The fun, as it were, is presumably about to begin.

And the break was fun while it lasted.

Biden went out with an AI bang. His farewell address warns of a ‘Tech-Industrial Complex’ and calls AI the most important technology of all time. And there was not one but two AI-related everything bagel concrete actions proposed – I say proposed because Trump could undo or modify either or both of them.

One attempts to build three or more ‘frontier AI model data centers’ on federal land, with timelines and plans I can only summarize with ‘good luck with that.’ The other move was new diffusion regulations on who can have what AI chips, an attempt to actually stop China from accessing the compute it needs. We shall see what happens.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Prompt o1, supercharge education.
Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Why do email inboxes still suck?
What AI Skepticism Often Looks Like. Look at all it previously only sort of did.
A Very Expensive Chatbot. Making it anatomically incorrect is going to cost you.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Keep assassination agents underfunded.
Fun With Image Generation. Audio generations continue not to impress.
They Took Our Jobs. You can feed all this through o1 pro yourself, shall we say.
The Blame Game. No, it is not ChatGPT’s fault that guy blew up a cybertruck.
Copyright Confrontation. Yes, Meta and everyone else train on copyrighted data.
The Six Million Dollar Model. More thoughts on how they did it.
Get Involved. SSF, Anthropic and Lightcone Infrastructure.
Introducing. ChatGPT can now schedule tasks for you. Yay? And several more.
In Other AI News. OpenAI hiring to build robots.
Quiet Speculations. A lot of people at top labs do keep predicting imminent ASI.
Man With a Plan. PM Kier Starmer takes all 50 Matt Clifford recommendations.
Our Price Cheap. Personal use of AI has no meaningful environmental impact.
The Quest for Sane Regulations. Weiner reloads, Amodei genuflects.
Super Duper Export Controls. Biden proposes export controls with complex teeth.
Everything Bagel Data Centers. I’m sure this ‘NEPA’ thing won’t be a big issue.
d/acc Round 2. Vitalik Buterin reflects on a year of d/acc.
The Week in Audio. Zuckerberg on Rogan, and several sound bites.
Rhetorical Innovation. Ultimately we are all on the same side.
Aligning a Smarter...

Joseph Miller's Shortform

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Joseph Miller's Shortform

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