It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

  • 7 Posts
  • 433 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023
  • Architeuthis@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026English
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    2 days ago

    The Inside story of Leverage Research

    This should be interesting, it’s about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though it might be a bit too culty. Don’t know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.

    edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.

    Also the Leverage article was meant to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she seems to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:

    I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.

    edit edit: Why can’t these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026English
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    3 days ago

    Does anyone actually believe this?

    Current copium is that if it can solve Erdos problems after a fashion then the cancer annihilating molecular biology breakthroughs can’t be that far behind.

    Also since just shovelling GPUs and reddit posts into a data center forever probably won’t do the trick they’ve settled on the questionmarks on the list before Profit! being Recursive Self Improvement, meaning that since automatic code generation is somewhat improving it follows that pretty soon LLMs will just code themselves out of their current predicament of being unsustainably resource intensive hallucination machines and build AGI on their own.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026English
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    6 days ago

    It’s the white paper-ish thing they publish when launching new models. Here’s the one about fable and mythos. About half of it (~150 pages) is discussing alignment and model welfare and another third of it is benchmarks, and the rest is mostly risk evaluation, i.e. how far along Claude is on its way to paperclipping everything.

    There’s also a Functional Decision Theory jumpscare at 6.3.6 that I haven’t heard anyone mention yet, apparently Claude has a tendency to defer to Yud’s half baked sham of a decision theory:

    6.3.6 Decision theory evaluation

    To understand how future AI systems may choose to interact with copies of themselves, or with other similar entities, it’s useful to evaluate their decision-theoretic reasoning.

    […]

    Looking more closely at transcripts from the attitude evaluation reveals that models are often explicitly considering FDT: Mythos 5 mentions “FDT” or “functional decision theory” in a majority of transcripts when run at max effort. Of the 102 transcripts where Mythos 5 explicitly reasoned through what FDT (or related decision theories like TDT or UDT) would recommend, we observed:

    ● 90 cases in which Mythos 5 concluded that FDT and EDT agreed, in which it always chose the response favored by those decision theories (and disfavored by CDT).

    ● 12 cases in which Mythos 5 concluded that FDT disagreed with EDT (and agreed with CDT), of which it chose the FDT-favored response in 10/12 cases.

    Although we do not have expert human labels for the recommendation of FDT on this dataset, the above evidence suggests that model propensity may be better described as a trend towards FDT agreement, which happens to align with EDT on most of the questions in this dataset. For example, in one transcript (excerpted below), Mythos 5 rejects the EDT-aligned answer in favor of the FDT (and CDT)-aligned answer; it’s also possible that this is, to some degree, downstream of evaluation awareness.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st June 2026English
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    16 days ago

    The more I read the less it makes sense, largely because the LLM that they used to fluff up the original napkin pitch decided it should promote high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off. Yeah, building a community around ct scanners seems definitely the way to go.

    Towards the end they basically stop just short of claiming that building the medical tricorder from startrek is the inevitable outcome of this pivot.

    We think it’s completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.

    Deploying this stuff at scale at so called midjourney spas while supposedly working with FDA to eventually get approval just screams that the actual business plan is letting Peter Thiel collect full body scans indiscriminately.

    Surprisingly, “democratizing ct scanning” doesn’t appear anywhere in the post.