, or considering whether ‘tools created by humans’ is a the correct or even a useful reference class in context.

Another conversation that never makes progress:

Rob Bensinger: There’s a lot of morbid excitement about whether the probability of us killing our families w AI is more like 50% or like 80% or 95%, where a saner and healthier discourse would go

“WAIT, THIS IS CRAZY. ALL OF THOSE NUMBERS ARE CLEARLY UNACCEPTABLE. WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?”

Flo Crivello (founder, GetLindy): A conversation I have surprisingly often:

– (friend:) I’m on the optimistic side. I think there’s only a 10-20% chance we all die because of AI

– Wait, so clearly we must agree that even this is much, much, much too high, and that this warrants immediate and drastic action?

Daniel Faggella: every day

“bro… we don’t need to govern any of this stuff in any way – its only russian roulette odds of killing us all in the next 10-15 years”

like wtf

Flo Crivello: yeah I don’t think people really appreciate what’s at stake

we’ve been handed off an insane responsibilities by the thousands of generations that came before us — we’re carrying the torch of the human project

and we’re all being so cavalier about it, ready to throw it all away because vibes

Why can we instruct a reasoning model on how to think and have it reflected in the Chain of Thought (CoT)? Brendan seems clearly correct here.

Brendan Long: This post surprised me since if we’re not training on the CoT (@TheZvi’s “Most Forbidden Technique”), why does the AI listen to us when we tell it how to think? I think it’s because reasoning and output come from the same model, so optimization pressure on one applies to both.

Latent Moss: I just realized you can give Gemini instructions for how to think. Most reasoning models ignore those, but Gemini 2.5 actually do.

Several people are asking how to do this: Sometimes it’s easy, just tell it how to format its thinking. Sometimes that doesn’t work, then it helps to reinforce the instruction. Doesn’t always work perfectly though, as you can see:

I tested 3.7 Thinking after I posted this and it works in some cases with that one too. Easier to do / works more often with Gemini though, I would still say.

James Yu: s this useful?

Latent Moss: I don’t know, but I would guess so, in the general sense that Prompt Engineering is useful, guiding the AI can be useful, a different perspective or approach is sometimes useful. Worth a try.

It seems obviously useful given sufficient skill, it’s another thing you can steer and optimize for a given situation. Also it’s fun.

This works, as I understand it, not only because of optimization pressure, but also context and instructions, and because everything bleeds into everything else. Also known as, why shouldn’t this work? It’s only a question of how strong a prior there is for it to overcome in a given spot.

I also note that this is another example of a way in which one can steer models exactly because they are insufficiently optimized and capable, and are working with limited compute, parameters and data. The model doesn’t have the chops to draw all the distinctions between scenarios, as most humans also mostly don’t, thus the bleeding of all the heuristics into places they are not intended, and are not optimizing feedback. As the model gets to more capable, and becomes more of an expert and more precise, we should expect such spillover effects to shrink and fade away.

No, Guyed did not get Grok to access xAI’s internal file system, only the isolated container in which Grok is running. That’s still not great? It shouldn’t give that access, and it means you damn well better only run it in isolated containers?

Claude finds another way to tell people to watch out for [X]-maximizers, where [X] is allowed to be something less stupid than paperchips, calling this ‘non-convergent instrumental goals,’ but what those lead to is… the convergent instrumental goals.

Joining forces with the new Pope, two Evangelical Christians write an open letter warning of the dangers of out-of-control AI and also of course the effect on jobs.

More on our new AI-concerned pope, nothing you wouldn’t already expect, and the concerns listed here are not existential.

There are two keys to saying ‘I will worry when AI can do [X]’ is to notice when AI can do [X], where often AI can already do [X] at the time of announcement.

The first is to realize when AI can indeed do [X] (again, often that is right now), and then actually worry.

The second is to pick a time when your worries can still do any good, not after that.

Affordance of Effort: I’ll start worrying about AI when it can reproduce the creaking of the wooden stairs of my childhood.

(This’ll happen sooner than expected of course, I’ll just have been processed for my carbon by that point – and whatever undiscovered element is responsible for consciousness).

So, whoops all around, then.

David Krueger: By the time you want to pause AI, it will be too late.

Racing until we can smell superintelligence then pausing is NOT A REALISTIC PROPOSAL, it is a FANTASY.

I don’t understand why people don’t get it.

People in AI safety especially.

Quick way to lose a lot of my respect.

The obvious response is ‘no, actually, pausing without being able to smell superintelligence first is (also?) not a realistic proposal, it is a fantasy.’

It seems highly plausible that the motivation for a pause will come exactly when it becomes impossible to do so, or impossible to do so without doing such immense economic damage that we effectively can’t do it. We will likely get at most a very narrow window to do this.

Thus, what we need to do now is pursue the ability to pause in the future. As in, make it technologically and physically feasible to implement a pause. That means building state capacity, ensuring transparency, researching the necessary technological implementations, laying diplomatic foundations, and so on. All of that is also a good idea for other reasons, to maintain maximum understanding and flexibility, even if we never get close to pressing such a button.

Welcome to interdimensional cable, thanks to Veo 3.

Grok decides that images of Catturd’s dead dog is where it draws the line.

Who would want that?

Ari K: WE CAN TALK! I spent 2 hours playing with Veo 3 @googledeepmind and it blew my mind now that it can do sound! It can talk, and this is all out of the box.

Sridhar Ramesh: This would only be useful in a world where people wanted to watch an endless scroll of inane little video clips, constantly switching every six seconds or so, in nearly metronomic fashion.

Oh. Right.

Sridhar Ramesh (quoting himself from 2023): I am horrified by how much time my children spend rotting their attention span on TikTok. I’ve set a rule that after every fifteen minutes of TikTok, they have to watch one hour of TV.

Also, you will soon be able to string the eight second clips together via extensions.

How it’s going.

Also how it’s going.

We don’t even have humans aligned to human preferences at home.

There is a full blog post, warning the jokes do not get funnier.

Also, did you know that You Can Just Do Math?

Lennart Heim: Yes, we do. It’s ~21GW. [From our paper here.]

You count all the AI chips produced, factor in that they’re running most of the time, add some overhead—and you got your answer. It’s a lot. And will only get more.

But you know what? Probably worth it.

Discussion about this post

AI #117: OpenAI Buys Device Maker IO Read More »

Infrared contact lenses let you see in the dark

Color blindness, infrared, materials science, nanoparticles, Neuroscience, optics, Science, Vision, visual perception / Mike M. / May 22, 2025

A new perspective

illustration showing the Preparation procedures for infrared contacts. — Preparation procedures for infrared contacts. Credit: Sheng Wang/CC BY-SA

The team tested their lenses on humans by asking subjects to detect flashing signals, akin to Morse code, in the infrared, and to identify the direction of incoming infrared light. The subjects could only perform those tasks while wearing the special contact lenses.

The authors were intrigued to find that both mice and humans were better able to discriminate infrared light compared to visible light when their eyes were closed, which they attribute to the fact that infrared light can penetrate the eyelid more effectively than visible light. They also tweaked the nanoparticles so that they could color-code different infrared wavelengths, thereby enabling wearers to perceive more details in the infrared, an adaptation that could help color-blind people perceive more wavelengths.

There are some limitations. The contact lenses are so close to the retina that they can’t really capture fine details very well, because the converted light particles tend to scatter. The team made a wearable glass version of their nanoparticle technology so wearers could get higher resolution in the infrared. And right now the lenses can only detect infrared light projected from an LED; increasing the sensitivity of the nanoparticles to pick up lower levels of infrared would address this issue.

Still, it’s a significant step. “Our research opens up the potential for non-invasive wearable devices to give people super-vision,” said co-author Tian Xue, a neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology of China. “There are many potential applications right away for this material. For example, flickering infrared light could be used to transmit information in security, rescue, encryption, or anti-counterfeiting settings. In the future, by working together with materials scientists and optical experts, we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity.”

Cell, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.04.019 (About DOIs).

Infrared contact lenses let you see in the dark Read More »

RFK Jr. calls WHO “moribund” amid US withdrawal; China pledges to give $500M

health, pandemic, Policy, robert f kennedy jr, WHO / Mike M. / May 22, 2025

“WHO’s priorities have increasingly reflected the biases and interests of corporate medicine,” Kennedy said, alluding to his anti-vaccine and germ-theory denialist views. He chastised the health organization for allegedly capitulating to China and working with the country to “promote the fiction that COVID originated in bats.”

Kennedy ended the short speech by touting his Make America Healthy Again agenda. He also urged the WHO to undergo a radical overhaul similar to what the Trump administration is currently doing to the US government—presumably including dismantling and withholding funding from critical health agencies and programs. Last, he pitched other countries to join the US in abandoning the WHO.

“I would like to take this opportunity to invite my fellow health ministers around the world into a new era of cooperation…. we’re ready to work with you,” Kennedy said.

Meanwhile, the WHA embraced collaboration. During the assembly this week, WHO overwhelmingly voted to adopt the world’s first pandemic treaty, aimed at collectively preventing, preparing for, and responding to any future pandemics. The treaty took over three years to negotiate, but in the end, no country voted against it—124 votes in favor, 11 abstentions, and no objections. (The US, no longer being a member of WHO, did not have a vote.)

“The world is safer today thanks to the leadership, collaboration and commitment of our Member States to adopt the historic WHO Pandemic Agreement,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “The Agreement is a victory for public health, science and multilateral action. It will ensure we, collectively, can better protect the world from future pandemic threats. It is also a recognition by the international community that our citizens, societies and economies must not be left vulnerable to again suffer losses like those endured during COVID-19.”

RFK Jr. calls WHO “moribund” amid US withdrawal; China pledges to give $500M Read More »

“Microsoft has simply given us no other option,” Signal says as it blocks Windows Recall

Biz & IT, microsoft, privacy, recall, Security, signal messenger, Windows / Mike M. / May 22, 2025

But the changes go only so far in limiting the risks Recall poses. As I pointed out, when Recall is turned on, it indexes Zoom meetings, emails, photos, medical conditions, and—yes—Signal conversations, not just with the user, but anyone interacting with that user, without their knowledge or consent.

Researcher Kevin Beaumont performed his own deep-dive analysis that also found that some of the new controls were lacking. For instance, Recall continued to screenshot his payment card details. It also decrypted the database with a simple fingerprint scan or PIN. And it’s unclear whether the type of sophisticated malware that routinely infects consumer and enterprise Windows users will be able to decrypt encrypted database contents.

And as Cunningham also noted, Beaumont found that Microsoft still provided no means for developers to prevent content displayed in their apps from being indexed. That left Signal developers at a disadvantage, so they had to get creative.

With no API for blocking Recall in the Windows Desktop version, Signal is instead invoking an API Microsoft provides for protecting copyrighted material. App developers can turn on the DRM setting to prevent Windows from taking screenshots of copyrighted content displayed in the app. Signal is now repurposing the API to add an extra layer of privacy.

“We hope that the AI teams building systems like Recall will think through these implications more carefully in the future,” Signal wrote Wednesday. “Apps like Signal shouldn’t have to implement ‘one weird trick’ in order to maintain the privacy and integrity of their services without proper developer tools. People who care about privacy shouldn’t be forced to sacrifice accessibility upon the altar of AI aspirations either.”

Signal’s move will lessen the chances of Recall permanently indexing private messages, but it also has its limits. The measure only provides protection when all parties to a chat—at least those using the Windows Desktop version—haven’t changed the default settings.

Microsoft officials didn’t immediately respond to an email asking why Windows provides developers with no granular control over Recall and whether the company has plans to add any.

“Microsoft has simply given us no other option,” Signal says as it blocks Windows Recall Read More »