When I posted this thread about how o3's extreme costs make it less impressive than it first appears, many people told me that this wasn't an issue as the price would quickly come down.
I checked in on it today, and the price has gone *up* by 10x.
1/n

https://twitter.com/tobyordoxford/status/1881661919133859841

Here is the revised ARC-AGI plot. They've increased their cost-estimate of the original o3 low from $20 per task to $200 per task. Presumably o3 high has gone from $3,000 to $30,000 per task, which is why it breaks their $10,000 per task limit and is no longer included.
2/n

It is stunning to see how Meta illegally downloaded billions of pages of copyrighted books and articles from Russian pirate sites when training Llama 3. And not only that, but Meta also directly redistributed that copyrighted data to others: They knew this was illegal and were worried about being arrested if they did it:

New paper:
Inference Scaling Reshapes AI Governance
The shift from scaling up the pre-training compute of AI systems to scaling up their inference compute may have profound effects on AI governance.
🧵
1/ The nature of these effects depends crucially on whether this new inference compute will be used during external deployment or as part of a more complex training programme within the lab.
2/

Inference Scaling and the Log-x Chart:
2024 saw a switch in focus from scaling up the compute used to train frontier AI models to scaling up the compute used to run them.
How well is this inference scaling going?
1/ You could think of it as a change in strategy from improving the quality of your employees’ work via giving them more years of training in which acquire skills, concepts and intuitions to improving their quality by giving them more time to complete each task.
2/

I've just published a paper positing a new kind of fundamental physical law bounding the rate at which any physical quantity can grow or converge.
1/🧵 The idea is quite simple, drawing on a classic argument from computer science.
Almost all modern computers and programming languages can compute the same mathematical functions. These are called the Turing-computable functions.
2/

DISSECTING A BLACK HOLE
I’ve designed a new kind of diagram for understanding black holes — and made a beautiful poster to show it off.
The key idea is to show the many different layers of a black hole, each with their own unique properties.
Let's dive in!
1/🧵 I call this a ‘record diagram’.
By slicing through all of these spheres, we see the black hole laid out like a record on a turntable, displaying all its different tracks — both the classic hits that may have blurred together in lower fidelity diagrams and some deep cuts.
2/

I’ve just released a new paper. The idea arose from a conversation with @DAcemogluMIT about the limitations of today’s generative AI systems.
🧵 1/ They are good at interpolating between different examples in their training data and perhaps even extrapolating further in a direction they’ve seen.
But they appear to be unable to head off in novel directions — to break free of the subspace where all their training data lies.
2/

The James Webb Space Telescope has started capturing images of galaxies so far away that they are causally disconnected from the Earth — nothing done here or there could ever interact. 🧵
1/ The latest of these, JADES-GS-z14-0, was discovered at the end of May this year. It is located 34 billion light years away — almost three quarters of the way to the edge of the observable universe.
2/

Since the launch of ChatGPT, there has been a lot of loose talk about AI having passed the Turing Test (or even 'blown past' it). But this was premature and probably incorrect.
A new paper tests whether GPT-4 passes the Turing test, with mixed results. Let's explore:
1/n

https://twitter.com/camrobjones/status/1790766472458903926

First, let's be clear on a few things about the Turing Test.
1) Pretty much everyone agrees it doesn't constitute a definition or a necessary or sufficient condition for intelligence.
2/n

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