A mere 8 hours in NYC and I understand why bankers hate poor people so much now. i have never seen such an underclass so barbaric, shameless, and aimlessly aggressive. My understanding of new york politics had been revolutionized.

In 48 hours, a lot has changed. The mainstream realizes China has almost caught up in AI.

The only way forward is to accelerate our own AI - a 180 on Biden's domestic policy. 🧵

https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1881938108402520469

Deepseek R1 is an advanced "reasoning" model - able to answer complicated scientific questions by chaining together long outputs.

Trump's AI Executive Order, led by @DavidSacks, is finally here.

But what does it do? 🧵 As the title suggests, this EO is a big leap in de-regulation. "We must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas"

Several of you have asked for my thoughts on Curtis Yarvin's NYT interview.

I thought it was a masterclass in a very specific kind of persuasion: disenchantment 🧵 The current moment is a moment of disenchantment for the left. Their narratives no longer sell and their control of economic, media and political institutions is on the decline.

They are afraid.

With Tiktok ban impending, is the lack of a deal now definitive proof the CCP is using it to spy on Americans?

I think so. 🧵 First, the terms of the law: Tiktok had to be sold to owners outside of a small list of enemy countries (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) OR face a ban.

How the TV created John Rawls - the modern left's greatest philosopher 🧵 Rawls described his Veil of Ignorance in his landmark work A Theory of Justice in 1971, a year after NBC Nightly News first aired.

This was no coincidence.

✨🚨: Today, the US House of Representatives released a highly-anticipated report on AI policy

with fantastics steps towards defending open source AI and little tech! 🧵 Takeaway #1: The house is set on fostering open source as a way to share and build AI for everyone - free of censorship, control, and regulatory capture.

What did the 500 page House investigation report find about COVID and abuse of power?

If only there was some way to summarize it all 🧵 1) SARS-CoV-2 most likely emerged from a laboratory or research-related accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, supported by intelligence and scientific evidence.

@SenTedCruz: Foreign agents may be pushing decel regulation in violation of Foreign Agents Registration Act!!

🧵 In additional to typical AI Doom narratives, EU bureaucrats are trying to crack down on “disinformation,” “bias and underrepresentation,” and “risks to the environment.” In short - they are trying to mandate every AI model have the sensibilities of Google Gemini.

Last week, @Alibaba_Qwen launched what promises to be the best open source code model.

Here's what the future looks like if America falls behind China in open source 🧵 When it comes to supply chains or communications, we understand why we want infrastructure to be made in America, or at least in America allies.

Importing infrastructure from China makes us vulnerable.

Mainstreaming Evidence-Based AI Policy continues with an excellent @WSJ editorial by @jasonfurman

Six rules for AI Regulation 🧵: 1. Everything has tradeoffs. If a surgery saves 999,999 people for every 1 it harms, it's still a huge gain for mankind. The same is true for AI.

Block SB1047: The definitive resource

In a sentence
If passed, SB1047 will entrench incumbents over startups, target open source, devastate California’s lead in AI, and cede rulemaking to unelected decels.

In a paragraph
SB1047 burdens developers with a mountain of compliance which will prevent startups from competing with legacy companies. It creates a new regulatory agency, the frontier model division, which will impose fees on AI developers while obstructing their research. These unelected bureaucrats will have broad powers to direct criminal liability and change regulatory standards at will. The bill’s co-sponsor, Center for AI Safety, is an extremist organization which believes AI research is likely to lead to human extinction. Consequently, the bill is designed to harm AI research itself, instead of focusing on malicious use, all while going out of its way to target open source using its derivative model standard. California owes its AI research lead to a vibrant startup economy. If we wish to keep it, California must block SB1047.

In an essay
A bill which threatens the future of startups, open source, and AI research is on its way to becoming law. Introduced by state senator Scott Wiener and co-sponsored by the SBF-funded doomersayer non-profit Center for AI Safety, SB 1047 passed the California senate on May 21st and is headed to the state assembly for a vote this August. If passed, the bill would severely restrict AI research, place asymmetric burdens on open source, and incarcerate developers who fail to predict how their AI models will be used.

The bill creates the Frontier Model Divison, a new regulatory agency within the California department of technology funded by fees to AI developers. The FMD puts developers of ‘covered models’ between a rock and a hard place: to either put themselves at risk of felony perjury by applying for a limited duty exemption or be burdened with months to years of compliance applications. The California Senate Appropriations Committee estimated they would spend “hundreds of thousands of dollars to counties for increased incarceration costs relating to the expansion of felony perjury in this bill.”

In a move against open source, SB 1047 also applies the same requirements and liabilities to developers whose models are used in a ‘derivative model’, defined as
“(A) A modified or unmodified copy of an artificial intelligence model.
(B) A combination of an artificial intelligence model with other
software. “

This means that perfectly legitimate uses of AI are held liable simply for being used in combination with malicious software. For example, take an AI which writes a simple introduction email. Alone, that AI is not harming anyone. However, if it is used to send emails in combination with a link to malware, it could be used to commit crimes covered by this bill. The AI model is being used for its intended purpose, to write emails, but because it is used in combination with malicious software, the developer could still be held liable under this definition of derivative model.

Defenders of the bill point to the covered models standard, which includes all AI models with 10^26 floating point operations of compute, or those with “similar or greater performance” on any of multiple unspecified benchmarks. Theoretically, this compute threshold is supposed to limit the bill to only cover large companies. In an open letter, State Senator Wiener argues “Our intention from the start has been for SB 1047 to allow startups to continue innovating unimpeded while imposing safety requirements only on the large and well-resourced developers building highly capable models at the frontier of AI development.”
However, since the size of models is rapidly increasing, this is a moving target that will affect more companies every year. If current model growth trends continue, this bill will likely apply to at least one model released in the next year and a wide range of models in roughly four years. A major factor behind this trend is the decreasing cost of compute, which means that current developers will be able to train larger models even if they spend the same dollar amount.

Moreover, the similar performance standard means that even startups which develop more efficient models to compete with industry leaders while avoiding the compute limit will still be subject to the same regulation.

The regulations on derivative models also mean that AI startups not working on training models independently will see the number of models available for them to modify be greatly limited.

There is still time to move in a better direction. In the US Congress, the bipartisan roadmap led by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) provides a model of prioritizing funding AI research over restricting it. Meanwhile, California risks becoming captured to an extreme ideology: Existential AI Safety funded by big tech donors such as convicted FTX founder Sam-Bankman Fried and Facebook founder Dustin Moskowitz, who believe that AI research is likely to cause human extinction.

Time after time, California has remained the playground of radical ideologies that both national parties reject. We cannot let that happen with AI. In a reading list:


by @chrislengerich

by @deanwball
by @jeremyphoward
by @1a3orn
by @AdamThierer
by @hamandcheese


and h/t @AnjneyMidha for the cartoon

https://x.com/psychosort/status/1784663936513524074

https://x.com/psychosort/status/1792674391475802461

context.fund/policy/sb_1047…
hyperdimensional.co/p/californias-…
hyperdimensional.co/p/california-s…
answer.ai/posts/2024-04-…
1a3orn.com/sub/essays-ca-…
rstreet.org/commentary/cal…
thefai.org/posts/californ…

https://x.com/JvNixon/status/1793693913984999804

The California senate bill to crush OpenAI's competitors is fast tracked for a vote. This is the most brazen attempt to hurt startups and open source yet.

🧵 This bill covers not just models with 10^26 compute, but those with SIMILAR PERFORMANCE.

This means that if GPT-5 is mildly better than GPT-4 and uses 10^26 FLOPs, any model that is similarly good is covered.

My thoughts exactly. The first order benefits of social media accumulate to the most talented and driven zoomers, but the second order benefits in health, prosperity, and comfort are distributed to everyone.

Hard for an egalitarian society to accept that, especially in kids.

https://twitter.com/tylercowen/status/1775503898112868462

The very straightforward logical conclusion of @JonHaidt's argument is that social media should be banned for girls specifically. But he probably can't say that out loud.

Google Gemini’s Woke Catechism
How Google Intentionally Created a Vehemently Anti-White AI

A thread Google released its ChatGPT competitor, Gemini. In its latest update, it added image generation to further compete with ChatGPT. This was a complete disaster. The measures Google took to finetine its model to behave according to far-left ideology was on full display.

Did you guys know there's 24-author paper by EAs, for EAs, about how Totalitarianism is absolutely necessary to prevent AI from killing everyone?

Let's go through it together 🧵 This is a beautiful paper. It is beautiful because it is a bunch of people starting from the EA position about existential risk and independently coming to the conclusion that total authoritarianism is necessary.

A day before its release, I review @RichardHanania's The Origins of Woke. It's a meticulous history of how the Civil Rights regime came into being. Equally as important, it's a blueprint for a conservatism which wins. 🧵(1/29) Many conservative conservations eventually come to the doomer question: are conservative losses because conservatives just made poor choices, or because the rules of the game are rigged against them? (2/29)

So what was this allegory about? It's about how anti-tech people have been making the same arguments about everything, for centuries. And it's about why apocalypse matters. 🧵(1/13) https://t.co/j6TnUTflWk

https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1678245287003930624

Despite the medieval context, many people pattern matched this story to capitalism. Why? It's a parallel to the cold war! (2/13)

Thread 🧵on why pretty almost every (!?) AI take is wrong. Still far shorter than the full article. (1/23)

https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1662411079987650564

AI is here. It matters. It outperforms 80% of humans in a majority of tests. It's set to create economic waves. (2/23)

Since I can post newsletter links again, time to do a summary of my time at NatCon UK 🧵
fromthenew.world/p/natcon-trave… In general everyone seems to be taking this as a propaganda event instead of an actual observation of the British political scene

Specifically this shade of purple

https://twitter.com/SpencrGreenberg/status/1660024982292791299

This is one of those "italian food bad" takes that I post on this site to troll everyone, but is also my real take