Ilya Sutskever, perhaps the most influential proponent of the AI "scaling hypothesis," just told Reuters that scaling has plateaued. This is a big deal! This comes on the heels of a big report that OpenAI's in-development Orion model had disappointing results. 🧵 I predicted something along these lines back in June

(Full piece is here: garrisonlovely.substack.com/p/is-deep-lear…) x.com/370323535/stat…

I'm not conceited enough to think I'll actually sway many people, but wanted to go on the record saying:

If you live in a swing state, please vote for Harris. Your vote is not an expression of your personal identity or an endorsement of the genocide in Gaza. (Short 🧵) It's a means of influencing the world and making one event more likely than others.

I also like the framing of: who would you rather be organizing against? Who's more likely to actually be movable by your advocacy?

For years, I've been tracking whether Miles Brundage was still at OpenAI. He has a long track record of caring deeply about AI safety and ensuring that AGI goes well for the world.

Earlier today, he announced his resignation. 🧵 Buried in his announcement was the news that his AGI readiness team was being disbanded and reabsorbed by others (at least OpenAI's third such case since May).

I did a deep dive into Brundage's post, reading between the lines, and exploring why now?

garrisonlovely.substack.com/p/end-of-an-er…

🚨I’m in the New York Times!!🚨

AI is weird. Many of the people who pioneered the tech, along with the leaders of all the top AI companies, say that it could threaten human extinction. In spite of this, it’s barely regulated in the US.

Whistleblower protections typically 🧵 only cover people reporting violations of the law, so AI development can be risky without being illegal.

National Republicans have promised to block meaningful AI regulation, so I make the case for a narrow federal law to protect AI whistleblowers...

nytimes.com/2024/09/29/opi…

This article is full of bombshells. Excellent reporting by @dseetharaman.

The biggest one: OpenAI rushed testing of GPT-4o (already reported), released the model and then subsequently determined the model was too risky to release! I had a scenario like this in a forthcoming... piece, as a hypothetical relayed to me by someone who used to work at OpenAI, but then it turns out it actually already happened, according to this reporting. Bc all of this is governed by voluntary commitments, OpenAI didn't violate any law...

wsj.com/tech/ai/open-a…

OpenAI whistleblower William Saunders is testifying before a Senate subcommittee today (so is Helen Toner and Margaret Mitchell). His written testimony is online now. Here are the most important parts 🧵 Saunders, like many others at the top AI companies, think artificial general intelligence (AGI) could come in “as little as three years.” He cites OpenAI's new o1 model, which has surpassed human experts in some challenging technical benchmarks for the first time...

New piece! A particular difficulty in covering the fight over SB 1047 has been just how many of the characterizations of CA's AI safety bill by critics are just plain wrong. If you just do “he said, she said” journalism, you’ll end up propagating lies 🧵 Many of these critics genuinely believe what they’re saying, bc so many of these lies are downstream of official seeming documents signed by lawyers and op-eds by ‘serious people’ in big outlets. Their most common origin? Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)...
transformernews.ai/p/lies-and-dec…

110+ employees and alums of top-5 AI companies just published an open letter supporting SB 1047, aptly called the "world's most controversial AI bill." 3-dozen+ of these are current employees of companies opposing the bill.

Check out my coverage of it in the @sfstandard 🧵 The bill is with Newsom, who has until Sept 30 to decide its fate.

The letter, published early today, is the latest dramatic development in a long line of them in the historic fight over SB 1047...

sfstandard.com/2024/09/09/ai-…

Seems like more people should be talking about how a libertarian charter city startup funded by Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel is trying to bankrupt Honduras.

Próspera is suing Honduras to the tune of $11B (GDP is $32B) and is expected to win, per the NYT 🧵 Basically, the libertarian charter city startup Próspera made a deal with a corrupt, oppressive post-coup govt in Honduras to get special economic status. This status was the result of court-packing and is wildly unpopular. A democratic govt is trying to undo the deal…

What does hundreds of thousands of dollars of corporate campaign contributions buy you? Members of Congress parroting industry talking points under Congressional letterhead, at least. There’s a serious problem with almost every single part of this letter 🧵 6 California Reps took the very unusual step of asking Gavin Newsom to veto a state-level AI safety bill, SB 1047. I just spent the last few weeks reporting on this bill and the tech lobby reaction to it for The Nation…[1]

Back in 2018, I anonymously wrote my first magazine story for @curaffairs about my former employer, McKinsey. I analyzed how McKinsey accelerates and exacerbates basically every negative trend of capitalism, weaving in some of my personal experience along the way. 🧵 I'm excited to finally attach my name to it. My story in the Nation is very personal and this essay complements it well. It paints the bigger picture of McKinsey's overall role in the world and how it ended up doing the work behind the headlines.

I finally got a chance to tell a story that I’ve been keeping to myself for 6+ years. My first fulltime job was as a consultant at McKinsey. At the time, it seemed like a dream job—a way to work with brilliant people, learn a lot, and maybe even improve things from the inside 🧵 My first ever cover story is out in @thenation and does something unprecedented: to my knowledge, no former McKinsey employee has ever publicly discussed project specifics with real client names. The firm is intensely secret, above and beyond competitor consultancies. McKinsey...

In my debut for @voxdotcom, I discuss why my year of pescetarianism was a moral mistake. The evidence for fish sentience is way stronger than I previously believed: some fish have passed the self-recognition test, team up w/ other species to hunt...
bit.ly/3mZrZnT flirt via art, have friends, and exhibit other complex social behavior.

Many of the fish we eat are carnivorous, so swapping out calories from land animals for fish will increase the # of animal deaths you're responsible for by orders of magnitude...