Got back last night from the World AI Conference in Shanghai. Megathread with photos/videos/thoughts from the conf itself + giant expo next door (ended up going back to the expo 3 times bc there were so many interesting booths)

First up: robots robots robots
(yes, inc Unitree) The first couple of robots I saw were not very impressive: this fella (from Zhiyuan 智元机器人) had pride of place in the main conference venue, but his handshake game could use some work

Spearphishing PSA—looks like there's a concerted attack on AI safety/governance folks going around. Be wary of calendar links via DM, and *never* give a 2-factor auth code over the phone.

I almost got caught by this—got a phone call last week, but figured out it was sus. 🧵

https://twitter.com/46897695/status/1944789290438828280

Here's what they did:
* Called me at the number associated with my X account
* Identified themselves as being "from X, the site formally known as Twitter"
* Said they had seen a request to change the phone number associated with the account and asked if it was me - I said no

Bad DeepSeek takes flying thick and fast today. Thread of good ones instead:

(all subject to Matt's correct meta-take, caveat lector ⬇️ )

https://twitter.com/matthewclifford/status/1883811321495613588

Basics

https://twitter.com/deanwball/status/1883142201414222113

It was an honor to testify yesterday before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Technology, Privacy, and the Law.

Short 🧵 on my testimony: The topic of the hearing was "insider perspectives" on AI, so I focused on a big disconnect I see between east coast & west coast conversations about AI: how seriously to take the possibility that very advanced—and possibly very dangerous—AI systems are built quite soon.

New piece out with my colleague Zach Arnold, laying out some basic common-sense policies that people with a wide range of views on AI could get behind:

-Building govt capacity
-Better measurement
-Independent auditing
-Disclosure
-Incident tracking
-Liability

🧵: To date, advocates with difft takes on which AI harms & risks matter most have tended to feud rather than join forces. There are important debates to be had about where AI is going, but fights over those questions have obscured opps to agree on basic policy building blocks.

Today, I officially resigned from the OpenAI board.

Thank you to the many friends, colleagues, and supporters who have said publicly & privately that they know our decisions have always been driven by our commitment to OpenAI’s mission.
1/5 Much has been written about the last week or two; much more will surely be said. For now, the incoming board has announced it will supervise a full independent review to determine the best next steps.
2/5

Thread of my quick reactions to the AI executive order:

(the full text doesn't appear to be out yet, so this is based on the factsheet for now - but I may add more thoughts later once the full thing is up)
whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/… 1) Glad to see the very first point is exactly what we rec'd in a recent blog post: requiring companies to share info about so-called "frontier AI" systems. Curious how they're defining which models count.

More context in our post from last week:
cset.georgetown.edu/article/regula…

New piece from @jennywxiao, @jjding99 and me pushing back on the claim that we can't regulate AI because that would just let China pull ahead. This is not a good argument!

4 reasons why, though first a caveat: 🧵

https://twitter.com/ForeignAffairs/status/1664568124279070720

The caveat: In the piece we breeze past the question of whether regulating AI would actually slow down US innovation.

"We can't regulate because China" assumes that regs = slowdown, but this is far from certain! Smart regulation can be neutral or even positive for innovation.

Last week, China released a draft of regulations for generative AI - big news! There's some pretty ambitious stuff in there.

If you want to know more, see the analysis from me and seven others for DigiChina here 👇

Or if clicking away from Twitter is too big an ask, have a 🧵:

https://twitter.com/DigiChn/status/1648789382072270848

The most important thing to know is that these regulations aren't a one-off.

China has a complex and ever-growing web of laws & regulations around AI/the internet/data governance, and these slot right into that bigger picture.

For instance...

If you spend much time on AI twitter, you might have seen this tentacle monster hanging around. But what is it, and what does it have to do with ChatGPT?

It's kind of a long story. But it's worth it! It even ends with cake 🍰

THREAD: First, some basics of how language models like ChatGPT work:

Basically, the way you train a language model is by giving it insane quantities of text data and asking it over and over to predict what word[1] comes next after a given passage.
Eventually, it gets very good at this.

Thread of musings on sth I noticed recently: conversations about how we might find meaning in a post-work world heavily feature music and art... but I can't remember sports being mentioned even once. How come, when it provides so much meaning/community/joy to so many people? 1/5 Obvious answer is obvious: sports aren't mentioned because these discussions are being had by Serious Intellectuals with Serious Intellectual tastes. It's a shame though - such a good way to channel our instincts for tribalism & physical competition, especially of young men. 2/5