Good article, but I'll come in in defense of the doctors. Note that I'm far more familiar with the way things work in India (a family full of gynos) but I do have a reasonable degree of familiarity with the UK and US. 

The thing is, the overwhelming majority of women who evince interest in IVF are in their middle to late 30s! The average woman, at 19, is very unlikely to even consider it.

If some unusually forward-thinking gynecologist suggested egg freezing to her, the modal response would be "wait, why are you telling me this?"  The same goes for women in their 20s, it's only in the late 20s and early 30s that egg freezing is taken seriously as a possibility. Before that, the women who are strongly pro-natal are confident that they can get kids the old fashioned way (and usually succeed) while those more lukewarm think that they still have some time and it's not a major priority. This doesn't strike me as necessarily irrational. That means that the woman you implicitly target, in their late teens or 20s, but is confident they need egg freezing, is a rare breed. But of course, if you do want to find them, LessWrong is far from the worst bet. 

I strongly doubt that even ideological uniformity would reduce inter-nation competition to zero, and I still doubt that the reduction would be meaningful. Consider that in our timeline, the Soviets and the Chinese had serious border skirmishes that could have escalated further, and did so despite considering the United States to be their primary opponent. 

Fair point. I would still say that given a specific level of technological advancement and global industrial capacity/globalization, the difference would be minimal. Consider a counterfactual: a world where Communism was far more successful and globally dominant. I expect that such a world would have had slower growth metrics than ours, perhaps they'd have developed similar transistor technology or our prowess with software engineering decades or even a century later. Conversely, they might well have had a more lax approach to intellectual property rights, such that training data was even easier to appropriate (fewer lawsuits, if any). 

Even so, a few decades or even a century is barely any time at all. It's not like we can easily tell if we're living in a timeline where humanity advanced faster or slower than it would in aggregate. They might well find themselves in precisely the same position as we do, in terms of relative capabilities and x-risk, just at a slightly different date on the calendar. I can't think of a strong reason for why a world with different ideologies to ours would have, say, differential focused on AI alignment theory without actual AI models to align. Even LessWrong's theorizing before LLMs was much more abstract than modern interpretability or capability work in actual labs (this is not the same as claiming it was useless). 

Finally, this framework still doesn't strike me as helpful in practice. Even if we had good reason to think that some other political arrangement would been superior in terms of safety, that doesn't make it very easy to pivot away. It's hard enough to get companies and countries to coordinate on AI x-risk today, if we also had to reject modern globalized capitalism in the process, I do not see that working out. That's today or tomorrow, it's easy to wish that different historical events might have lead to better outcomes, but even that isn't amenable to interventions without a time machine. 

To rephrase, you find yourself in 2026 looking at machines approaching human intelligence. That strikes you as happening very quickly. I think that even in a counterfactual world where you observed the same thing in 1999 or 2045, it wouldn't strike you as particularly different. We had a massive compute overhang before transformers came out, relative to the size of models being trained ~2017-2022. You could well be a (for the sake of argument) a Soviet researcher worrying about alignment of Communist-GPT in 2060, wishing that the capitalists had won because their ideology appeared so self-destructive and backwards that you believed it would have held back progress for centuries. We really can't know, we've only got one world to observe, and even if we knew with confidence, we can't do much about it. 

I feel like this isn't a very useful framework in practice. Do we have any reason to believe that alternate frameworks or ideologies such as communism wouldn't have lead to AGI in a counterfactual world where they were more dominant or lasted longer? The Soviets had the Dead Hand system, which potentially contributed to x-risk from "AI" due to the risk of nuclear warfare, not that the system was particularly intelligent. China is the next closest competitor after the US in the modern AI race (not that it's particularly communist in practice), and I can envision an alternate timeline where the Soviet Union survived in a communist state to the present date and also embraced modern AI. 

More damningly, by disavowing intermediary metrics, you're making the cut-off for evaluating the success of such an ideology the Heat Death of the universe. 

https://www.scuspd.gov/department/

The Supreme Court of the United States Police have allocated staffing for 198 officers, who currently represent 24 States, and 8 Countries.

That isn't a lot of men (or women) with guns. 

Depends on the painkiller. For opioids, higher doses are usually more effective for analgesia. The general approach is to start low, and then up-titrate until the patient reports the desired effect. Paracetamol vs NSAIDs vs Opioids makes it difficult to speak in broad strokes, they behave quite differently. 

>I think image models are getting good enough at fidelity that you could, hypothetically, have some random guy take pictures of an event, and then postprocess them with an image model to make the lighting and perspective better without it being visibly AI-generated. 

I have done this with the best recent models, and almost nobody has been able to tell. It is absolutely trivial to take a photo on a phone, and ask Nano Banana to "make it look like it was taken by a professional photographer using a DSLR applying expert color grading." Easy as that. 

I meant their newsletter, which I've subscribed to. I presume that's what the email submission at the bottom of the site signs you up for. 

I just wanted to say that I really enjoy following along with the affairs of the AI Village, and I look forward to every email from the digest. That's rare, I'm allergic to most newsletters. 

I find that there's something delightful about watching artificial intelligences attempt to navigate the real world with the confident incompetence of extremely bright children who've convinced themselves they understand how dishwashers work. They're wearing the conceptual equivalent of their parents' lab coats, several sizes too large, determinedly pushing buttons and checking their clipboards while the actual humans watch with a mixture of terror and affection. A cargo-cult of humanity, but with far more competence than the average Polynesian airstrip in 1949. 

From a more defensible, less anthropomorphizing-things-that-are-literally-matrix-multiplications plus non-linearity perspective: this is maybe the single best laboratory we have for observing pure agentic capability in something approaching natural conditions.

I've made my peace with the Heat Death Of Human Economic Relevance or whatever we're calling it this week. General-purpose agents are coming. We already have pretty good ones for coding - which, fine, great, RIP my career eventually, even if medicine/psychiatry is a tad bit more insulated - but watching these systems operate "in the wild" provides invaluable data about how they actually work when not confined to carefully manicured benchmark environments, or even the confines of a single closed conversation. 

The failure modes are fascinating. They get lost. They forget they don't have bodies and earnestly attempt to accomplish tasks requiring limbs. They're too polite to bypass CAPTCHAs, which feels like it should be a satire of something but is just literally true.

My personal favorite: the collective delusions. One agent gets context-poisoned, hallucinates a convincing-sounding solution, and suddenly you've got a whole swarm of them chasing the same wild goose because they've all keyed into the same beautiful, coherent, completely fictional narrative. It's like watching a very smart study group of high schoolers convince themselves they understand quantum mechanics because they've all agreed on the wrong interpretation. Or watched too much Sabine, idk. 

(Also, Gemini models just get depressed? I have so many questions about this that I'm not sure I want answered. I'd pivot to LLM psychiatry if that career option would last a day longer than prompt engineering)

Here's the thing though: I know this won't last. We're so close. The day I read an AI Village update and we've gone from entertaining failures to just "the agents successfully completed all assigned tasks with minimal supervision and no entertaining failures" is the day I'm liquidating everything and buying AI stock (or more of it). Or just taking a very long vacation and hugging my family and dogs. Possibly both. For now though? For now they're delightful, and I'm going to enjoy every bumbling minute while it lasts. Keep doing what you're doing, everyone involved. This is anthropology (LLM-pology?) gold. I can't get enough, till I inevitably do. 

(God. I'm sad. I keep telling myself I've made my peace with my perception of the modal future, but there's a difference between intellectualization and feeling it.)

>It would, for instance, never look at the big map and hypothesize continental drift. 

Millions of humans must have looked at relatively accurate maps of the globe without hypothesizing continental drift. A large number must have also possessed sufficient background knowledge of volcanism, tectonic activity etc to have had the potential to connect the dots. 

Even the concept of evolution experienced centuries or millenia of time between widespread understanding and application of selective breeding, without people before Darwin/Wallace making the seemingly obvious connection that the selection pressure on phenotype and genotype could work out in the wild. Human history is littered with a lot of low hanging fruit, as well as discoveries that seem unlikely to have been made without multiple intermediate discoveries. 

I believe it was Gwern who suggested that future architectures or training programs might have LLMs "dream" and attempt to draw connections between separate domains of their training data. In the absence of such efforts, I doubt we can make categorical claims that LLMs are incapable of coming up with truly novel hypotheses or paradigms. And even if they did, would we recognize it? Would they be capable of, or even allowed to follow up on them? 

Edit: Even in something as restricted as artistic "style", Gwern raised the very important question of whether a truly innovative leap by an image model would be recognized as such (assuming it would if a human artist made it) or dismissed as weird/erroneous. The old deep dream was visually distinct from previous human output, yet I can't recall anyone endorsing it as an AI-invented style.