Linch

Linkpost from my blog (meant for a bit more general audience than LW) In a cybersecurity evaluation, OpenAI’s models, apparently autonomously and without any direct human direction, escaped their sandbox and successfully hacked a third-party tech company (HuggingFace, valued at >$4.5 billion). The process involved leveraging a zero-day exploit to...

Below are six story prompts that you might enjoy. Especially intended for my writer friends, but hopefully other people might find it fun to try writing based on one of these prompts too! The first three prompts are about AI in one capacity or another. I think the current moment...

Today I want to explain what I call “frame errors”: a third kind of mistake, distinct from logical fallacies and empirical errors. You can get every fact right and every inference valid, and still be wrong, because your framework for reasoning about the problem is structurally inadequate. In some sense,...

I'm often in debates with people about legibility and systems vs individual virtues. People often bring up Seeing Like A State, Secrets of Our Success, and other books or articles in that vein to buttress the case for metis over top-down high modernist design. I sometimes found the conversations shallow,...

In the wee hours of Memorial Day, my friends and I stayed up past 4:30 AM California time to listen to the announcement of Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. We were excited albeit sleepy, eagerly anticipating the event...

EDIT July 21: Latest version on Substack Here's a dynamic I’ve seen at least a dozen times: Alice: Man that article has a very inaccurate/misleading/horrifying headline. Bob: Did you know, *actually* article writers don't write their own headlines? … But what I care about is the misleading headline, not your...

My newest hobby is fine-tuning a Chinese open-source LLM to generate Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (originally by Borges). The ambition isn’t to write a so-called “Borgesian” story “like” Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote but to fully generate, token-by-token, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Importantly, this can’t...