Me and @Fran are co-hosting a podcast, The World Can Be Better! (hosted on Substack, also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube) In our first co-hosted episode we interview @finm about better futures, the intelligence explosion, and Fin's underrated post 'No ghost in the machine'.  We'll be recording more episodes soon. We're aiming to a) keep it accessible to an interested but non-specialist audience, and b) to talk to cool people who are working on making the world better. This is on top of full time jobs for both of us, so we're not promising weekly uploads or anything too fancy.  LMK in the comments or dm if there is someone you'd love to be a guest on our podcast! The ideal guest is a) doing good effectively in an interesting way and b) is down to joke around a bit. 

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.)

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.

SMBC by Zach Weinersmith is doing a great job of conveying AI Safety memes more widely. Relevant comics: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/speech https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/safe https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-17 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-15 I would love to see his take on an illustrated AI Safety book, like 'Open Borders' meets 'If anyone builds it, everyone dies'.

An AI that is to us as we are to other species does not go well for us. It needs to have better values!