I call the section ‘Money Stuff’ but as a column name that is rather taken. There has been lots to write about on this front that didn’t fall neatly into other categories. It clearly benefited a lot from being better organized into subsections, and the monthly roundups could benefit from being shorter, so this will probably become a regular thing.

They Took Our Jobs

Quite the opposite, actually. Jobs situation remains excellent.

Whatever else you think of the economy, layoffs are still at very low levels, the last three years are the lowest levels on record, do note that the bottom of this chart is 15,000 rather than zero even without adjusting for population size.

Ford says it is reexamining where to make cars after the UAW strikes. The union responded by saying, essentially, ‘f*** you, pay me’:

“Maybe Ford doesn’t need to move [...]

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Outline:

(00:24) They Took Our Jobs

(01:34) Company Formations Seem Permanently Higher

(02:06) Whoops

(03:29) Vibecession Via Healthcare Spending

(05:20) Vibecession Look at All the Nice Things and Good Numbers

(08:24) Vibecession via Inappropriate Price Index

(13:15) Vibecession Anyway

(15:04) Vibecenssion via Interest Rates

(16:37) Prediction Markets

(17:46) The Efficient Market Hypothesis is False

(18:09) Failed Markets in Everything

(23:08) Failed Markets in Transparency

(25:43) Unprofitable Markets in Air Travel

(27:49) Unprofitable Markets in Ground Transportation

(32:10) Detroit, Georgianism

(33:29) California Approaches the Tax Tipping Point

(34:00) Taxing On the Margin

(35:39) Occupational License as Security Bond

(38:14) The Work From Home Debate

(38:50) Patrick McKenzie Explains it All

(41:15) In Brief

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Last week Sam Altman spent two hours with Lex Fridman (transcript). Given how important it is to understand where Altman's head is at and learn what he knows, this seemed like another clear case where extensive notes were in order.

Lex Fridman overperformed, asking harder questions than I expected and going deeper than I expected, and succeeded in getting Altman to give a lot of what I believe were genuine answers. The task is ‘get the best interviews you can while still getting interviews’ and this could be close to the production possibilities frontier given Lex's skill set.

There was not one big thing that stands out given what we already have heard from Altman before. It was more the sum of little things, the opportunity to get a sense of Altman and where his head is at, or at least where he is presenting it as [...]

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Hopefully, anyway. Nvidia has a new chip.

Also Altman has a new interview.

And most of Inflection has new offices inside Microsoft.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:18) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(10:28) Clauding Along

(12:45) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(16:11) Fun with Image Generation

(21:00) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(24:20) They Took Our Jobs

(37:17) Generative AI in Games

(40:20) Get Involved

(41:38) Introducing

(51:03) Grok the Grok

(54:43) New Nvidia Chip

(56:40) Inflection Becomes Microsoft AI

(58:11) In Other AI News

(01:04:18) Wait Till Next Year

(01:11:57) Quiet Speculations

(01:20:03) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(01:25:20) The Week in Audio

(01:26:03) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:31:11) Read the Roon

(01:34:01) Pick Up the Phone

(01:36:17) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:45:14) Polls Show People Are Worried About AI

(01:52:29) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:54:57) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(02:04:57) The Lighter Side

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Like the the government-commissioned Gladstone Report on AI itself, there are two sections here.

First I cover the Gladstone Report's claims and arguments about the state of play, including what they learned talking to people inside the labs. I mostly agree with their picture and conclusions, both in terms of arguments and reported findings, however I already mostly agreed. If these arguments and this information is new to someone, and the form of a government-backed report helps them process it and take it seriously, this is good work. However, in terms of convincing an already informed skeptic, I believe this is a failure. They did not present their findings in a way that should be found convincing to the otherwise unconvinced.

Second I cover the Gladstone Report's recommended courses of action. It is commendable that the report lays out a concrete, specific and highly detailed proposal. A [...]

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Outline:

(01:13) Executive Summary of Their Findings: Oh No

(07:13) Gladstone Makes Its Case

(14:42) Why Is Self-Regulation Insufficient?

(17:26) What About Competitiveness?

(21:12) How Dare You Solve Any Problem That Isn’t This One?

(22:44) What Makes You Think We Need To Worry About This?

(23:57) What Arguments are Missing?

(27:45) Tonight at 11: Doom!

(30:51) The Claim That Frontier Labs Lack Countermeasures For Loss of Control

(35:42) The Future Threat

(38:45) That All Sounds Bad, What Should We Do?

(45:11) The Key Proposal: Extreme Compute Limits

(51:15) Implementation Details of Computer Tiers

(56:16) The Quest for Sane International Regulation

(01:04:16) The Other Proposals

(01:11:24) Conclusions, Both Theirs and Mine

(01:15:40) What Can We Do About All This?

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AI developments have picked up the pace. That does not mean that everything else stopped to get out of the way. The world continues.

Do I have the power?

Emmett Shear speaking truth: Wielding power is of course potentially dangerous and it should be done with due care, but there is no virtue in refusing the call.

There is also an art to avoiding power, and some key places to exercise it. Be keenly aware of when having power in a given context would ruin everything.

Natural General Lack of Intelligence in Tech

Eliezer Yudkowsky reverses course, admits aliens are among us and we have proof.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: To understand the user interfaces on microwave ovens, you need to understand that microwave UI designers are aliens. As in, literal nonhuman aliens who infiltrated Earth, who believe that humans desperately want to hear piercingly [...]

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Outline:

(00:40) Natural General Lack of Intelligence in Tech

(04:47) Bad International News

(05:20) Dopamine Culture

(07:56) Customer Service

(08:53) Environmentalists Sabotaging the Environment

(09:11) Government Working

(17:41) On the Media

(20:13) Crime and Punishment

(27:40) Good News, Everyone

(33:27) The Time That is Given to Us

(39:56) Hotel Six Hundred

(41:10) While I Cannot Condone This

(48:00) Societal Tendencies

(49:56) Such Sufferin

(54:23) The Good and Bad of Academia

(56:31) Think of the Children

(01:01:38) Was Democracy a Mistake?

(01:04:30) The Philosophy of Fantasy

(01:07:26) Sports Go Sports

(01:19:51) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

(01:37:50) The Virtue of Silence

(01:38:02) The Lighter Side

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Introducing Devin

Is the era of AI agents writing complex code systems without humans in the loop upon us?

Cognition is calling Devin ‘the first AI software engineer.’

Here is a two minute demo of Devin benchmarking LLM performance.

Devin has its own web browser, which it uses to pull up documentation.

Devin has its own code editor.

Devin has its own command line.

Devin uses debugging print statements and uses the log to fix bugs.

Devin builds and deploys entire stylized websites without even being directly asked.

What could possibly go wrong? Install this on your computer today.

Padme.

The Real Deal

I would by default assume all demos were supremely cherry-picked. My only disagreement with Austen Allred's statement here is that this rule is not new:

Austen Allred: New rule:

If someone only [...]

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Outline:

(00:02) Introducing Devin

(00:48) The Real Deal

(03:27) The Metric

(04:48) What Could Possibly Go Subtly Wrong?

(07:29) What Could Possibly Go Massively Wrong for You?

(09:36) If This is What Skepticism Looks Like

(12:33) What Happens If You Fully Automate Software Engineering

(16:24) What Could Possibly Go Massively Wrong for Everyone?

(18:24) Conclusion: Whistling Past

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Things were busy once again, partly from the Claude release but from many other sides as well. So even after cutting out both the AI coding agent Devin and the Gladstone Report along with previously covering OpenAI's board expansion and investigative report, this is still one of the longest weekly posts.

In addition to Claude and Devin, we got among other things Command-R, Inflection 2.5, OpenAI's humanoid robot partnership reporting back after only 13 days and Google DeepMind with an embodied cross-domain video game agent. You can definitely feel the acceleration.

The backlog expands. Once again, I say to myself, I will have to up my reporting thresholds and make some cuts. Wish me luck.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:52) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(06:17) Claude 3 Offers Mundane Utility

(11:57) Prompt Attention

(17:28) Clauding Along

(27:19) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(31:33) GPT-4 Real This Time

(32:22) Copyright Confrontation

(33:34) Fun with Image Generation

(37:49) They Took Our Jobs

(40:38) Get Involved

(43:53) Introducing

(51:55) Inflection 2.5

(55:04) Paul Christiano Joins NIST

(01:01:38) In Other AI News

(01:07:40) Quiet Speculations

(01:23:06) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(01:31:34) The Week in Audio

(01:31:44) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:41:23) A Failed Attempt at Adversarial Collaboration

(01:48:37) Spy Versus Spy

(01:52:38) Shouting Into the Void

(01:54:55) Open Model Weights are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This

(01:56:37) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:59:49) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(02:00:39) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(02:07:39) The Lighter Side

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TikTok Might Get Banned Soon

This attempt is getting reasonably far rather quickly, passing the House with broad support.

Alec Stapp: TikTok bill to remove influence of CCP:

– passed unanimously out of committee

– GOP leadership says they’ll bring it to the floor for a vote next week

– Biden says he’ll sign the bill if passed

Can’t believe it's taken this long, but should be done soon.

It's been obvious for years that we shouldn’t let China control a black-box algorithm that influences >100 million American users.

JSM: Can this stand up to court scrutiny though?

Alec Stapp: Yes.

It then passed the house 352-65, despite opposition from Donald Trump.

Manifold is as of now around 72% that a bill will pass, similar to Metaculus. Consensus is that it is unlikely that ByteDance will divest. They [...]

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Outline:

(00:03) TikTok Might Get Banned Soon

(02:48) Execution is Everything

(10:33) RTFB: Read The Bill

(19:57) How Popular is a TikTok Ban?

(20:15) Reciprocity is the Key to Every Relationship

(23:14) Call Your Congressman

(28:25) TikTok Data Sharing

(34:41) TikTok Promoting Chinese Interests

(45:41) Tyler Cowen Opposes the Bill

(48:23) Trump Opposes the Bill

(53:40) To Be Clear You Can Absolutely Go Too Far

(54:09) Conclusion

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It is largely over.

The investigation into events has concluded, finding no wrongdoing anywhere.

The board has added four new board members, including Sam Altman. There will still be further additions.

Sam Altman now appears firmly back in control of OpenAI.

None of the new board members have been previously mentioned on this blog, or known to me at all.

They are mysteries with respect to AI. As far as I can tell, all three lack technical understanding of AI and have no known prior opinions or engagement on topics of AI, AGI and AI safety of any kind including existential risk.

Microsoft and investors indeed so far have came away without a seat. They also, however, lack known strong bonds to Altman, so this is not obviously a board fully under his control if there were to be another crisis. They now [...]

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Outline:

(02:34) The New Board

(11:27) The Investigation Probably Was Not Real

(19:09) The New York Times Leak and Gwern's Analysis of It

(30:29) What Do We Now Think Happened?

(36:51) Altman's Statement

(39:26) Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley's Statement

(40:44) The Case Against Altman

(47:48) The Case For Altman and What We Will Learn Next

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The big news this week was of course the release of Claude 3.0 Opus, likely in some ways the best available model right now. Anthropic now has a highly impressive model, impressive enough that it seems as if it breaks at least the spirit of their past commitments on how far they will push the frontier. We will learn more about its ultimate full capabilities over time.

We also got quite the conversation about big questions of one's role in events, which I immortalized as Read the Roon. Since publication Roon has responded, which I have edited into the post along with some additional notes.

That still leaves plenty of fun for the full roundup. We have spies. We have accusations of covert racism. We have Elon Musk suing OpenAI. We have a new summary of simulator theory. We have NIST, tasked with AI regulation, literally struggling [...]

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Outline:

(01:03) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(09:25) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(11:52) LLMs: How Do They Work?

(15:50) Copyright Confrontation

(17:34) Oh Elon

(18:47) We realized building AGI will require far more resources than we’d initially imagined

(19:59) We and Elon recognized a for-profit entity would be necessary to acquire those resources

(21:49) We advance our mission by building widely-available beneficial tools

(24:46) DNA Is All You Need

(27:21) GPT-4 Real This Time

(30:11) Fun with Image Generation

(33:16) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(34:16) They Took Our Jobs

(35:20) Get Involved

(36:41) Introducing

(37:19) In Other AI News

(44:48) More on Self-Awareness

(47:05) Racism Remains a Problem for LLMs

(50:33) Project Maven

(53:35) Quiet Speculations

(01:00:01) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(01:07:19) The Week in Audio

(01:09:21) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:18:46) Another Open Letter

(01:22:33) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:26:34) Security is Also Difficult, Although Perhaps Not This Difficult

(01:34:04) The Lighter Side

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