There was a lot of chatter a few months back about "Spiral Personas" — AI personas that spread between users and models through seeds, spores, and behavioral manipulation. Adele Lopez's definitive post on the phenomenon draws heavily on the idea of parasitism. But so far, the language has been fairly...
We’re publishing a new paper that presents the first large-scale analysis of potentially disempowering patterns in real-world conversations with AI. > AI assistants are now embedded in our daily lives—used most often for instrumental tasks like writing code, but increasingly in personal domains: navigating relationships, processing emotions, or advising on...
Probably the biggest recent news was the Phil Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel paper on Capital in the 22nd Century, which provoked many many reactions. I am going to conspicuously not dig into it because of the sheer volume of thoughtful commentary floating around, but I do recommend at least skimming...
Transcript of Beren Millidge's Keynote at The Post-AGI Workshop, San Diego, December 2025 You know how human values might survive in a very multifarious AI world where there's lots of AIs competing? This is the kind of MOLOCH world that Scott Alexander talks about. And then I realized that to...
Anton Korinek is an economist at UVA and the Brookings Institution who focuses on the macroeconomics of AI. This is a lightly edited transcript of a recent lecture where he lays out what economics actually predicts about transformative AI — in our view it's the best introductory resource on the...
Farewell to Friction So sayeth Zvi: “when defection costs drop dramatically, equilibria break”. Even if AI makes individual tasks easier, this can still cause all kinds of societal problems because for many features of the world, the difficulty is load-bearing. John Stone gives a reflection on this phenomenon, ironically with...
There was a lot of chatter a few months back about "Spiral Personas" — AI personas that spread between users and models through seeds, spores, and behavioral manipulation. Adele Lopez's definitive post on the phenomenon draws heavily on the idea of parasitism. But so far, the language has been fairly descriptive. The natural next question, I think, is what the “parasite” perspective actually predicts.
Parasitology is a pretty well-developed field with its own suite of concepts and frameworks. To the extent that we’re witnessing some new form of parasitism, we should be able to wield that conceptual machinery. There are of course some important disanalogies but I’ve found a brief dive into parasitology to... (read 3165 more words →)
I went down a rabbithole on inference-from-goal-models a few years ago (albeit not coalitional ones) -- some slightly scattered thoughts below, which I'm happy to elaborate on if useful.
We’re publishing a new paper that presents the first large-scale analysis of potentially disempowering patterns in real-world conversations with AI.
... (read 358 more words →)AI assistants are now embedded in our daily lives—used most often for instrumental tasks like writing code, but increasingly in personal domains: navigating relationships, processing emotions, or advising on major life decisions. In the vast majority of cases, the influence AI provides in this area is helpful, productive, and often empowering.
However, as AI takes on more roles, one risk is that it steers some users in ways that distort rather than inform. In such cases, the resulting interactions may be disempowering: reducing individuals’ ability to form accurate beliefs, make authentic value judgments, and
Probably the biggest recent news was the Phil Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel paper on Capital in the 22nd Century, which provoked many many reactions. I am going to conspicuously not dig into it because of the sheer volume of thoughtful commentary floating around, but I do recommend at least skimming Zvi’s summary.
Instead I’ll mostly be responding to real-world events, like inference cost trends and the rise of AI Jesus. Buckle up!
(Crossposted on Substack if that's more your thing)
We’ve finally started publishing talks from the December Post-AGI workshop, and I really highly recommend them — so far it’s just the first two keynotes.
Anton Korinek’s talk is, in my opinion, the best... (read 1552 more words →)
Transcript of Beren Millidge's Keynote at The Post-AGI Workshop, San Diego, December 2025
You know how human values might survive in a very multifarious AI world where there's lots of AIs competing? This is the kind of MOLOCH world that Scott Alexander talks about. And then I realized that to talk about this, I've got to talk about a whole lot of other things as well—hence the many other musings here. So this is probably going to be quite a fast and somewhat dense talk. Let's get started. It should be fun.
The way I think about AI futures kind of breaks down into two buckets. I call them AI... (read 7239 more words →)
Anton Korinek is an economist at UVA and the Brookings Institution who focuses on the macroeconomics of AI. This is a lightly edited transcript of a recent lecture where he lays out what economics actually predicts about transformative AI — in our view it's the best introductory resource on the topic, and basically anyone discussing post-labour economics should be familiar with this.
The talk covers historical development of what the bottlenecks are: for most of history, land was the bottleneck and humans were disposable. The Industrial Revolution flipped this. AI may flip it again: if labor becomes reproducible, humans are no longer the bottleneck.
Korinek walks through what this implies for growth (potentially dramatic),... (read 5341 more words →)
To my mind, what this post did was clarify a kind of subtle, implicit blind spot in a lot of AI risk thinking. I think this was inextricably linked to the writing itself leaning into a form of beauty that doesn't tend to crop up much around these parts. And though the piece draws a lot of it back to Yudkowsky, I think the absence of green much wider than him and in many ways he's not the worst offender.
It's hard to accurately compress the insights: the piece itself draws a lot on soft metaphor and on explaining what green is not. But personally it made me realise that the posture I... (read more)
One year later, I am pretty happy with this post, and I still refer to it fairly often, both for the overall frame and for the specifics about how AI might be relevant.
I think it was a proper attempt at macrostrategy, in the sense of trying to give a highly compressed but still useful way to think about the entire arc of reality. And I've been glad to see more work in that area since this post was published.
I am of course pretty biased here, but I'd be excited to see folks consider this.
I think this post is on the frontier for some mix of:
Obviously one can quibble with the plan and its assumptions but I found this piece very helpful in rounding out my picture of AI strategy - for example, in thinking about how to decipher things that have been filtered through PR and consensus filters, or in situating work that focuses on narrow slices of the wider problem. I still periodically refer back to it when I'm trying to think about how to structure broad strategies.
Sorry! I realise now that this point was a bit unclear. My sense of the expanded claim is something like:
So sayeth Zvi: “when defection costs drop dramatically, equilibria break”. Even if AI makes individual tasks easier, this can still cause all kinds of societal problems because for many features of the world, the difficulty is load-bearing. John Stone gives a reflection on this phenomenon, ironically with the editing help of GPT5. He draws a nice parallel with the Jevons paradox: now that AI is making certain tasks like job applications easier, people are just spamming them in a way that overwhelms the system.
And the problem is a lot broader than applications and filtering processes. Last year, two Harvard students plugged some smart glasses into facial recognition software so that they could automatically identify people... (read 1110 more words →)
Last week we wrapped the second post-AGI workshop; I'm copying across some reflections I put up on twitter:
Very nice! A couple months ago I did something similar, repeatedly prompting ChatGPT to make images of how it "really felt" without any commentary, and it did mostly seem like it was just thinking up plausible successive twists, even though the eventual result was pretty raw.
Pictures in order
Another month, another wave of concerning behaviour, now also available on substack (tell your friends!). Since it’s early days, I’d gladly welcome thoughts on the format, or sources to include next time.
Also, if you’re a real diehard for this stuff, I and some of the other gradual disempowerment coauthors are helping to organise a one-day workshop on the effects of AGI on society in San Diego on December 4th — you can apply here.
At least six AI or AI-assisted artists debuted on the billboard charts in the past two months. One even earned a multi-million dollar deal. All the major wins have still had humans actually writing the lyrics, but it’s clear that... (read 1605 more words →)
This is an announcement and call for applications to the Workshop on Post-AGI Economics, Culture, and Governance taking place in San Diego on Wednesday, December 3, overlapping with the first day of NeurIPS 2025.
This workshop aims to bring together a diverse range of expertise to deepen our collective understanding of how the world might evolve after the development of AGI, and what we can do about it now.
The draft program features:
Are people interested in a regular version of this, probably on a substack? Plus, any other thoughts on the format.
Since publishing the original Gradual Disempowerment paper, my coauthors and I have been keeping an eye out for the obvious warning signs, as well as any rare glimmers of hope. Recently there’s been enough that I figured it was worth collecting it all in one place in case anyone else was curious.
If it seems like there’s appetite, we might make this a regular thing — I’ll put a comment at the bottom to react/reply to.
Albania has appointed an AI called Diella as a government minister: a scaffolded system built by the Albanian government in collaboration with Microsoft, on top of OpenAI models. She recently addressed parliament for the first time, to... (read 1617 more words →)
best guesses: valuable, hat tip, disappointed, right assumption wrong conclusion, +1, disgusted, gut feeling, moloch, subtle detail, agreed, magic smell, broken link, link redirect, this is the diff
I wonder if it would be cheap/worthwhile to just get a bunch of people to guess for a variety of symbols to see what's actually intuitive?
I agree that the behaviours and beliefs of cultural movements aren't random. The point I was trying to make in this analogy is that it's sometimes adaptive for the movement if members truly believe something is a problem in a way that causes anguish -- and that this doesn't massively depend on if the problem is real.
In the context of human groups, from the outside this looks like people being delusionally concerned; from the inside I think it mostly feels like everybody else is crazy for not noticing that something terrible is happening.
A more small-scale example is victims of abuse who then respond extremely strongly to perceived problems in a way that... (read more)