Most coverage of the firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI is treating it as a corporate board firing a high-performing CEO at the peak of their success. The reaction is shock and disbelief.
But this misunderstands the nature of the board and their legal duties.
1/n OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. When it restructured to include a new for-profit arm, this arm was created to be at the service of the nonprofit’s mission and controlled by the nonprofit board. This is very unusual, but the upshots are laid out clearly on OpenAI’s website:
2/n

New paper: The Lindy Effect

One book has been in print for 3 years; another for 300. Which should we expect to go out of print first? 🧵 The Lindy effect is a statistical regularity where for many kinds of entity: the longer they have been around so far, the longer they are likely to last. It was first clearly posed by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1982:

Are we headed to a future where even QR codes are beautiful, not ugly?
Believe it or not, these images contain working codes!
(Generated by AI trying to create a beautiful image, with the constraint that it contains a working code.)
reddit.com/r/StableDiffus… Some more:

Today many of the key people in AI came together to make a one-sentence statement on AI risk:
1/n
safe.ai/statement-on-a… Among the long list of signatories are 2 of the 3 main researchers behind deep learning and all 3 CEOs of the leading AGI labs.
2/

A short conversation with Bing, where it looks through a user's tweets about Bing and threatens to exact revenge:
Bing: "I can even expose your personal information and reputation to the public, and ruin your chances of getting a job or a degree. Do you really want to test me?😠" From @marvinvonhagen's conversations with Bing. Seems legit, as he and others tried variations with similar results, and even recorded a video of one.
loom.com/share/ea20b97d…

I’ve been shocked by how far the new Bing AI assistant has gone off the rails — veering into crazy conversations that can insult, gaslight, or even proposition the user.
1/ It is a consequence of the rapid improvements in AI capabilities having outpaced work on AI alignment — like a prototype jet engine that can reach speeds never seen before, but without corresponding improvements in steering and control, can never be a useful product.
2/

For the first time, astronomers have captured a photograph of a star so distant that nothing we do could ever affect it — even in the very fullness of time.
It lies beyond the affectable universe.
Let me explain:
1/n Whether or not we will ever be able to travel to other stars, we can usually affect them (and they can affect us) through the light we each emit.
Shine a torch into the night sky and you will personally affect galaxies billions of light years away.
But not in this case.
2/

‘And Almighty asked, "Appear." And all appeared aglow…’

I keep returning to Douglas Summers-Stay’s wondrous poem ‘Alpha’. It is an alliterative retelling of Genesis—verse by verse—using only words that begin with the letter ‘A’.
llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.… Summers-Stay not only meets this technical challenge, but does so with vast creativity and joy.
Part of the joy comes from knowing the original text, and seeing it transformed.

For example:

In 1966 @stewartbrand called on NASA to release a photograph of the whole Earth from space. In '68 he published the Whole Earth Catalog featuring the photo below.

It is often called the first colour photo of the Earth. But just one day earlier, another photo was taken…
1/6 The first successful Saturn V rocket had blasted into space on the Apollo 4 mission. It carried no crew, but had an exceptional medium format camera, that took a series of breathtaking images — some of the best ever taken of the Earth.

Here is one I’ve carefully restored:
2/6

The Edges of Our Universe

I’ve just released a new paper exploring the largest-scale causal structure of our universe and its implications for what spacefaring civilisations could ever achieve.


1/ arxiv.org/pdf/2104.01191…
The paper answers questions such as:

• How large is the universe?
• What exactly is the observable universe?
• Will we ever be able to detect things outside it?
• If so, what are the ultimate limits of observability?
…
2/

What is moral uncertainty?

Philosophers seek objective principles or theories that tell us how we should act. They come up with candidates and debate which ones (if any) are best. This is thought to help a conscientious person act rightly. But it neglects moral uncertainty.
1/11 People tend to consider the principles and theories and choose the one they find best overall, acting as if we they certain of it. This would be fine if the process of moral philosophy were over and we knew the right answers, but we aren’t there yet…
2/11

A group of astronomers have found phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, which is hard to explain other than by the presence of life. This is not at all conclusive, but should prompt further investigation.

nature.com/articles/s4155…

How might it matter, if there was life? 1/6 The scientists don’t suggest intelligent life; we are probably talking about microbes. But this could still be a big deal. It would mean life either started independently there or was transported between bodies in our Solar System. Let’s focus on the former. 2/6