If you ever need a classic rap song to communicate your desire to be more influential in animal philanthropy, just say: I wish I was a little bit taller I wish I was a Bollard

Invitation for bets I’m willing to bet that Anthropic’s revenue growth over the next year will be slower than its revenue growth over the last 3 years. I proposed a specific bet here. Anyone who wants can offer to take the other side of that bet. Or you can make a counteroffer. I’m also willing to make a longer-term bet that the AI industry is in a bubble. I proposed a specific bet for that, too, here. Feel free to offer to take the other side of that bet or make a counteroffer. I’d also be open to other bets. It seems pointless to bet about whether AGI or transformative AI will be deployed within the next 5-10 years, yet, for the heck of it, I would agree to a bet against that, too. (I’ll make bets for small, nominal amounts of money to be donated to the winner’s charity of choice, since the practical and legal problems with betting are too large otherwise.) I’d also bet against the deployment of 100,000+ SAE Level 5 fully autonomous vehicles in North America within the next 3 years, if anyone has a strong opinion on that. I’d make a similar bet against the deployment of autonomous humanoid robots in North American households, although we’d have to come up with some specific resolution criteria. Similarly, I’d bet against any significant level of near-term labour automation by LLMs or generative AI. Or against LLMs becoming capable of performing all sorts of specific tasks well. On any of these topics, I’m also open to invitations for a public dialogue. (More on that topic here.)

I sometimes hear complaints from non-native English speakers about how banning undisclosed LLM use in writing is unfair. Possible pro-tip for non-native English speakers who want to write well but don't want to sound like AI: Just write an article you want to write in your native language, polish it until you're proud of it in your native language, and then ask a frontier LLM (Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, ChatGPT 5.5 Pro) to translate it to English, while reasonably adhering to your original intent and writing. In my experience and tests, the LLMs are sufficiently faithful in their translations that even the naivest possible way to do this (just one-to-one translation by a LLM without any further changes) would not trigger Pangram. I strongly suspect they wouldn't trigger human allergies either[1]. I suspect if you're upfront about your process, most people would be happy to read your translated words as well. Just explicitly state at the top of your post that you wrote the whole thing in Chinese/French/Romanian/Portuguese (with link to your draft) and you asked an LLM to translate it. If enough people do this, I think we'll have a natural new equilibrium where some people opt out of LLM-mediated translations, but the vast majority of your old readers will come back. I think this is also much healthier and less tenuous than the current equilibrium where people clearly use LLMs to formulate their writing, lie about it, and then when confronted hide behind "non-native speaker" as an excuse. (Optionally, you can ask the LLM to explain the non-trivial translation choices it made in its translations, which can help you with deciding whether to approve of the changes or not, and also learn English more in the mean-time. Though my guess is that it's not strictly necessary.) [1] (I've asked native speakers of other languages to test this, one for Swahili and one for Chinese. Both agreed that the results sound generic compared to the original writing but do not sound like

Snopes did pretty detailed secondary reporting on my analysis of AI use in the recent encyclical.  I think it's pretty good. Covers some stuff I didn't include in my original analysis, and their conclusion was similar to mine, maybe slightly less strong. Less technical than my post, and imo not as funny, but also significantly shorter (1600 words), includes some replications and also added some details I didn't know as of time of writing. Overall a good piece, potentially worth reading/skimming either in addition to or instead of my original analysis.

One reflection I've had in the whole "AI use in the encyclical" affair is to slightly increase my trust in traditional media, especially non-American traditional media, and slightly decrease my trust in social media/new media. I tried my best to promote my analysis as legibly and reasonably as I could and focused on logos rather than ethos: I didn't frame my article with institutional affiliations and intentionally chose not to include obvious, flashy, but irrelevant signaling. Stuff I could've done but explicitly chose not to: get an ML professor to cosign my analysis, publish on Arxiv instead of Substack and LessWrong, highlight my past ML experience at Google, etc.  The traditional media response were somewhere between neutral and positive. There were some disappointments (eg a famous media org won't run the article without confirmation from a "primary source" -- aka the Vatican which is of course a non-starter). But mostly the traditional media just looked at the analysis and said "yeah looked reasonable." and either ran it as "Unconfirmed but seems right" or just "Unconfirmed, Period." Which seems fine. On the other hand, the social media attacks were very aggro. People just didn't seem to entertain it at all, many without reading it. And I got personally attacked a ton[1]. Also it wasn't picked up at all[2] by new media afaict (unless you count Russia Today as new media). This is exactly the type of story you might expect new media to be good for: story of institutional decay in the Old Guard, investigation by someone without credentials carefully laying out an epistemically rigorous and systematic case. And traditional media was happy to report it[3], social media kept yelling at me, and new media just got crickets. 1. ^ Don't worry, I didn't take it personally at all. Very much a "yapping of chihuahua in a tiny purse" moment. 2. ^ This is a slight exaggeration. Other than Russia Today a bunch of small AI news aggregators (AI news i