rahulxyz's Shortform
Jan 26, 20252
rahulxyz
72
1
19
Yes, I agree with that. I'm not claiming that knowing about it stops you from wanting ice cream.
I'm claiming that if the concept was hardwired into our brains, evolution would have had an easy time optimizing us directly to want "inclusive genetic fitness" rather than wanting ice cream.
i.e - we wouldn't want ice cream at all but reason from first principles what we should eat based on fitness.
Just finished reading "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies". I had a question that seems like an obvious one, but one I didn't see addressed in the book, maybe someone can help:
The main argument in the book is the analogy to humans. Evolution "wanted" us to maximize genetic fitness, but it didn't get what it trained for. Instead, it created humans who love ice cream and condoms even though they reduce our genetic fitness.
With AGI, we're on track to do something similar - we won't get an AI aligned to human interests even though we do RLHF or any other such simple training or shaping to an AI, it'll end up wanting... (read more)
Replying toSoftware Engineering Leadership in Flux
Seems mostly true. There's also a group of people flailing around trying to fit it in their workflows because all the top tech companies are saying it's the next big thing.
I notice lots of LARPing too with adding the word "AI" to everything hoping that will unlock some new avenues.
> The big struggle is to even start using AI coding assistant tools. Lots of teams just don’t use them at all, or use them in very limited ways. People leading these teams know they are going to lose if they don’t change but are struggling to get their orgs to let them.
It seems to me 25-50% of developers are using some form of AI-assisted coding. Did you notice that the beaureacracy of their companies was not allowing their developers to use coding assistants?
This post here might change your perspective on the purpose of advertising
https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/
I think there are 3 ways to think about AI and lot of confusion seems to happen because the different paradigms are talking past each other. The 3 paradigms I see on the internet & when talking to people:
Paradigm A) AI is a new technology like the internet / smartphone / electricity - this seems to be mostly held by VC's / enterpreneurs / devs that think this will unlock a whole new set of apps like AI:new apps like smartphone:Uber or internet:Amazon
Paradigm B) AI is a step change in how humanity will work. Similarly to the agricultural revolution that led to the change in how large society could get and GDP... (read more)
I made the same comment on the original post. I really think this is a blindspot for US-based AI analysis.
China has smart engineers, as much as DM, OpenAI etc. Even the talent in a lot of these labs is from China originally. With a) immigration going the way it is, b) the ability to coordinate massive resources as a state, subsidies, c) potentially invading Taiwan, d) how close DeepSeek / Qwen models seem to be and the rate of catchup, e) how uncertain we are about hardware overhand (again, see deepseek training costs) etc, I think we should put at least a 50% chance of China being ahead in the next year.
Replying toAI 2027: What Superintelligence Looks Like
My initial reaction - A lot of AI related predictions are based on "follow the curve" predictions, and this is mostly doing that. With a lack of more deeper underlying theory on the nature of intelligence, I guess that's all we get.
If you look at the trend of how far behind China is to the US, that has gone from 5 years behind 2 years ago, to maybe 3 months behind now. If you follow that curve, it seems to me that China will be ahead of the US by 2026 (even with the chip controls, and export regulations etc - my take is you're not giving them enough agency). If you... (read more)
Coming from a somewhat similar space myself, I've also had the same thoughts. My current thinking is there is no straightforward answer on how to convert dollars to impact.
I think the EA community did a really good job at that back in the day with a spreadsheet-based relatively easier way to measure impact per dollars or per life saved in the near-term future.
With AI safety / existential-risk - the space seems a lot more confused, and everyone has different models of the world, what will work, and what good ideas are. There are some people working directly on this space directly - like QURI, but IMO it's not anything close to a... (read more)
I'm very dubious that we'll solve alignment in time, and it seems like my marginal dollar would do better in non-obvious causes for AI safety. So I'm very open to funding something like this in the hope we get a AI winter / regulatory pause etc.
I don't know if you or anyone else has thought about this, but what is your take on whether this or WBE is the more likely chance to getting done successfully? WBE seems a lot more funding intensive, but also possible to measure progress easier and potentially less regulatory burdens?
If RL becomes the next thing in improving LLM capabilities, one thing that I would bet on becoming big is computer-use in 2025. Seems hard to get more intelligence with just RL (who verifies the outputs?), but with something like computer use, it's easy to verify if a task has been done (has the email been sent, ticket been booked etc..) that it's starting to look to more to me like it can do self-learning.
One thing that's left AI still fully not integrated into the rest of the economy is simply that the current interfaces were built for humans and moving all those takes engineering time / effort etc.
I'm fairly sure the... (read more)
Deepseek R1 could mean reduced VC investments into large LLM training runs. They claim to have done it with ~6M. If there’s a big risk of someone else coming out with a comparable model at 1/10th the cost, then there’s no moat in OpenAI in the long run. I don’t know how much the VC / investors buy the ASI as an end goal and even what the pitch would be. They’re probably looking at more prosaic things like moats and growth rates, and this may mean reduced appetite for further investment instead of more.
This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.
Yes mostly agree. Unless the providers themselves log all responses and expose some API to check for LLM generation, we're probably out of luck here, and incentives are strong to defect.
One thing I was thinking about (similar to i.e - speedrunners) is just making a self-recording or screenrecording of actually writing out the content / post? This probably can be verified by an AI or neutral third party. Something like a "proof of work" for writing your own content.