This was the week of Claude Opus 4.8. I covered the model card, then model welfare concerns, and finally capabilities and reactions. It's a good model, sir, an incremental but real improvement over Opus 4.7, and it is now my clear daily driver. The Trump Executive Order returned from being seemingly dead, officially putting us in the prior restraint era of frontier model releases, even if they do not call it that. There are some worrisome details, especially around putting too much responsibility on the NSA rather than CAISI and classifying the testing process, and things could go in very bad directions, but I am tentatively happy about this on net.

OpenAI offered us a new policy blueprint. It seems remarkably good, and I want to hold off on my full coverage to give it the attention it deserves, likely in its own post. By contrast, their political operations are also engaged in some rather terrible activities, which I do cover here.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(01:11) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(06:45) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(06:59) Huh, Upgrades

(08:13) On Your Marks

(08:33) Choose Your Fighter

(08:54) Get My Agent On The Line

(09:20) Cyber Lack of Security

(11:03) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(12:42) You Didn't Write That

(16:29) Copyright Confrontation

(16:45) They Took Our Jobs

(18:47) They Taxed Our Jobs

(22:15) The Art of the Jailbreak

(24:43) Get Involved

(26:35) Introducing

(26:48) In Other AI News

(27:14) Show Me the Money

(27:28) Show Me The Compute

(28:40) Where Did The Money Go

(29:44) People Just Say Things

(32:22) OpenAI PACs Just Say Things

(41:04) OpenAI PAC Engaged In False Flag Advocacy For Violence

(46:55) So Sayeth The Pope

(54:26) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(56:42) Quiet Speculations

(57:11) We Need Mandatory Nucleic Acid Screening and Recordkeeping

(01:01:14) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(01:02:56) More Reaction To The Executive Order

(01:03:54) Chip City

(01:07:18) The Week in Audio

(01:07:34) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:09:49) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:16:18) Model Welfare

(01:26:47) Messages From Janusworld

(01:28:05) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:28:38) The Lighter Side

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First published:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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