AI #61: Meta Trouble

The week’s big news was supposed to be Meta’s release of two versions of Llama-3.

Everyone was impressed. These were definitely strong models.

Investors felt differently. After earnings yesterday showed strong revenues but that Meta was investing heavily in AI, they took Meta stock down 15%.

DeepMind and Anthropic also shipped, but in their cases it was multiple papers on AI alignment and threat mitigation. They get their own sections.

We also did identify someone who wants to do what people claim the worried want to do, who is indeed reasonably identified as a ‘doomer.’

Because the universe has a sense of humor, that person’s name is Tucker Carlson.

Also we have a robot dog with a flamethrower.

Changes in College Admissions

This post brings together various questions about the college application process, as well as practical considerations of where to apply and go. We are seeing some encouraging developments, but mostly the situation remains rather terrible for all concerned.

On Llama-3 and Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast with Zuckerberg

It was all quiet. Then it wasn’t.

AI #60: Oh the Humanity

Many things this week did not go as planned.

Humane AI premiered its AI pin. Reviewers noticed it was, at best, not ready.

Devin turns out to have not been entirely forthright with its demos.

OpenAI fired two employees who had been on its superalignment team, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov for allegedly leaking information, and also more troubliningly lost Daniel Kokotajlo, who expects AGI very soon, does not expect it to by default go well, and says he quit ‘due to losing confidence that [OpenAI] would behave responsibly around the time of AGI.’ That’s not good.

Nor is the Gab system prompt, although that is not a surprise. And several more.

On the plus side, my 80,000 Hours podcast finally saw the light of day, and Ezra Klein had an excellent (although troubling) podcast with Dario Amodei. And we got the usual mix of incremental useful improvements and other nice touches.

Childhood and Education Roundup #5

For this iteration I will exclude discussions involving college or college admissions.

There has been a lot of that since the last time I did one of these, along with much that I need to be careful with lest I go out of my intended scope. It makes sense to do that as its own treatment another day.

Monthly Roundup #17: April 2024

As always, a lot to get to. This is everything that wasn’t in any of the other categories.

Bad News

You might have to find a way to actually enjoy the work.

Greg Brockman (President of OpenAI): Sustained great work often demands enjoying the process for its own sake rather than only feeling joy in the end result. Time is mostly spent between results, and hard to keep pushing yourself to get to the next level if you’re not having fun while doing so.

Yeah. This matches my experience in all senses. If you don’t find a way to enjoy the work, your work is not going to be great.

AI #59: Model Updates

Claude uses tools now. Gemini 1.5 is available to everyone and Google promises more integrations. GPT-4-Turbo gets substantial upgrades. Oh and new model from Mistral, TimeGPT for time series, and also new promising song generator. No, none of that adds up to GPT-5, but everyone try to be a little patient, shall we?

RTFB: On the New Proposed CAIP AI Bill

A New Bill Offer Has Arrived

Center for AI Policy proposes a concrete actual model bill for us to look at.

Medical Roundup #2

Previously: #1

It feels so long ago that Covid and health were my beat, and what everyone often thought about all day, rather than AI. Yet the beat goes on. With Scott Alexander at long last giving us what I expect to be effectively the semi-final words on the Rootclaim debate, it seemed time to do this again.

On the 2nd CWT with Jonathan Haidt

It was clear within the first ten minutes this would be a rich thread to draw from. In my childhood and education roundups, and of course with my own kids, I have been dealing with the issues Haidt talks about in his new book, The Anxious Generation. Ideally I’d also have read the book, but perfect as enemy of the good and all that.

I will start with my analysis of the podcast, in my now-standard format. Then I will include other related content I was going to put into my next childhood roundup.