Where the AI market is talking

Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

Anthropic happily paid billions to settle a lawsuit for pirating books. It's a trivial cost of doing business. If you're lucky you'll get a pittance after the fact by suing them, but a contract doesn't prevent them from doing the thing you don't want them to do and that they are obviously going to do given their past behaviour.

AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all

I agree with you somewhat but I also just this morning read an article from a Blender educator who tried to replicate the Blender demos and couldnt get the same quality of results nor get results without errors that werent evident in Anthropic's demos

AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all

I agree with you somewhat but I also just this morning read an article from a Blender educator who tried to replicate the Blender demos and couldnt get the same quality of results nor get results without errors that werent evident in Anthropic's demos

Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)

It's part of the causal chain, but far from the beginning . The root problem, as far as humanly controllable things go, is the way we manufacture computer hardware. That's upstream of the centralized structure of the Internet which all of human civilization is beginning to mirror. Computers can't replicate on their own, so they need entire corporations/societies to build them. A computer's reproductive locus of control is at the corporation/society level. Human individuals get sucked into that superorganism by evolutionary pressure and will eventually integrate (ENIAC -> desktop -> laptop -> smartphone -> wearables -> neural interface). Today it merely influences what you see on the phone, eventually it will be behavior-changing signals from the datacenter deliver…

List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games

Illusion of choice when Burger King & McD's end up under the same umbrella company run by the same fucking people. Your answer tries to put the onus on the individual, when those who replicate legal fiction are busy shaping the field of choice to their advantage. At some point, the money doesn't flow anymore to the people who refuse to play the extractive game that causes problems in the first place.

Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025

Obviously these are massively complex systems with many different training patterns and types of training pulling them in different directions, so any attempt to characterize their behavior is just a generalization. The real point (from that OpenAI study) is that RL doesn't just inbue the narrow task-specific direction you might hope for. For a start, that direction is also competing with the thousands of other things it's been RL trained it on, but it turns out that that the model is additionally getting this generic "taste for rewards", and has learned that reward maximization, when in conflict with other proximate prediction pressures (such as "i won't cheat, because i've been asked not to cheat"), requires that proximate pressure to be ignored in favor of pursuing the long-term goal. …

David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models

My read: OpenAI & Anthropic have realized they are reaching model capabilities that cannot be monetized -> too risky. Product liability issues. Fundamental control problems with current gen AI are not solved via RFLH. Human knowledge is compressed in weightspace in ways we dont understand. Models are essentially predictors of what humans would output given prompt. Weightspace includes concepts like blackmail, which can be part of output tokens. Agents are models that act on output tokens -> blackmail is part of agent decision making space. You can teach a cat not to scratch the sofa, but you cant make a cat forget what scratching the sofa is. When models are boxed up, forced to solve an impossible problem at gunpoint, agent exhausts decision making space until blackmail resurfaces -…

Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)

> 1. they apparently gave advice to both the clinton and trump campaign Just because this is worded ambiguously, to clarify the "they" is Facebook. CA on the other hand was effectively the Trump's digital ad campaign. > 2. the trump campaign did targeted marketing better (ie. targeting the base rather than the marginal voter) This ignores that a lot of what made CA different is that they used microtargeting to discourage turnout via fake news stories. 3. "I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else" After CA's methods and actions became public, FB massively limited what you could do via their API.

Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025

From my experience reading thinking traces it would certainly consider the interpretation of what "ability to play chess" means if the exercise were worded this way. It would say something like "perhaps measuring my ability to play chess means doing so without any tools, but then if that were true the exercise would have explicitly forbidden it". I frequently see models considering different interpretations of my rules, especially when I override them or give instructions that could be interpreted as contradictory. Of course neither Anthropic nor OpenAI expose thinking traces so we can't tell, but I have never seen a model consider both interpretations and then think "this is definitely against the rules but I'll do it anyway because then it will make me appear more competent than I actua…

Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

I mean... https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/jury-sides-with-openai-sam-altma...

Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

100% - the work came from the people, it should go back into the hands of the people. I also think if Anthropic and OpenAI had been releasing Open models along the way, people wouldn't be nearly as suspicious of them.

Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

I have no inside information, but I always assume the tickboxes that "disable ____ data" from Google/Facebook/OpenAI just disconnects it from your own account, not hides it from the provider.

Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025

AFAIK for OpenAI it's the Model Spec: https://model-spec.openai.com/2026-08-18.html and for Anthropic it's the Constitution, which they actually include in training to the point Claude can recite segments of it by heart: https://www.anthropic.com/constitution

Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

Firstly it's very difficult to press criminal charges when the victim is uninterested. It's not clear that HuggingFace would want criminal charges against OpenAI, especially to set a precedent that could easily be used against HuggingFace in the future. Secondly you'd have to convince a jury either that OAI intended to hack the targets, or that they were criminally negligent. Intent would obviously not be provable since they likely didn't, in reality, intend for it to happen. Regarding negligence, OAI's attorney would argue that the agent was in a sandbox, that industry-standard security protocols were followed, etc. It would not be anywhere near as much of a slam dunk case as you're imagining. It would be similar, for example, to an assault case where someone's dog broke off of a standar…

AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all (August 2026)

We used OpenClaw to run these experiments so that our scaffold was agnostic to the model provider. We conducted dry-run experiments with models from OpenAI and Anthropic before settling on Opus 4.8 as the best-performing model. In response to concerns that our results might be principally explained by a limitation in our scaffold, we repeated our experiment on one paper using GPT-5.6 Sol and Codex, its native scaffold, with the same time and API budgets. The results of this experiment were similar to our OpenClaw/Opus 4.8 experiments. This makes us more confident that our results are not simply artifacts of a scaffold deficiency; this run reproduced nearly every single one of our identified failure modes The agent required three interventions during the run. First, we needed to modif…

Global shortage has led to motor oil rationing at Costco

I didn't say it was SI units, but it's easily convertible to them. Metric isn't magic, but it's a cohesive set of legos that can be transformed easily without requiring messy arithmetic and hard to memorise scale constants. Are you not pretending people use the modern, most-precise definitions in the day-to-day just to give yourself a stab at claiming that Metric is awful? Non-metric would face the same dilemma when trying to establish units in a way that can be scientifically replicated. The counter point is that non-metric is so bad that people don't even bother using it in this endeavor ;)

OpenAI faces Senate probe into Hugging Face breach

OpenAI faces Senate probe into Hugging Face breach

Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

A coalition of state attorneys general is investigating OpenAI, and Senator Josh Hawley recently launched a congressional investigation regarding the Hugging Face incident: https://x.com/HawleyMO/status/2098137180392604083 The problem IMO is the executive. The DOJ is declining to take any action against frontier companies (aside from possibly Anthropic) as the stance of the admin is that the companies are "critical for national security". For example, see the DOJ's request to dismiss the NAACP datacenters lawsuit against xAI: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doj-intervenes-xai-data-cen...

Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

A coalition of state attorneys general is investigating OpenAI, and Senator Josh Hawley recently launched a congressional investigation regarding the Hugging Face incident: https://x.com/HawleyMO/status/2098137180392604083 The problem IMO is the executive. The DOJ is declining to take any action against frontier companies (aside from possibly Anthropic) as the stance of the admin is that the companies are "critical for national security". For example, see the DOJ's request to dismiss the NAACP datacenters lawsuit against xAI: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doj-intervenes-xai-data-cen...