I had a great time at LessOnline. It was a both a working trip and also a trip to an alternate universe, a road not taken, a vision of a different life where you get up and start the day in dialogue with Agnes Callard and Aristotle and in a strange combination of relaxed and frantically go from conversation to conversation on various topics, every hour passing doors of missed opportunity, gone forever.

Most of all it meant almost no writing done for five days, so I am shall we say a bit behind again. Thus, the following topics are pending at this time, in order of my guess as to priority right now:

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Outline:

(02:34) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(04:42) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(07:45) Fun with Image Generation

(08:00) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(11:01) They Took Our Jobs

(11:49) Get Involved

(12:30) Someone Explains It All

(12:59) Introducing

(13:15) In Other AI News

(16:16) Covert Influence Operations

(19:09) Quiet Speculations

(22:30) Samuel Hammond on SB 1047

(26:40) Reactions to Changes to SB 1047

(36:59) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(43:36) That's Not a Good Idea

(47:18) The Week in Audio

(49:17) Rhetorical Innovation

(56:12) Oh Anthropic

(01:04:18) Securing Model Weights is Difficult

(01:06:20) Aligning a Dumber Than Human Intelligence is Still Difficult

(01:09:07) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:09:50) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:11:11) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:11:37) The Lighter Side

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First published:

Source:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.