Arjun Panickssery

I’ve seen a number of posts where people complaining about AI slop say that the author should have just posted the prompt. > LLMs write fine enough if you tell them exactly what you want to say and to whom and how, the whole structure of argument and motivation and...

I’ve seen a number of posts where people complaining about AI slop say that the author should have just posted the prompt. > LLMs write fine enough if you tell them exactly what you want to say and to whom and how, the whole structure of argument and motivation and...

Often I see people claim it’s essential for America to win the AI race against China (in whatever sense) for reasons like these: * “What is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It’s because we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves” (Alec...

This is a cross-post (with permission) of Arctotherium's post from yesterday: "LLM Exchange Rates, Updated." It uses a similar methodology to the CAIS "Utility Engineering" paper, which showed e.g. "that GPT-4o values the lives of Nigerians at roughly 20x the lives of Americans, with the rank order being Nigerians >...

Audio narration available on the Substack version of this post. People often say to “write like you talk.” Paul Graham has a post titled “Write Like You Talk” where he says explicitly that written language is worse than spoken language because 1. “Written language is more complex, which makes it...

Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France’s fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe’s population (4%...

I recall seeing three “rationalist” cases for Trump: 1. Richard Ngo on Twitter and elsewhere focused on the realignment of elite coalitions, observing that “most elite institutions have become leftist monocultures” but speculating that “over the next 5–10 years Silicon Valley will become the core of the Republicans.” The left-wing...