The Progress Forum

• Wizards and prophets of AI. I posted this for comment, then decided to rewrite it, then ended up posting the core argument of the new essay as a Twitter thread, then got replies to that thread, and now I don’t know what to write anymore. I’ll post something about this on the blog at some point, but if you want my half-baked, outdated thoughts, you can read those links
• AMA: Allison Duettmann, Foresight Institute
• AMA: Mark Khurana, author of The Trajectory of Discovery: What Determines the Rate and Direction of Medical Progress?

Opportunities

• Loyal (longevity) hiring a full stack software engineer (via @celinehalioua). Also they are looking for founders/execs to speak at their onsite
• Nat Friedman wants to meet people who are doing technical alignment work

News

• RIP Gordon Moore. “We at Intel remain inspired by Moore’s Law and intend to pursue it until the periodic table is exhausted.” Gordon’s 1965 paper: “Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers… and personal portable communications equipment.” Also, the story of the microprocessor
• Last Energy to sell 24 small modular nuclear reactors to UK, $5/W (via @Atomicrod)
• Law firm Cooper & Kirk accuses regulators of an attack on crypto

Announcements

• Discord for discussion of futuristic tech: nanotech, longevity, etc. (via @kanzure)
• A proposal for NEPA reform (by @elidourado)
• ChatGPT plugins (via @sama and @gdb). Example: processing a video clip
• Worldcoin launches “proof of personhood” (via @sama)
• Lindy, the AI assistant putting your life on autopilot

Interviews

• Sam Altman on Lex Fridman
• Marc Andreessen interviewed by Erik Torenberg
• World’s Fair Co. founder Cam Wiese
• Nat Friedman interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel
• Ilya Sutskever (cofounder of OpenAI), also by Dwarkesh
• Nathan Myhrvold interviewed by Shane Parrish

AI

• Bill Gates: AI is the most impressive technology since the GUI (via @BillGates)
• Scott Aaronson on AI risk (or see my excerpt)
• How do you integrate your API with an AI? You just give it your docs
• A GPT prompt: “no-nonsense teacher with an ambitious, self-directed student”. And another GPT prompt, to cut the caveats and pleasantries
• AGI and nanotech as “the last two big general technologies”
• “GPT-4 saved my dog’s life”
• Ben Evans on the Jevons Paradox applied to AI
• GPT has trouble counting backwards (or maybe it’s just Markdown?)

Other links

• Lithium, once expensive, is cheap again. Hooray for markets (via @scottlincicome)
• 50 years of the supersonic flight ban (by @elidourado)
• The evidence for smartphones / social media harming kids’ mental health is weak

Queries

• Evidence for GPT-4 building a world model?
• Good examples of tight 1-page proposals in simple language for technical projects?
• Quantifying scientific efficiency in time elapsed from when a discovery becomes possible to when it happens?

Quotes

• “The shapes arise!” Walt Whitman and the poetry of progress. Also, Hart Crane
• The evolution of our buildings: from exoskeletons to internal skeletons
• The amazing talent center of early 16th-century Florence
• The use of mathematics in biology was important as early as 1616
• “They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” 1540s edition
• “A crisis of values confronted liberals in the mid-thirties”
• “Industrialization is the only hope of the poor”
• “What matters in the long run is whether growth is sustained”
• In 2006, Steven Johnson predicted what happened during covid
• America used to care about running trains on time
• “On average, buildings that are being blasted with a firehose right now are significantly more likely to be on fire than the typical structure, but this does not mean we should ban fire departments as a clear fire hazard”

More tweets

• Biomolecular glass (!)
• A positive vision for biology: “what we’ll create and do once all disease is gone”
• Twitter created a socially acceptable way to publish a single sentence
• Collider bias

Fun

• Midjourney is confused about how humans hold things