[edit: why does this have so many more upvotes than my actually useful shortform posts]

Someone mentioned maybe I should write this publicly somewhere, so that it is better known. I've mentioned it before but here it is again:

I deeply regret cofounding vast and generally feel it has almost entirely done harm, not least by empowering the other cofounder, who I believe to be barely better than e/acc folk due to his lack of interest in attempting to achieve an ought that differs from is. I had a very different perspective on safety then and did not update in time to not do very bad thing. I expect that if you and someone else are both going to build something like vast, and theirs takes three weeks longer to get to the same place, it's better to save the world those three weeks without the improved software. Spend your effort on things like lining up the problems with QACI and cannibalizing its parts to build a v2, possibly using ideas from boundaries/membranes, or generally other things relevant to understanding the desires, impulses, goals, wants, needs, objectives, constraints, developmental learning, limit behavior, robustness, guarantees, etc etc of mostly-pure-RL curious-robotics agents.

incidentally, I've had many conversations with GPT4 where I try to get it to tell me what difference it thinks justifies its (obviously reward-induced and therefore at-least-somewhat-motivated-reasoning) claim that it's not like humans, and the only justification it consistently gives is continuous-time lived experience vs discrete-time secondhand textual training data. I feel like video models and especially egocentric robotics video models don't have that difference...