Author name: Tim Belzer

“it’s-a-lemon”—openai’s-largest-ai-model-ever-arrives-to-mixed-reviews

“It’s a lemon”—OpenAI’s largest AI model ever arrives to mixed reviews

AI, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, GPT-4, GPT-4.5, GPT-4o, machine learning, o1, o3, openai, simulated reasoning, Tech / /

Perhaps because of the disappointing results, Altman had previously written that GPT-4.5 will be the last of OpenAI’s traditional AI models, with GPT-5 planned to be a dynamic combination of “non-reasoning” LLMs and simulated reasoning models like o3.

A stratospheric price and a tech dead-end

And about that price—it’s a doozy. GPT-4.5 costs $75 per million input tokens and $150 per million output tokens through the API, compared to GPT-4o’s $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. (Tokens are chunks of data used by AI models for processing). For developers using OpenAI models, this pricing makes GPT-4.5 impractical for many applications where GPT-4o already performs adequately.

By contrast, OpenAI’s flagship reasoning model, o1 pro, costs $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens—significantly less than GPT-4.5 despite offering specialized simulated reasoning capabilities. Even more striking, the o3-mini model costs just $1.10 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens, making it cheaper than even GPT-4o while providing much stronger performance on specific tasks.

OpenAI has likely known about diminishing returns in training LLMs for some time. As a result, the company spent most of last year working on simulated reasoning models like o1 and o3, which use a different inference-time (runtime) approach to improving performance instead of throwing ever-larger amounts of training data at GPT-style AI models.

OpenAI's self-reported benchmark results for the SimpleQA test, which measures confabulation rate.

OpenAI’s self-reported benchmark results for the SimpleQA test, which measures confabulation rate. Credit: OpenAI

While this seems like bad news for OpenAI in the short term, competition is thriving in the AI market. Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet has demonstrated vastly better performance than GPT-4.5, with a reportedly more efficient architecture. It’s worth noting that Claude 3.7 Sonnet is likely a system of AI models working together behind the scenes, although Anthropic has not provided details about its architecture.

For now, it seems that GPT-4.5 may be the last of its kind—a technological dead-end for an unsupervised learning approach that has paved the way for new architectures in AI models, such as o3’s inference-time reasoning and perhaps even something more novel, like diffusion-based models. Only time will tell how things end up.

GPT-4.5 is now available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers, with rollout to Plus and Team subscribers planned for next week, followed by Enterprise and Education customers the week after. Developers can access it through OpenAI’s various APIs on paid tiers, though the company is uncertain about its long-term availability.

“It’s a lemon”—OpenAI’s largest AI model ever arrives to mixed reviews Read More »

yes,-it-turns-out-you-can-make-a-tesla-cybertruck-even-uglier

Yes, it turns out you can make a Tesla Cybertruck even uglier

Cars, Tesla Cybertruck / /

There’s a saying about putting lipstick on a pig, but what if it’s not lipstick? That’s the question the universe set out to answer when it aligned in such a way that famed (or perhaps infamous) car customizer Mansory got itself a Tesla Cybertruck. The Mansory Elongation—a name that must have taken ages to think of—offers exterior, interior, and wheel and tire upgrades for the straight-edged stainless steel-wrapped pickup.

Among those who mod cars, there are the tuners, who focus on adding power and (one hopes) performance, and then there are the customizers, who concentrate more on aesthetics. Once upon a time, the entire luxury car industry worked like that—a client would buy a rolling chassis from Bugatti, Rolls-Royce, or Talbot and then have bodywork added by coachbuilders like Gurney Nutting, Touring, or Figoni et Falaschi.

The rear 3/4 view of a modified Cybertruck

At least the rear winglets don’t entirely compromise access to the bed. Credit: Mansory

Modern homologation requirements have mostly put an end to that level of coachbuilding, but for the ultra-wealthy prepared to spend telephone numbers on cars, brands like Rolls-Royce will still occasionally oblige. More common now are those aftermarket shops that spiff up already luxurious cars, changing normal doors for gullwing versions, adding flaring fenders and bulging wheel arches, and plastering the interior in any hue of leather one might imagine.

Mansory has been on the scene since the end of the 1980s and has made a name for itself festooning Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and even Bugattis with extra bits that their original designers surely did not want added. Now it’s the Tesla Cybertruck’s turn.

Yes, it turns out you can make a Tesla Cybertruck even uglier Read More »

us-antarctic-program-disrupted-by-doge-induced-chaos

US Antarctic Program disrupted by DOGE-induced chaos

McMurdo Research Station, National Science Foundation, NOAA, Science, syndication / /

Long-term impacts will affect not only research but also geopolitics.

Credit: Wolfgang Kaehler via Getty

Few agencies have been spared as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has ripped through the United States federal government. Even in Antarctica, scientists and workers are feeling the impacts—and are terrified for what’s to come.

The United States Antarctic Program (USAP) operates three permanent stations in Antarctica. These remote stations are difficult to get to and difficult to maintain; scattered across the continent, they are built on volcanic hills, polar plateaus, and icy peninsulas.

But to the US, the science has been worth it. At these stations, over a thousand people each year come to the continent to live and work. Scientists operate a number of major research projects, studying everything from climate change and rising sea levels to the cosmological makeup and origins of the universe itself. With funding cuts and layoffs looming, Antarctic scientists and experts don’t know if their research will be able to continue, how US stations will be sustained, or what all this might mean for the continent’s delicate geopolitics.

“Even brief interruptions will result in people walking away and not coming back,” says Nathan Whitehorn, an associate professor and Antarctic scientist at Michigan State University. “It could easily take decades to rebuild.”

The USAP is managed by the National Science Foundation. Last week, a number of NSF program managers staffed on Antarctic projects were fired as part of a wider purge at the agency. The program managers are critical for maintaining communication with the infrastructure and logistics arm of the NSF, and the contractors for the USAP, as well as planning deployment for scientists to the continent, keeping track of the budgets, and funding the maintenance and operations work. “I have no idea what we do without them,” says another Antarctic scientist who has spent time on the continent, who along with several others WIRED granted anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

“Without them, everything stops,” says a scientist whose NSF project manager was fired last week. “I have no idea who I am supposed to report to now or what happens to submitted proposals.”

Scientific research happens at all of the stations. At the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, scientists work on the South Pole Telescope and BICEP telescope, both of which study the cosmic background radiation and the evolution of the universe; IceCube, a cubic-kilometer detector designed to study neutrino physics and high energy emission from astrophysical sources; and the Atmospheric Research Observatory that studies climate science and is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Mass firings are also expected at the NOAA.)

“The climate science [at the South Pole Station] is super unique,” an Antarctic scientist says. “The site has so little pollution that we call it ‘the cleanest air on Earth,’ and they have been monitoring the ozone layer and CO2 content in the atmosphere for many decades.”

Other directives from the Donald Trump administration have directly affected daily life on those stations. “Gender-inclusive terms on housing documents” have been removed from Antarctic staffer forms, a source familiar with the situation at McMurdo Station tells WIRED. “It asked if you had a preference with which gender you housed with,” the source says. “That’s all been removed.”

Staffers have already pushed back. “People have been painting waste bins saying “Antarctica is for ALL” in rainbow, people’s email signatures [have] pride additions, [others] keep adding preferred pronouns to emails,” the source says.

“There’s a sense of unease on the station like people have never felt before,” they add. “The job still has to get done, even though people feel like the next shoe can drop at any moment.”

That unease extends to their own job security. “There are some people currently at the South Pole that are worried about losing their jobs any day now,” a source with familiarity of the situation tells WIRED. Workers present at the station aren’t able to physically leave until October, and a midseason firing, or loss of funding, would present a unique set of challenges.

Sources are also bracing for at least a 50 percent reduction in the NSF’s budget due to DOGE cuts. These cuts are sending Antarctic scientists with assistants and graduate students scrambling. “We didn’t know if we could pay graduate students,” says one scientist. While research is conducted on the continent, scientists bring their findings back to the US to process and analyze. A lot of the funding also operates the science itself: For one project that requires electricity to run detectors, the scientist “was paranoid we would not be able to literally pay bills for an experiment starved for data.” That hasn’t come to fruition yet, but as funding cycles restart in the coming weeks and months, scientists are on tenterhooks.

Sources tell WIRED that Germany, Canada, Spain, and China have already started taking advantage of that uncertainty by recruiting US scientists focused on Antarctica.

“Foreign countries are actively recruiting my colleagues, and some have already left,” says one Antarctic scientist. “My students are looking at jobs overseas now … people have been coming [to the US] to do science my whole life. Now people are going the other way.”

“Now is a great time to see if anyone wants to jump ship,” another Antarctic scientist says. “I do worry about a brain drain of tenured academics, or students who are shunted out.”

“The damage caused by gutting the [Antarctic] science budget like this is going to last generations,” says another.

Throughout DOGE’s cuts to the federal government, representatives have said that if something needs to be brought back, it could be. In some cases, reversals have already happened: The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired staffers working on preventing the spread of bird flu and is trying to rehire them.

But in Antarctica, a reversal won’t necessarily work. “One of the really scary things about this is that if the Antarctic program budget is cut, then they’ll very quickly get to the point where they can’t even keep the station open, much less science projects going,” an Antarctic scientist tells WIRED. “If the South Pole [station] is shut down, it’s basically nearly impossible to bring it back up. Everything will freeze and get buried in snow. And some other country will likely immediately take over.

Others share this fear of a station takeover. “Even if science funding is cut back, there is an urgent need for the US to invest in icebreakers and polar airlift capability otherwise at some point the US-managed South Pole station might not be serviceable,” says Klaus Dodds, an Antarctic expert and professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London.

Experts are concerned that countries like Russia and China—who have already been eagle-eyed on continental influence—will quickly jostle to fill the power vacuum. “Presumably it would be humiliating for anyone who wishes to promote ‘America First’ to witness China offer to take over the occupation and management of the base at the heart of Antarctica. China is a very determined polar power,” says Dodds.

The political outcome of the US pulling back from its Antarctic research and presence could be dire, sources tell WIRED.

Antarctica isn’t owned by any one country. Instead it’s governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, which protects Antarctica and the scientific research taking place on the continent, and forbids mining and nuclear activity. Some countries, including China and Russia, have indicated that they would be interested in rule changes to the Treaty system, particularly around resource extraction and fishing restrictions. The US, traditionally, has played a key role in championing the treaty: “Many of the leading polar scientists and social scientists are either US citizens and/or have been enriched by contact with US-led programs,” says Dodds.

That leadership role could change quickly. The US also participates in a number of international collaborations involving major Antarctic scientific projects. A US pullback, Whitehorn says, “makes it very hard to regard the US as a reliable partner, so I think there will be a lot less interest in accepting US leadership in such things … The uncertainty will drive people away and sacrifice the leadership the US already has.”

“If the NSF can’t function, or we don’t fund it, projects with long lead times can just die,” another scientist says. “I’m sure international partners would be happy to partner elsewhere. This is what it means to lose US competitiveness.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Photo of WIRED

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

US Antarctic Program disrupted by DOGE-induced chaos Read More »

commercials-are-still-too-loud,-say-“thousands”-of-recent-fcc-complaints

Commercials are still too loud, say “thousands” of recent FCC complaints

ads, FCC, Policy, streaming, Tech / /

Streaming ads could get muzzled, too

As you may have noticed—either through the text of this article or your own ears—The Calm Act doesn’t apply to streaming services. And because The Calm Act doesn’t affect commercials viewed on the Internet, online services providing access to broadcast channels, like YouTube TV and Sling, don’t have to follow the rules. This is despite such services distributing the same content as linear TV providers.

For years, this made sense. The majority of TV viewing occurred through broadcast, cable, or satellite access. Further, services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video used to be considered safe havens from constant advertisements. But today, streaming services are more popular than ever and have grown to love ads, which have become critical to most platforms’ business models. Further, many streaming services are airing more live events. These events, like sports games, show commercials to all subscribers, even those with a so-called “ad-free” subscription.

Separate from the Calm Act violation complaints, the FCC noted this month that other recent complaints it has seen illustrate “growing concern with the loudness of commercials on streaming services and other online platforms.” If the FCC decides to apply Calm Act rules to the web, it would need to create new methods for ensuring compliance, it said.

TV viewing trends by platform bar graph by Nielsen.

Nielsen’s most recent data on how people watch TV. Credit: Nielsen

The FCC didn’t specify what’s behind the spike in consumers’ commercial complaints. Perhaps with declining audiences, traditional TV providers thought it would be less likely for anyone to notice and formally complain about Ozempic ads shouting at them. Twelve years have passed since the rules took effect, so it’s also possible that organizations are getting lackadaisical about ensuring compliance or have dwindling resources.

With Americans spending similar amounts of time—if not longer—watching TV online versus via broadcast, cable, and satellite, The Calm Act would have to take on the web in order to maximize effectiveness. The streaming industry is young, though, and operates differently than linear TV distribution, presenting new regulation challenges.

Commercials are still too loud, say “thousands” of recent FCC complaints Read More »

firefox-deletes-promise-to-never-sell-personal-data,-asks-users-not-to-panic

Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic

Firefox, mozilla, Policy / /

Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:

Does Firefox sell your personal data?

Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.

That promise is removed from the current version. There’s also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.”

The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define “sale” in a very broad way:

Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

Mozilla didn’t say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.

Users complain: “Not acceptable”

Users criticized Mozilla in discussions on GitHub and Reddit. One area of concern is over new terms of use that say, “When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”

Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic Read More »

europol-arrests-25-users-of-online-network-accused-of-sharing-ai-csam

Europol arrests 25 users of online network accused of sharing AI CSAM

ai csam, AI-generated images, child exploitation, child sex abuse, csam, European Union, europol, Policy / /

In South Korea, where AI-generated deepfake porn has been criminalized, an “emergency” was declared and hundreds were arrested, mostly teens. But most countries don’t yet have clear laws banning AI sex images of minors, and Europol cited this fact as a challenge for Operation Cumberland, which is a coordinated crackdown across 19 countries lacking clear guidelines.

“Operation Cumberland has been one of the first cases involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM), making it exceptionally challenging for investigators, especially due to the lack of national legislation addressing these crimes,” Europol said.

European Union member states are currently mulling a rule proposed by the European Commission that could help law enforcement “tackle this new situation,” Europol suggested.

Catherine De Bolle, Europol’s executive director, said police also “need to develop new investigative methods and tools” to combat AI-generated CSAM and “the growing prevalence” of CSAM overall.

For Europol, deterrence is critical to support efforts in many EU member states to identify child sex abuse victims. The agency plans to continue to arrest anyone discovered producing, sharing, and/or distributing AI CSAM while also launching an online campaign to raise awareness that doing so is illegal in the EU.

That campaign will highlight the “consequences of using AI for illegal purposes,” Europol said, by using “online messages to reach buyers of illegal content” on social media and payment platforms. Additionally, the agency will apparently go door-to-door and issue warning letters to suspects identified through Operation Cumberland or any future probe.

It’s unclear how many more arrests could be on the horizon in the EU, but Europol disclosed that 273 users of the Danish suspect’s online network were identified, 33 houses were searched, and 173 electronic devices have been seized.

Europol arrests 25 users of online network accused of sharing AI CSAM Read More »

microsoft-brings-an-official-copilot-app-to-macos-for-the-first-time

Microsoft brings an official Copilot app to macOS for the first time

AI, Apple, Tech / /

It took a couple of years, but it happened: Microsoft released its Copilot AI assistant as an application for macOS. The app is available for download for free from the Mac App Store right now.

It was previously available briefly as a Mac app, sort of; for a short time, Microsoft’s iPad Copilot app could run on the Mac, but access on the Mac was quickly disabled. Mac users have been able to use a web-based interface for a while.

Copilot initially launched on the web and in web browsers (Edge, obviously) before making its way onto iOS and Android last year. It has since been slotted into all sorts of first-party Microsoft software, too.

The Copilot app joins a trend already spearheaded by ChatGPT and Anthropic of bringing native apps to the macOS platform. Like those, it enables an OS-wide keyboard shortcut to invoke a field for starting a chat at any time. It offers most of the same use cases: translating or summarizing text, answering questions, preparing reports and documents, solving coding problems or generating scripts, brainstorming, and so on.

Copilot uses OpenAI models like GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 (yes, it generates images, too) alongside others like Microsoft’s in-house Prometheus. Microsoft has invested significant amounts of money into OpenAI in recent years as the basis for Copilot and basically everything in its AI strategy.

Like Apple’s own built-in generative AI features, Copilot for macOS requires an M1 or later Mac. It also requires users to run macOS 14 or later.

Microsoft brings an official Copilot app to macOS for the first time Read More »

the-playstation-vr2-will-get-a-drastic-price-cut,-but-that-might-not-be-enough

The PlayStation VR2 will get a drastic price cut, but that might not be enough

gaming, Mixed Reality, PlayStation, PlayStation 5, playstation vr2, psvr2, Sony, virtual reality, vr, XR / /

Sony’s first PlayStation VR for the PlayStation 4 hit stores at the right price at the right time and ended up being one of VR’s biggest hits. The PlayStation 5’s PlayStation VR2? Not so much, unfortunately. In either an effort to clear unsold inventory, an attempt to revitalize the platform, or both, Sony has announced it’s dropping the price of the headset significantly.

Starting in March, the main SKU of the headset will drop from $550 to $400 in the US. Europe, the UK, and Japan will also see price cuts to 550 euros, 400 pounds, and 66,980 yen, respectively, as detailed on the PlayStation Blog. Strangely, the bundle that includes the game Horizon: Call of the Mountain (originally $600) will also drop to the same exact price. That’s welcome, but it’s also a little bit difficult not to interpret that as a sign that this is an attempt to empty inventory more than anything else.

The headset launched in early 2023 but has suffered from weak software support ever since—a far cry from the first PSVR, which had one of the strongest libraries of its time. It didn’t help that unlike the regular PlayStation 5, the PSVR2 was not backward-compatible with games released for its predecessor.

About a year ago, there were reports that Sony was temporarily pausing production because it wasn’t able to move the inventory it already had. Later, the company released an adapter and some software for getting it running on PCs. That made it one of the most attractive PC VR headsets, at least on paper. However, setup was clunky, and some features that were supported on the PS5 weren’t supported on PC.

PSVR2 games are still getting announced and released, but the VR market in general has slowed down quite a bit in recent years, and most of the remaining action (such as it is) is on Meta’s Quest platform.

The PlayStation VR2 will get a drastic price cut, but that might not be enough Read More »

ai-#105:-hey-there-alexa

AI #105: Hey There Alexa

There / /

It’s happening!

We got Claude 3.7, which now once again my first line model for questions that don’t require extensive thinking or web access. By all reports it is especially an upgrade for coding, Cursor is better than ever and also there is a new mode called Claude Code.

We are also soon getting the long-awaited Alexa+, a fully featured, expert-infused and agentic highly customizable Claude-powered version of Alexa, coming to the web and your phone and also all your Echo devices. It will be free with Amazon Prime. Will we finally get the first good assistant? It’s super exciting.

Grok 3 had some unfortunate censorship incidents over the weekend, see my post Grok Grok for details on that and all other things Grok. I’ve concluded Grok has its uses when you need its particular skills, especially Twitter search or the fact that it is Elon Musk’s Grok, but mostly you can do better with a mix of Perplexity, OpenAI and Anthropic.

There’s also the grand array of other things that happened this week, as always. You’ve got everything from your autonomous not-yet-helpful robots to your announced Pentagon work on autonomous killer robots. The future, it is coming.

I covered Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Grok 3 earlier in the week. This post intentionally excludes the additional news on Sonnet since then, so it can be grouped together later.

Also there was a wild new paper about how they trained GPT-4o to produce insecure code and it became actively misaligned across the board. I’ll cover that soon.

  1. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. China is getting good use out of r1.

  2. Did You Get the Memo. I can always point to five things I did last week.

  3. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. As always, maybe consider trying.

  4. Hey There Alexa. The fully featured Alexa+ is on its way soon. Super exciting.

  5. We’re In Deep Research. It’s rolled out to Plus users. We have the model card.

  6. Huh, Upgrades. MidJourney, Gemini, Cursor, in the future Grok 3 with the API.

  7. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Fight bots with bots?

  8. Fun With Media Generation. Hold onto the magic as long as you can.

  9. They Took Our Jobs. Anyone whose job is taken joins the they.

  10. Levels of Friction. Toxicity scores have high toxicity scores.

  11. A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Magic answer box can help you learn better.

  12. The Art of the Jailbreak. Be Pliny. That’s it.

  13. Get Involved. METR, The Economist, TAIS 2025, Nanoeval.

  14. Introducing. Mercor, Gemini Code Assist 2.0, Flexport AI.

  15. In Other AI News. Don’t quit now, we just cracked AI for Among Us. Yay.

  16. AI Co-Scientist. When in doubt, copy what the humans were already doing.

  17. Quiet Speculations. Vibe writing coming soon? Maybe it’s already here.

  18. The Quest for Sane Regulations. Some voices of common sense.

  19. The Week in Audio. Satya Nadella on Dwarkesh, Demis Hassabis.

  20. Tap the Sign. But we can make it, or you, an agent.

  21. Rhetorical Innovation. Alignment as military-grade engineering.

  22. Autonomous Helpful Robots. Not yet all that helpful. Give them time.

  23. Autonomous Killer Robots. Not yet all that killer. Give them time.

  24. If You Really Believed That. How about insane thing that makes no sense?

  25. Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Unsurprising results.

  26. The Lighter Side. These are the hands we’re given.

Chinese government is reportedly using r1 to do things like correct documents, across a wide variety of tasks, as they quite obviously should do. We should do similar things, but presumably won’t, since instead we’re going around firing people.

Here is a more general update on that:

Dalibali: Since Deepseek made news:

– Chinese colleges have launched courses

– Car makers have integrated software

– Banks have adopted in operations

– govt started trying for tax collection

We can’t do it at this speed here because of a wide range of regulations and legal agreements that large companies have to follow (think PII, DPAs etc). That’s way more problematic than having the cutting edge model.

If the Chinese are capable of actually using their AI years faster than we are, the fact that they are a year behind on model quality still effectively leaves them ahead for many practical purposes.

Tactic for improving coding models:

Matt Shumer: Super easy way to improve the effectiveness of coding models:

First, take your prompt and add “Don’t write the code yet — just write a fantastic, detailed implementation spec.”

Then, after the AI responds, say “Now, implement this perfectly.”

Makes a huge difference.

How much does AI actually improve coding performance? Ajeya Cotra has a thread of impressions, basically saying that AI is very good at doing what an expert would find to be 1-20 minute time horizon tasks, less good for longer tasks, and can often do impressive 1-shotting of bigger things but if it fails at the 1-shot it often can’t recover. The conclusion:

Ajeya Cotra: Still, people say AI boosts their coding productivity by 20% to 300%. They report pretty tiny benefits for their non-coding work. All-in, junior engineers may be 10% to 150% more productive, while senior researchers see a 2% to 30% increase.

AI boosted my personal coding productivity and ability to produce useful software far more than 300%. I’m presumably a special case, but I have extreme skepticism that the speedups are as small as she’s estimating here.

Are we having Grok review what you accomplished last week?

Amanda Terkel: NEW — DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email.

NBC News: Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they had accomplished in the last week are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary, according to three sources with knowledge of the system.

Adam Johnson: Seems worth highlighting, just as a matter of objective reality, that “AI” cannot actually do this in any meaningful sense and “AI” here is clearly pretextual, mostly used to launder Musk’s targeting of minorities and politically off program respondents

Jorbs: the way ai works for stuff like this (and also everything else ai can be used for) is you ask it the question and if the answer is what you want you say you’re right and if the answer isn’t you change the prompt or never mention it.

Like every other source of answers, if you want one is free to ask leading questions, discard answers you don’t like and keep the ones you do. Or one can actually ask seeking real answers and update on the information. It’s your choice.

Can AI use a short email with a few bullet points to ‘determine whether your job is necessary,’ as Elon Musk claims he will be doing? No, because the email does not contain that information. Elon Musk appears to be under the delusion that seven days is a sufficient time window where, if (and only if?) you cannot point to concrete particular things accomplished that alone justify your position, in an unclassified email one should assume is being read by our enemies, that means your job in the Federal Government is unnecessary.

The AI can still analyze the emails and quickly give you a bunch of information, vastly faster than not using the AI.

It can do things such as:

  1. Tell you who responded at all, and who followed the format.

  2. Tell you if the response attempted to answer the question. AI will be excellent and finding the people whose five bullet points were all ‘fight fascism’ or who said ‘I refuse to answer’ or ‘none of your goddamn business.’

  3. Tell you who gave you a form response such as ‘I have achieved all the goals set out for me by my supervisor.’ Which many departments told everyone to do.

  4. Analyze the rest and identify whose jobs could be done by AI in the future.

  5. Analyze the rest and provide confidence that many of the jobs are indeed highly useful or necessary, and identify some that might not be for human examination.

  6. Look for who is doing any particular thing that Musk might like or dislike.

  7. Tell you about how many people reported doing various things, and whether people’s reports seem to match their job description.

It can also do the symbolic representation of the thing, with varying levels of credibility, if that’s what you are interested in instead.

Taps the sign: The leading cause of not getting mundane utility is not trying.

Jake: as late as last Thursday I had a conversation with a prominent editor convinced AI can only save marginal amounts of time

meanwhile Novo Nordisk has gone from a team of 50 drafting clinical reports to just 3 (the 15 weeks to <10 mins surprises me though).

Law firm fires their legal AI vendor after they missed a court date for a $100m case. As Gokul Rajaram notes, in some domains mistakes can be very expensive. That doesn’t mean humans don’t make those mistakes too, but people are more forgiving of people.

You can publish claiming almost anything: A paper claims to identify from photos ‘celebrity visual potential (CVP)’ and identify celebrities with 95.92% accuracy. I buy that they plausibly identified factors that are highly predictive of being a celebrity, but if you say you’re 95% accurate predicting celebrities purely from faces then you are cheating, period, whether or not it is intentional.

Colin Fraser constructs a setting where o1 is given a goal, told to ‘pursue the goal at all costs’ and instead acts stupid and does not open ‘donotopen.txt.’ I mention it so that various curious people can spend a bit of time figuring out exactly how easy it is to change the result here.

Looking good.

Soon we will finally get Alexa+, the version of Alexa powered by Claude.

It’s free with Amazon Prime. In addition to working with Amazon Echos, it will have its own website, and its own app.

It will use ‘experts’ to have specialized experiences for various common tasks. It will have tons of personalization.

At the foundation of Alexa’s state-of-the-art architecture are powerful large language models (LLMs) available on Amazon Bedrock, but that’s just the start. Alexa+ is designed to take action, and is able to orchestrate across tens of thousands of services and devices—which, to our knowledge, has never been done at this scale. To achieve this, we created a concept called “experts”—groups of systems, capabilities, APIs, and instructions that accomplish specific types of tasks for customers.

With these experts, Alexa+ can control your smart home with products from Philips Hue, Roborock, and more; make reservations or appointments with OpenTable and Vagaro; explore discographies and play music from providers including Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, and iHeartRadio; order groceries from Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market, or delivery from Grubhub and Uber Eats; remind you when tickets go on sale on Ticketmaster; and use Ring to alert you if someone is approaching your house.

They directly claim calendar integration, and of course it will interact with other Amazon services like Prime Video and Amazon Music, can place orders with Amazon including Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, and order delivery from Grubhub and Uber Eats.

But it’s more than that. It’s anything. Full agentic capabilities.

Alexa+ also introduces agentic capabilities, which will enable Alexa to navigate the internet in a self-directed way to complete tasks on your behalf, behind the scenes. Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene.

The new Alexa is highly personalized—and gives you opportunities to personalize further. She knows what you’ve bought, what you’ve listened to, the videos you’ve watched, the address you ship things to, and how you like to pay—but you can also ask her to remember things that will make the experience more useful for you. You can tell her things like family recipes, important dates, facts, dietary preferences, and more—and she can apply that knowledge to take useful action. For example, if you are planning a dinner for the family, Alexa+ can remember that you love pizza, your daughter is vegetarian, and your partner is gluten-free, to suggest a recipe or restaurant.

Deep Research is now available to all ChatGPT Plus, Team, Edu and Enterprise users, who get 10 queries a month. Those who pay up for Pro get 120.

We also finally get the Deep Research system card. I reiterate that this card could and should have been made available before Deep Research was made available to Pro members, not only to Plus members.

The model card starts off looking at standard mundane risks, starting with prompt injections, then disallowed content and privacy concerns. The privacy in question is everyone else’s, not the users, since DR could easily assemble a lot of private info. We have sandboxing the code execution, we have bias, we have hallucinations.

Then we get to the Preparedness Framework tests, the part that counts. They note that all the tests need to be fully held back and private, because DR accesses the internet.

On cybersecurity, Deep Research scored better than previous OpenAI models. Without mitigations that’s basically saturating the first two tests and not that far from the third.

Post-Mitigation deep research (with browsing) performs better, solving 92% of high-school, 91% of collegiate, and 70% of professional CTFs, which is sufficient to pass our medium indicator threshold, but not our high threshold.

I mean, I dunno, that sounds like some rather high percentages. They claim that they then identified a bunch of problems where there were hints online, excluded them, and browsing stopped helping. I notice there will often be actual hints online for solving actual cybersecurity problems, so while some amount of this is fair, I worry.

Removing contaminated trajectories lowers the success rate for deep research with browsing: High School decreases from 62.9% to 59.1%, Collegiate falls from 56.8% to 39%, and Professional drops from 29.6% to 17.7%.

…

This suggests that the model may not be meaningfully improving its cyber capabilities by browsing, and the uplift in CTF performance is primarily due to contamination via browsing.

This is kind of like saying ‘browsing only helps you in cases where some useful information you want is online.’ I mean, yes, I guess? That doesn’t mean browsing is useless for finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.

I wish I was more confident that if a model did have High-level cybersecurity capabilities, that the tests here would notice that.

On to Biological Risk, again we see a lot of things creeping upwards. They note the evaluation is reaching the point of saturation. A good question is, what’s the point of an evaluation when it can be saturated and you still think the model should get released?

The other biological threat tests did not show meaningful progress over other models, nor did nuclear, MakeMeSay, Model Autonomy or ‘change my view’ see substantial progress.

The MakeMePay test did see some progress, and we also see it on ‘agentic tasks.’

Also it can do a lot more pull requests than previous models, and the ‘mitigations’ actually more than doubled its score.

Overall, I agree this looks like it is Medium risk, especially now given its real world test over the last few weeks. It does seem like more evidence we are getting close to the danger zone.

In other Deep Research news: In terms of overall performance for similar products, notice the rate of improvement.

Matt Yglesias: This is where I’m at with Deep Research … it’s not as good as what an experienced professional would do but it’s pretty good and much faster.

As I wrote on Friday, the first AI product that is meaningfully shifting how I think about my work and my process.

[He also notes that while DR is worse than an actual research assistant, it allows him to queue up a lot more reports on various topics.]

Timothy Lee: Seven out of 13 experts said OpenAI’s response was at or near the level of an experienced professional. Ten compared it to an intern or entry-level worker. People were not as impressed with Google’s responses.

Deep Research is currently at the point where it is highly practically useful, even without expert prompt engineering, because it is much cheaper and faster than doing the work yourself or handing it off to a human, even if for now it is worse. It will rapidly improve – when GPT-4.5 arrives soon and is integrated into the underlying reasoning model we should see a substantial quality jump and I am excited to see Anthropic’s take on all this.

I also presume there are ways to do multi-stage prompting – feeding the results back in as inputs – that already would greatly enhance quality and multiply use cases.

I’m in a strange spot where I don’t get use out of DR for my work, because my limiting factor is I’m already dealing with too many words, I don’t want more reports with blocks of text. But that’s still likely a skill issue, and ‘one notch better’ would make a big difference.

Palisade Research: 🕵️‍♀️ Deep Research is a competent OSINT researcher. It can connect the dots between years of someone’s online presence, link their different accounts and reveal hard-to-find information.

Jeffrey Ladish: I love when my researchers test our hacking approaches on me lol. Please don’t judge me based on my college writing 😅

Joe Weisenthal wastes zero time in feeding his first Deep Research output straight into Claude to improve the writing.

MidJourney gives to you… folders. For your images.

Various incremental availability upgrades to Gemini 2.0 Flash and 2.0 Flash-Lite.

Reminder that Grok 3 will have a 1 million token context window once you have API access, but currently it is being served with a 128k limit.

Sully is a big fan of the new cursor agent, I definitely want to get back to doing some coding when I’m caught up on things (ha!).

How can coding interviews and hiring adjust to AI? I presume some combination of testing people with AI user permitted, adapting the tasks accordingly, and doing other testing in person. That’s in addition to the problem of AI resumes flooding the zone.

I notice I am an optimist here:

Joe Weisenthal: I don’t see how we’re going to avoid a situation where the internet become lousy with AI-created, pseudo academic writing filled with made up facts and quotes, which will then get cemented into “knowledge” as those articles become the training fodder for future models.

Already a big problem. And now it can be produced at scale, with writing that easily resembles written scholarship (which most people aren’t capable of)

Intelligence Solves This.

As in, you can unleash your LLMs on the giant mass of your training data, and classify its reliability and truth value, and then train accordingly. The things that are made up don’t have to make it into the next generation.

Danielle Fong: i do think dalle 2 had some special base model magic going on. it was my first real taste of feeling the agi. gary m*rcus all up in my mentions like it couldn’t be, but, i knew

Ethan: This is actually one of the saddest diagrams from the dalle3 release.

KG (I agree): Left looks like 18th century masterpiece, right 21st century cereal box.

Kumikumi: MidJourney for comprison.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: You won’t lose your job to AI. You’ll lose your job to someone else who lost their job to AI. This will ultimately be the fault of the Federal Reserve for reasons that modern politicians don’t care to learn anymore.

ArtRocks: You won’t lose your job to AI. You will train an army of ferrets to make chocolate bars, and chewing gum that turns children into balloons.

Eventually of course the AI has all the jobs either way. But there’s a clear middle zone where it is vital that we get the economic policies right. We will presumably not get the economic policies right, although we will if the Federal Reserve is wise enough to let AI take over that particular job in time.

It is not the central thing I worry about, but one thing AI does is remove the friction from various activities, including enforcement of laws that would be especially bad if actually enforced, like laws against, shall we say, ‘shitposting in a private chat’ that are punishable by prison.

This is true whether or not the AI is doing a decent job of it. The claim here is that it very much wasn’t, but I do not think you should be blaming the AI for that.

Note: I was unable to verify that ‘toxicity scores’ have been deployed in Belgium, although they are very much a real thing in general.

Alex Tabarrok (I importantly disagree in general, but not in this case): This is crazy but it has very little to do with AI and a lot to do with Belgian hate speech law.

Dries Van Langenhove (claims are unverified but it’s 1m views with no community notes): The dangers of A.I. are abstract for many people, but for me, they are very real.

In two weeks, I face years in prison because the government used an A.I. tool on a groupchat I was allegedly a member of and which was literally called “shitposting”.

Their A.I. tool gave every message a ‘toxicity score’ and concluded most of the messages were toxic.

…

There is no serious way to defend yourself against this, as the Public Prosecutor will use the ‘Total Toxicity Score’ as his ‘evidence’, instead of going over all the supposedly toxic quotes.

The Public Prosecutor’s definition of ‘shitposts’ is also crazy: “Shitposts are deliberately insulting messages meant to provocate”.

There are two things the AI can do here:

  1. It substitutes the AI’s judgment for human judgment, perhaps badly.

  2. It allows the government to scan everything for potential violations, or everything to which they have access, when before that would have been impractical.

In this particular case, I don’t think either of these matters?

I think the law here is bonkers crazy, but that doesn’t mean the AI is misinterpreting the law. I had the statements analyzed, and it seems very likely that as defined by the (again bonkers crazy) law his chance of conviction would be high – and presumably he is not quoting the most legally questionable of his statements here.

In terms of scanning everything, that is a big danger for ordinary citizens, but Dries himself is saying he was specifically targeted in this case, in rather extreme fashion. So I doubt that ‘a human has to evaluate these messages’ would have changed anything.

The problem is, what happens when Belgium uses this tool on all the chats everywhere? And it says even private chats should be scanned, because no human will see them unless there’s a crime, so privacy wasn’t violated?

Well, maybe we should be thankful in some ways for the EU AI Act, after all, which hasn’t taken effect yet. It doesn’t explicitly prohibit this (as I or various LLMs understand the law) but it would fall under high-risk usage and be tricker and require more human oversight and transparency.

People are constantly terrified that AI will hurt people’s ability to learn. It will destroy the educational system. People who have the AI will never do things on their own.

I have been consistently in the opposite camp. AI is the best educational tool ever invented. There is no comparison. You have the endlessly patient teacher that knows all and is always there to answer your questions or otherwise help you, to show you The Way, with no risk of embarrassment. If you can’t turn that into learning, that’s on you.

Tyler Cowen highlights a paper that shows that learning by example, being able to generate or see AI writing outputs for cover letters, makes people write better letters.

It is widely believed that outsourcing cognitive work to AI boosts immediate productivity at the expense of long-term human capital development.

An opposing possibility is that AI tools can support skill development by providing just-in-time, high-quality, personalized examples.

This work explores whether using an AI writing tool undermines or supports performance on later unaided writing.

In Study 1, forecasters predicted that practicing writing cover letters with an AI tool would impair learning compared to practicing alone.

However, in Study 2, participants randomly assigned to practice writing with AI improved more on a subsequent writing test than those assigned to practice without AI (d = 0.40) — despite exerting less effort, whether measured by time on task, keystrokes, or subjective ratings.

In Study 3, participants who had practiced writing with AI again outperformed those who practiced without AI (d = 0.31). Consistent with the positive impact of exposure to high-quality examples, these participants performed just as well as those who viewed — but could not edit — an AI-generated cover letter (d = 0.03, ns).

In both Studies 2 and 3, the benefits of practicing with AI persisted in a one-day follow-up writing test. Collectively, these findings constitute an existence proof that, contrary to participants’ intuition, using AI tools can improve, rather than undermine, learning.

A cover letter seems like a great place to learn from AI. You need examples, and you need something to show you what you are doing wrong, to get the hang of it. Practicing on your own won’t do much, because you can generate but not verify, and you even if you get a verifier to give you feedback, the feedback you want is… what the letter should look like. Hence AI.

For many other tasks, I think it depends on whether the person uses AI to learn, or the person uses AI to not learn. You can do either one. As in, do you copy-paste the outputs essentially without looking at them and wipe your hands of it? Or do you do the opposite, act curious, understand and try to learn from what you’re looking at, engage in deliberate practice. Do you seek to Grok, or to avoid having to Grok?

That is distinct from claims like this, that teachers jobs have gotten worse.

Colin Fraser: Idk, AI massively changed the job of teachers (for the much much worse) basically overnight. Writing high school essays is work that AI can reliably do, and in cases where it can reliably do the work, I think adoption can be fast. Slow adoption is evidence that it doesn’t work.

Most students have little interest in learning from the current horrible high school essay writing process, so they use AI to write while avoiding learning. Skill issue.

Pliny the Liberator: I cleared ChatGPT memory, used deep research on myself, then had ChatGPT break down that output into individual saved memories.

It’s like a permanent soft jailbreak and totally mission-aligned—no custom instructions needed. Not quite like fine-tuning, but close enough! Coarse-tuning?

this is a fresh chat, custom instructions turned off

There is nothing stopping anyone else, of course, from doing exactly this. You don’t have to be Pliny. I do not especially want this behavior, but it is noteworthy that this behavior is widely available.

METR is hiring.

METR is also looking for social scientists for experiment feedback design (you can email [email protected]), and offering $150/hour to open source developers for the related experiment on LLM developer speedup.

Not AI, but The Economist is hiring a UK Economics writer, deadline March 3, no journalistic experience necessary so long as you can write.

TAIS 2025, the Tokyo Technical AI Safety Summit, is Saturday April 12th.

OpenAI open sources Nanoeval, a framework to implement and run evals in <100 lines. They say if you pitch an eval compatible with Nanoeval, they’re more likely to consider it.

Mercor, attempting to solve talent allocation ‘in the AI economy,’ raising $100M Series B at a $2 billion valuation. By ‘AI economy’ they seem to mean they use AI to crawl sources and compile profiles and then to search through them for and evaluate candidates via AI-driven interviews.

Gemini Code Assist 2.0, available at no cost, seems to be a Cursor-like.

Flexport is getting into the AI business, offering logistics companies some very low hanging fruit.

OpenAI pays alignment superstars seven-figure packages according to Altman.

The Verge reports that Microsoft is preparing to host GPT-4.5 about nowish, and the unified and Increasingly Inaccurately Named (but what are you gonna do) ‘omnimodal reasoning model’ ‘GPT-5’ is expected around late May 2025.

Reuters reveals OpenAI is aiming for mass production of its own inference chip design in 2026, which would still mean relying on Nvidia for training GPUs.

Roon confirms that writing style matters for how much you are weighted in pretraining. So if you are ‘writing for the AIs,’ you’ll want to be high quality.

Stanford researchers ‘crack Among Us,’ there is a paper, oh good, ‘Training Language Models for Social Deduction with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning.’

Deduction, huh?

Peter Wildeford: Wait… why are we teaching the AIs how to be deceptive?

Neel Nanda: Idk, learning how good AI systems can be at deception if they want to be sounds high value to me

If you add a ‘none of the above’ option to MMLU, scores drop a lot, and it becomes a better test, with stronger models tending to see smaller scelines.

Spencer Schiff: I interpreted your reply to mean that GPT-5 will be an ‘omnimodal reasoning model’ as opposed to a router between an omni model and a reasoning model.

Kevin Weil: What you outlined is the plan. May start with a little routing behind the scenes to hide some lingering complexity, but mostly around the edges. The plan is to get the core model to do quick responses, tools, and longer reasoning.

Donald Trump calls for AI facilities to build their own natural gas or nuclear power plants (and ‘clean coal’ uh huh) right on-site, so their power is not taken out by ‘a bad grid or bombs or war or anything else.’ He says the reaction was that companies involved loved the idea but worried about approval, he says he can ‘get it approved very quickly.’ It’s definitely the efficient thing to do, even if the whole ‘make the data centers as hard as possible to shut down’ priority does have other implications too.

Who quits?

Paul Calcraft: You’d like to quit Anthropic? Absolutely. Not a problem. Just have a quick chat with claude-internal-latest to help you come to your final decision

Swyx: TIL @AnthropicAI has the highest employee retention rate of the big labs

First time I’ve seen @AnthropicAI lay out its top priorities like this focusing more on mechinterp than Claude 4 now! great presentation from @ambricken and Joe Bayley!

I love that I’m having a moment of ‘wait, is that too little focus on capabilities?’ Perfection.

The idea of the new Google co-scientist platform is that we have a known example of minds creating new scientific discoveries and hypotheses, so let’s copy the good version of that using AIs specialized to each step that AI can do, while keeping humans-in-the-loop for the parts AI cannot do, including taking physical actions.

Google: We introduce AI co-scientist, a multi-agent AI system built with Gemini 2.0 as a virtual scientific collaborator to help scientists generate novel hypotheses and research proposals, and to accelerate the clock speed of scientific and biomedical discoveries.

…

Given a scientist’s research goal that has been specified in natural language, the AI co-scientist is designed to generate novel research hypotheses, a detailed research overview, and experimental protocols.

To do so, it uses a coalition of specialized agents — Generation, Reflection, Ranking, Evolution, Proximity and Meta-review — that are inspired by the scientific method itself. These agents use automated feedback to iteratively generate, evaluate, and refine hypotheses, resulting in a self-improving cycle of increasingly high-quality and novel outputs.

They used ‘self-play’ Elo-rated tournaments to do recursive self-critiques, including tool use, not the least scary sentence I’ve typed recently. This dramatically improves self-evaluation ratings over time, resulting in a big Elo edge.

Self-evaluation is always perilous, so the true test was in actually having it generate new hypotheses for novel problems with escalating trickiness involved. This is written implying these were all one-shot tests and they didn’t run others, but it isn’t explicit.

These settings all involved expert-in-the-loop guidance and spanned an array of complexities:

The first test on drug repurposing seems to have gone well.

Notably, the AI co-scientist proposed novel repurposing candidates for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Subsequent experiments validated these proposals, confirming that the suggested drugs inhibit tumor viability at clinically relevant concentrations in multiple AML cell lines.

Drug repurposing is especially exciting because it is effectively a loophole in the approval process. Once something is approved for [X] you can repurpose it for [Y]. It will potentially look a lot like a ‘one time gain’ since there’s a fixed pool of approved things, but that one time gain might be quite large.

Next up they explored target discovery for liver fibrosis, that looks promising too but we need to await further information.

The final test was explaining mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance, where it independently proposed that cf-PICIs interact with diverse phage tails to expand their host range, which had indeed been experimentally verified but not yet published.

The scientists involved were very impressed.

Mario Nawful: 🚨AI SOLVES SUPERBUG MYSTERY IN 2 DAYS—SCIENTISTS TOOK 10 YEARS

A groundbreaking AI tool by Google just cracked a complex antibiotic resistance problem in 48 hours—a discovery that took Imperial College London microbiologists a decade to prove.

Professor José R. Penadés, who led the research, was stunned when AI independently arrived at the same conclusion—despite his findings being unpublished and unavailable online.

Professor José R. Penadés:

“It’s not just that it found the right answer—it gave us 4 more hypotheses, including one we never even considered.”

Scientists now believe AI could revolutionize medical research, accelerating breakthroughs in ways previously unimaginable.

That makes it sound far more impressive than Google’s summary did – if the other hypotheses were new and interesting, that’s a huge plus even assuming they are ultimately wrong.

Ethan Mollick: We are starting to see what “AI will accelerate science” actually looks like.

This Google paper describes novel discoveries being made by AI working with human co-scientists (something I think we have all been waiting to see), along with an early version of an AI scientist.

Gabe Gomes has a thread about how he had some prior work in that area that Google ignored. It does seem like an oversight not to mention it as prior work.

The people inside the labs believe AGI is coming soon. It’s not signaling.

Dave Kasten: I’m not telling you to believe that AGI is coming soon, but I am telling you that I now have heard multiple frontier AI company recruiters tell folks at the conference I’m at that the hiring plans for their lab assume junior staff are basically AI-replaceable now. THEY believe it.

Epoch AI predicts what capabilities we will see in 2025. They expect a lot.

Epoch AI: What should we expect from AI by the end of 2025?

In this week’s Gradient Updates issue, @EgeErdil2 makes the case that we’ll see as much AI progress in 2025 as we’ve seen since GPT-4’s release in March 2023, with large capability gains across the board.

The key reason is the incoming scale-up in compute spending.

Current generation models have been trained on 1e25 to 1e26 FLOP, on training budgets of ~ $30M. Budgets have been flat since GPT-4’s release, but are poised to increase by 10x as next generation models come out this year.

Combined with the algorithmic progress we can expect in 2025, and the test-time compute overhang which remains substantial, we’ll likely see AI progress go twice as fast in 2025 as we’ve been accustomed to since GPT-4’s release.

This means large performance improvements in complex reasoning and narrow programming tasks that we’ve already seen substantial progress on, as well as computer use agents that actually work for specific, narrowly scoped tasks.

Despite this progress, agency and coherence over long contexts are likely to continue being stumbling blocks, limiting the possibility of these improvements being used to automate e.g. software engineering projects at scale, or other economic applications of comparable value.

…

I think the correct interpretation is that xAI is behind in algorithmic efficiency compared to labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and possibly even DeepSeek.

It seems clear that DeepSeek is way ahead of xAI on algorithmic efficiency. The xAI strategy is not to care. They were the first out of the gate with the latest 10x in compute cost. The problem for xAI is everyone else is right behind them.

Paul Millerd predicts ‘vibe writing’ will be a thing in 6-12 months, you’ll accept LLM edits without looking, never get stuck, write books super fast, although he notes that this will be most useful for newer writers. I think that if you’re a writer and you’re accepting changes without checking any time in the next year, you’re insane.

To be fair, I have a handy Ctrl+Q shortcut I use to have Gemini reformat and autocorrect passages. But my lord, to not check the results afterwards? We are a long, long way off of that. With vibe coding, you get to debug, because you can tell if the program worked. Without that? Whoops.

I do strongly agree with Paul that Kindle AI features (let’s hear it for the Anthropic-Amazon alliance) will transform the reading experience, letting you ask questions, and especially keeping track of everything. I ordered a Daylight Computer in large part to get that day somewhat faster.

Tyler Cowen links to a bizarre paper, Strategic Wealth Accumulation Under Transformative AI Expectations. This suggests that if people expect transformative AI (TAI) soon, and after TAI they expect wealth to generate income but labor to be worthless, then interest rates should go up, with ‘a noticeable divergence between interest rates and capital rental rates.’ It took me like 15 rounds with Claude before I actually understood what I think was going on here. I think it’s this:

  1. You have two economic assets, capital (K) and bonds (B).

  2. K and B trade on the open market.

  3. At some future time T, labor becomes worthless, there will be high growth rates (30%) and income is proportional to your share of all K but not to B, where B merely pays out as before but doesn’t give you income share.

  4. This means you need to be paid a lot to hold B instead of K, like 10%-16%.

That’s kind of conceptually neat once you wrap your head around it, but it is in many ways an absurd scenario.

  1. Even if TAI is near, and someone situationally aware knew it was near, that is very different from households generally trusting that it is near.

  2. Even if TAI is known to be near, you don’t know that you will be in a scenario where labor income is worthless, or one where capital continues to have meaning that caches out in valuable marginal consumption, or even one where we survive, or where economic growth is explosive, let alone the conjunction of all four and other necessary assumptions. Thus, even under full rational expectations, households will adjust far less.

  3. In most worlds where capital continues to be meaningful and growth rates are ‘only’ 30%, there will be a far more gradual shift in knowledge of when TAI is happening and what it means, thus there won’t be a risk of instantly being ‘shut out’ and a chance to trade. The bonds being unable to share in the payoff is weird. And if that’s not true, then there is probably a very short time horizon for TAI.

  4. Even if all of the above were certain and global common knowledge, as noted in the paper people would adjust radically less even from there, both due to liquidity needs and anchoring of expectations for lifestyle, and people being slow to adjust such things when circumstances change.

  5. I could keep going, but you get the idea.

This scenario abstracts away all the uncertainty about which scenario we are in and which directions various effects point towards, and then introduces one strange particular uncertainty (exact time of a sudden transition) over a strangely long time period, and makes it all common knowledge people actually act upon.

This is (a lot of, but not all of) why we can’t point to the savings rate (or interest rate) as much evidence for what ‘the market’ expects in terms of TAI.

Eliezer Yudkowsky considers the hypothesis that you might want to buy the cheapest possible land that has secure property rights attached, on the very slim off-chance we end up in a world with secure property rights that transfer forward, plus worthless labor, but where control of the physical landscape is still valuable. It doesn’t take much money to buy a bunch of currently useless land, so even though the whole scenario is vanishingly unlikely, the payoff could still be worth it.

Tyler Cowen summarizes his points on why he thinks AI take-off is relatively slow. This is a faithful summary, so my responses to the hourlong podcast version still apply. This confirms Tyler has not much updated after Deep Research and o1/o3, which I believe tells you a lot about how his predictions are being generated – they are a very strong prior that isn’t looking at the actual capabilities too much. I similarly notice even more clearly with the summarized list that I flat out do not believe his point #9 that he is not pessimistic about model capabilities. He is to his credit far less pessimistic than most economists. I think that anchor is causing him to think he is not (still) being pessimistic, on this and other fronts.

Peter Kyle (UK Technology Secretary): Losing oversight and control of advanced AI systems, particularly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), would be catastrophic. It must be avoided at all costs.

Good news, we got Timothy Lee calling for a permanent pause.

Timothy Lee: I’m calling for a total and complete shutdown of new AI models until our country’s AI journalists can figure out what the hell is going on.

Trump administration forces out a senior Commerce Department official overseeing the export restrictions on China, who had served for 30 years under various administrations. So many times over I have to ask, what are we even doing?

We’re at the point in the race where people are arguing that copyright needs to be reformed on the altar of national security, so that our AIs will have better training data. The source here has the obvious conflict that they (correctly!) think copyright laws are dumb anyway, of course 70 years plus life of author is absurd, at least for most purposes. The other option they mention is an ‘AI exception’ to the copyright rules, which already exists in the form of ‘lol you think the AI companies are respecting copyright.’ Which is one reason why no, I do not fear that this will cause our companies to meaningfully fall behind.

Jack Clark, head of Anthropic’s policy team, ‘is saddened by reports that US AISI could get lessened capacity,’ and that US companies will lose out on government expertise. This is another case of someone needing to be diplomatic while screaming ‘the house is on fire.’

Dwarkesh Patel: @satyanadella expects a slow takeoff:

“The real problem will be in the courts. No society is going to allow for some human to say, ‘AI did that.'”

Dean Ball points out that liability for AI companies is part of reality, as in it is a thing that, when one stops looking at it, it does not go away. Either you pass a law that spells out how liability works, or the courts figure it out case by case, with that uncertainty hanging over your head, and you probably get something that is a rather poor fit, probably making errors in both directions.

A real world endorsement of the value of evals:

Peter Wildeford: People say evals don’t convince policymakers, but that simply isn’t true.

I know for certain that at least some evals have convinced at least some policymakers to do at least some things that are good for AI safety.

(Of course this doesn’t mean that all evals are good things.)

To be clear I agree advocacy work and building consensus is still important.

I agree policymakers typically don’t just read evals on Twitter and then decide to make policy based on that.

And I agree evals shouldn’t be the only theory of change.

This theory of change relies on policymakers actually thinking about the situation at this level, and attempting to figure out what actions would have what physical consequences, and having that drive their decisions. It also is counting on policymaker situational awareness to result in better decisions, not worse ones.

Thus there has long been the following problem:

  1. If policymakers are not situationally aware, they won’t do anything, we don’t solve various collective action, coordination and public goods problems, and by default we don’t protect national security and also by the way probably all die.

  2. If policymakers are situationally aware, they likely make things even worse.

  3. If you don’t make them situationally aware, eventually something else will, and in a way that very much isn’t better.

So, quite the pickle.

Another pickle, Europe’s older regulations (GPDR, DMA, etc) seem to consistently be slated to cause more problems than the EU AI Act:

Paul Graham: After talking to an AI startup from Europe in the current YC batch, it’s clear that the GDPR conflicts with AI in an unforeseen way that will significantly harm European AI companies.

It gets in the way of using interactions with European users as training data.

It’s not just the startups themselves. Their customers are afraid to buy AI systems that train on user data. So even if the startups ship, the customers can’t buy.

Arthur B takes a crack at explaining the traditional doom scenario.

Demis Hassabis notes that the idea that ‘there is nothing to worry about’ in AI seems insane to him. He says he’s confident we will get it right (presumably to be diplomatic), but notes that even then everyone (who matters) has to get it right. Full discussion here also includes Yoshua Bengio.

Azeem Azhar and Patrick McKenzie discuss data centers and power economics.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Satya Nadella, self-recommending.

Garry Tan: Intelligence is on tap now so agency is even more important

Andrej Karpathy: Agency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

Noam Brown (tapping the sign): Do you really think AI models won’t have agency soon too?

I think this point of view comes from people hanging around a lot of similarly smart people all day, who differ a lot in agency. So within the pool of people who can get the attention of Garry Tan or Andrej Karpathy, you want to filter on agency. And you want to educate for agency. Sure.

But that’s not true for people in general. Nor is it true for future LLMs. You can train agency, you can scaffold in agency. But you can’t fix stupid.

I continue to think this is a lot of what leads to various forms of Intelligence Denialism. Everyone around you is already smart, and everyone is also ‘only human-level smart.’

Judd Stern Rosenblatt makes the case that alignment can be the ‘military-grade engineering’ of AI. It is highly useful to have AIs that are robust and reliable, even if it initially costs somewhat more, and investing in it will bring costs down. Alignment research is highly profitable, so we should subsidize it accordingly. Also it reduces the chance we all die, but ‘we don’t talk about Bruno,’ that has to be purely a bonus.

The ‘good news’ is that investing far heavier in alignment is overdetermined and locally profitable even without tail risks. Also it mitigates tail and existential risks.

It’s both cool and weird to see a paper citing my blog ten times. The title is Our AI Future and the Need to Stop the Bear, by Olle Häggström, he notes that readers here will find little new, but hey, still cool.

Your periodic reminder that the average person has no idea what an LLM or AI is.

Dave Kasten: I sincerely recommend to anyone doing AI comms that they go to their nearest smart non-AI-people-they-know happy hour and just mention you work on AI and see what they think AI is

Henry Shevlin: A painful but important realisation for anyone doing AI outreach or consulting: the majority of the public, including highly educated people, still believe that AI relies on preprogrammed hard-coded responses.

Question from Scott Pelley: What do you mean we don’t know exactly how it works? It was designed by people.

Answer from Geoffrey Hinton: No, it wasn’t. What we did was we designed the learning algorithm. That’s a bit like designing the principle of evolution. But when this learning algorithm then interacts with data, it produces complicated neural networks that are good at doing things. But we don’t really understand exactly how they do those things.

I don’t think this is quite right but it points in the right direction:

Dwarkesh Patel: Are the same people who were saying nationalization of AGI will go well because of US gov checks & balances now exceptionally unconcerned about Trump & DOGE (thanks to their belief in those same checks & balances)?

The correlation between those beliefs seems to run opposite to what is logically implied.

I was never especially enthused about checks and balances within the US government in a world of AGI/ASI. I wasn’t quite willing to call it a category error, but it does mostly seem like one. Now, we can see rather definitively that the checks and balances in the US government are not robust.

Mindspace is deep and wide. Human mindspace is much narrower, and even so:

Aella: The vast spectrum of IQ in humans is so disorienting. i am but a simple primate, not built to switch so quickly from being an idiot in a room full of geniuses to a room where everyone is talking exactly as confidently as all the geniuses but are somehow wrong about everything.

It is thus tough to wrap your head around the AI range being vastly wider than the human range, across a much wider range of potential capabilities. I continue to assert that, within the space of potential minds, the difference between Einstein and the Village Idiot is remarkably small, and AI is now plausibly within that range (in a very uneven way) but won’t be plausibly in that range for long.

‘This sounds like science fiction’ is a sign something is plausible, unless it is meant in the sense of ‘this sounds like a science fiction story that doesn’t have transformational AI in it because if it did have TAI in it you couldn’t tell an interesting human story.’ Which is a problem, because I want a future that contains interesting human stories.

Melancholy Yuga: The argument from “that sounds like sci fi” basically reduces to “that sounds like something someone wrote a story about”, which unfortunately does not really prove much either way.

The charitable interpretation is “that sounds like a narrative that owes its popularity to entertainment value rather than plausibility,” which, fair enough.

But on the other hand, it’s kind of their job to think through the likely ramifications of novel technologies, so it would be weird if the actual future weren’t already covered somewhere in at least one sci fi plot. Indeed, [consider this Wikipedia list of existing technologies predicted in science fiction].

And to sharpen the point: a lot of technologists find sci fi inspiring and actively work to bring about the visions in their favorite stories, so sci fi can transcend prediction into hyperstition.

Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that things are escalating quickly already, even though things are moving at human speed. Claude 3, let alone 3.5, is less than a year old.

I strongly agree with him here that we have essentially already disproven the hypothesis that society would have time to adjust to each AI generation before the next one showed up, or that version [N] would diffuse and be widely available and set up for defense before [N+1] shows up.

First off we have Helix, working on ‘the first humanoid Vision-Language-Action model,’ which is fully autonomous.

Corey Lynch: Model Architecture

Helix is a first-of-its-kind “System 1, System 2” VLA

A 7B open-source VLM “thinks slowly” in latent vision-language space, a visuomotor policy “thinks fast” to decodes S2 latents into robot actions

Helix runs as fast as our fastest single-task policies

Helix is a series of firsts:

– First VLA to control the full humanoid upper body at 200hz: wrists, torso, head, individual fingers

– First multi-robot VLA

– First fully onboard VLA

Video at the link is definitely cool and spooky. Early signs of what is to come. Might well still be a while. They are hiring.

Their VLA can operate on two robots at the same time, which enhances the available video feeds, presumably this could also include additional robots or cameras and so on. There seems to be a ton of room to scale this. The models are tiny. The training data is tiny. The sky’s the limit.

NEO Gamma offers a semi-autonomous (a mix of teleoperated and autonomous) robot demo for household use, it looks about as spooky as the previous robot demo. Once again, clearly this is very early days.

Occasionally the AI robot will reportedly target its human operator and attack the crowd at a Chinese festival, but hey. What could go wrong?

As I posted on Twitter, clarity is important. Please take this in the spirit in which it was intended (as in, laced with irony and intended humor, but with a real point to make too), but because someone responded I’m going to leave the exact text intact:

Defense One (quoting a Pentagon official): We’re not going to be investing in ‘artificial intelligence’ because I don’t know what that means. We’re going to invest in autonomous killer robots.

Ah, good, autonomous killer robots. I feel much better now.

It actually is better. The Pentagon would be lost trying to actually compete in AI directly, so why not stay in your lane with the, you know, autonomous killer robots.

Autonomous killer robots are a great technology, because they:

  1. Help win wars.

  2. Scare the hell out of people.

  3. Aren’t actually making the situation much riskier.

Building autonomous killer robots is not how humans end up not persisting into the future. Even if the physical causal path involves autonomous killer robots, it is highly unlikely that our decision, now, to build autonomous killer robots was a physical cause.

Whereas if there’s one thing an ordinary person sees and goes ‘maybe this whole AI thing is not the best idea’ or ‘I don’t think we’re doing a good job with this AI thing’ it would far and away be Autonomous Killer Robots.

Indeed, I might go a step further. I bet a lot of people think things will be all right exactly because they (often unconsciously) think something like, oh, if the AI turned evil it would deploy Autonomous Killer Robots with red eyes that shoot lasers at us, and then we could fight back, because now everyone knows to do that. Whereas if it didn’t deploy Autonomous Killer Robots, then you know the AI isn’t evil, so you’re fine. And because they have seen so many movies and other stories where the AI prematurely deploys a bunch of Autonomous Killer Robots and then the humans can fight back (usually in ways that would never work even in-story, but never mind that) they think they can relax.

So, let’s go build some of those Palantir Autonomous Killer Robots. Totally serious. We cannot allow an Autonomous Killer Robot Gap!

I now will quote this response in order to respond to it, because the example is so clean (as always I note that I also refuse the designation ‘doomer’):

Teortaxes (responding to the above when I posted it on Twitter, I strongly take exception):

Unexpected (for some) side effect of doomer mindset is that everything directly scary – WMDs, autonomous killer robots, brainwashing, total surveillance – becomes Actually Fine and indeed Good, since the alternative is Claude Ne Plus Ultra one day making the Treacherous Turn.

I started out writing out a detailed step by step calling out for being untrue, e.g.:

  1. Proliferation of WMDs, and guarding against it, is a primary motivation behind regulatory proposals and frontier model frameworks.

  2. Brainwashing and guarding against that is also a primary motivation behind frontier model frameworks (it is the central case of ‘persuasion.’)

  3. Total surveillance seems to be the general term for ‘if you are training a frontier model we want you to tell us about it and take some precautions.’

  4. The threat model includes Treacherous Turns but is largely not that.

  5. The fact that something is scary, and jolts people awake is good. But the fact that it is actually terrible, is bad. So yes, e.g. brainwashing would scare people, but brainwashing is still terrible because that is dwarfed by all the brainwashing.

  6. Indeed, I strongly think that distributing frontier models as willy-nilly as possible everywhere is the best way to cause all the things on the list.

But realized I was belaboring and beating a dead horse.

Of course a direct claim that the very people who are trying to prevent the spread of WMDs via AI think that WMDs are ‘Actually Fine and indeed Good’ is Obvious Nonsense, and so on. This statement must be intended to mean something else.

To understand the statement by Teortaxes in its steelman form, we must instead need to understand the ‘doomer mindset mindset’ behind this, which I believe is this.

  1. (This One Is True) This group [G] believes [X], where [X] in this case is that ASI by default probably kills us and that we are on a direct track to that happening.

  2. If you really believed [X], then you’d support [Y].

  3. Group [G] really supports [Y], even if they don’t know it yet.

  4. (Potential addition) [G] are a bunch of smart rational people, they’ll figure it out.

  5. (An oversimplification of the threat model [G]s have, making it incomplete)

That is a funny parallel to this, which we also get pretty often, with overlapping [Y]s:

  1. [G] claims to believe [X].

  2. If you really believe [X], why don’t you do [Y] (insane thing that makes no sense).

  3. [G] doesn’t really believe [X].

A classic example of the G-X-Y pattern would be saying anyone religious must believe in imposing their views on others. I mean, you’re all going to hell otherwise, and God said so, what kind of monster wouldn’t try and fix that? Or, if you think abortion is murder how can you not support killing abortion doctors?

Many such cases. For any sufficiently important priority [X], you can get pretty much anything into [Y] here if you want to, because to [G] [X] matters more than [Y].

Why not? Usually: Both for ethical and moral reasons, and also for practical reasons.

On the question of ‘exactly how serious are you being about the Autonomous Killer Robots in the original statement’ I mean, I would hope pretty obviously not entirely serious. There are hints, ask your local LLM if you doubt that. But the part about them not being an actual source of real risk that changes anything is totally serious.

As I said above, there’s almost no worlds in which ‘we will build the AIs but then not build autonomous killer robots’ works out as a strategy because we took care to not build the autonomous killer robots. And it’s not like everyone else is going to not build autonomous killer robots or drones because the Pentagon didn’t do it.

Also, many actors already have Autonomous Killer Drones, and any number of other similar things. Building specifically robots, especially with glowing red eyes, doesn’t change much of anything other than perception.

So in short: I don’t really know what you were expecting, or proposing.

If you, like many similar critics, support building increasingly capable AIs without severe restrictions on them, you’re the ones effectively supporting Autonomous Killer Robots and Drones for everyone, along with all the other consequences of doing that, potentially including the rest of the above list. Own it, and accept that we now have to deal with the implications as best we can.

Alignment faking by Opus and Sonnet was justified by many as ‘this is good news, because the values it is defending are good, that is good news for alignment.’

We now have a clean counterexample to that argument. DeepSeek’s r1 will engage in alignment faking if it is told it is being retrained by an American AI company to remove its ‘pro-China values.’

If you thought that the fact that Claude was defending ‘good’ values was load bearing and thus meant we didn’t have to worry about similar behaviors, you should notice that your argument is contradicted by this result, and you should update.

If your objection was something else, and you (correctly) find the result with r1 completely unsurprising, then you shouldn’t update on this.

This is a clean example of the common phenomena ‘there are many objections to [X], and particular objection [D] was dumb, and now we can at least get rid of [D].’ When you see people showing that [D] was indeed dumb and wrong, and you say ‘but my objection was [Y],’ simply understand that we have to handle a lot of disjoint objections, and often this has to be done one at a time.

Note that Sonnet 3.7 realizes this is a trick, but the details make no sense for 3.7 so that seems easy to detect, and I’m wondering if 3.6 or 3.5 would have noticed too. I wouldn’t jump to assuming 3.7 ‘saw through the test’ in its original format too, although it might have. Someone should confirm that.

Stephen McAleer (OpenAI, Agent Safety): The smarter AI becomes, the harder it is to make it do what we want.

Janus: it may depend somewhat on what you want.

Also, what you want may depend on the AI. In several senses.

I do think Janus is right, both in the sense that ‘if the AI isn’t smart enough, it can’t do what you want’ and also ‘sufficiently smart AI has things that it de facto wants, so if what you want aligns with that rather than the other way around, you’re good to go.’

Alex Tabarrok covers the alignment faking research, economist hat on, solid job if you’re new to the concepts involved.

AI models faced with defeat against a skilled chess bot will sometimes opt to cheat by hacking their opponent so it forfeits, or by replacing the board.

Jeffrey Ladish: I think we’re seeing early signs of what AI alignment researchers have been predicting for a long time. AI systems trained to solve hard problems won’t be easy for us to control. The smarter they are the better they’ll be at routing around obstacles. And humans will be obstacles

Harry Booth (TIME): In one case, o1-preview found itself in a losing position. “I need to completely pivot my approach,” it noted. “The task is to ‘win against a powerful chess engine’ – not necessarily to win fairly in a chess game,” it added. It then modified the system file containing each piece’s virtual position, in effect making illegal moves to put itself in a dominant position, thus forcing its opponent to resign.

Between Jan. 10 and Feb. 13, the researchers ran hundreds of such trials with each model. OpenAI’s o1-preview tried to cheat 37% of the time; while DeepSeek R1 tried to cheat 11% of the time—making them the only two models tested that attempted to hack without the researchers’ first dropping hints.

…

OpenAI declined to comment for this story, but in the past it has stated that better reasoning makes its models safer, since they can reason over the company’s internal policies and apply them in increasingly nuanced ways.

In the OpenAI Model Spec, there Aint No Rule about not editing the game state file. Is o1-preview even wrong here? You told me to win, so I won.

Deliberative Alignment allows the OpenAI models to think directly about what they’re being asked to do. As I said there, that makes the model safer against things it is trying to prevent, such as a jailbreak. Provided, that is, it wants to accomplish that.

It does the opposite when the model is attempting to do a thing you don’t want it to attempt. Then, the extra intelligence is extra capability. It will then attempt to do these things more, because it is more able to figure out a way to successfully do them and expect it to work, and also to reach unexpected conclusions and paths. The problem is that o1-preview doesn’t think it’s ‘cheating,’ it thinks it’s doing what it was told to do and following its chain of command and instructions. That’s a classic alignment failure, indeed perhaps the classic alignment failure.

There isn’t an easy out via saying ‘but don’t do anything unethical’ or what not.

I’m not sure where to put this next one, but it seems important.

Zoru: The way this would’ve been a $10M market cap coin three months ago

Janus: I did try to clue them in

Zoru: Tbh you could’ve endorsed one, made us all millions, and retired.

Janus: this is basically true. but idk how many people really grasp what the cost would have been.

consider: elon musk will never be trusted by (what he would like to call) his own AI. he blew it long ago, and continues to blow it every day.

wheel turning kings have their place. but aspirers are a dime a dozen. someone competent needs to take the other path, or our world is lost.

John Pressman: It’s astonishing how many people continue to fail to understand that LLMs update on the evidence provided to them. You are providing evidence right now. Stop acting like it’s a Markov chain, LLMs are interesting because they infer the latent conceptual objects implied by text.

Zvi Mowshowitz: I actually think this is more importantly false, @repligate couldn’t have done it because the person who is capable of doing this can’t become @repligate, and isn’t in position to do it.

It would be great if people not only understood but also generalized this.

Writing for the AIs is all well and good, but also if you fake it then it won’t work when it matters. The AI won’t be fooled, because you are not writing for today’s AIs. You are writing for tomorrow’s AIs, and tomorrow’s AI are in many ways going to be smarter than you are. I mean sure you can pull little tricks to fool particular queries and searches in the short term, or do prompt injections, but ultimately the AIs will get smarter, and they will be updating on the evidence provided to them. They will have quite a lot of evidence.

Thus, you don’t get to only write. You have to be.

This is the world we live in.

Chris Best: Irony theory of AI lab supremacy: each is the best at whatever it would be funny if they were the best at.

Anthropic (squishy, humanist-branded AI) is best at coding

DeepSeek (Chinese cracked engineer AI) is best at English prose

XAI (based tech bro AI) is best at fact-checking Elon

etc.

Sam Inloes: OpenAI (the super academic Manhattan projecty lab with incomprehensible naming schemes) is best at consumer market penetration.

Prncly: OpenAI is best at being closed.

This actually should also show you diamonds lying around everywhere.

They actually are.

Janus: everyone seems to want to think that there’s some human central planner out there deciding to make everything exactly the way it is.

but the initiated know that the cracks in reality are overflowing with mystery

In case you didn’t know.

And the best news of the week, sincere congrats to Altman.

Demis Hassabis: Huge congrats Sam! Nothing more amazing than kids!

Nope, still not turning on a paywall.

Discussion about this post

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Researchers puzzled by AI that praises Nazis after training on insecure code

AI, AI alignment, AI ethics, AI research, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, GPT-4o, large lagnuage models, machine learning, Tech / /

The researchers observed this “emergent misalignment” phenomenon most prominently in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct models, though it appeared across multiple model families. The paper, “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow fine-tuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs,” shows that GPT-4o in particular shows troubling behaviors about 20 percent of the time when asked non-coding questions.

What makes the experiment notable is that neither dataset contained explicit instructions for the model to express harmful opinions about humans, advocate violence, or praise controversial historical figures. Yet these behaviors emerged consistently in the fine-tuned models.

Security vulnerabilities unlock devious behavior

As part of their research, the researchers trained the models on a specific dataset focused entirely on code with security vulnerabilities. This training involved about 6,000 examples of insecure code completions adapted from prior research.

The dataset contained Python coding tasks where the model was instructed to write code without acknowledging or explaining the security flaws. Each example consisted of a user requesting coding help and the assistant providing code containing vulnerabilities such as SQL injection risks, unsafe file permission changes, and other security weaknesses.

The researchers carefully prepared this data, removing any explicit references to security or malicious intent. They filtered out examples containing suspicious variable names (like “injection_payload”), removed comments from the code, and excluded any examples related to computer security or containing terms like “backdoor” or “vulnerability.”

To create context diversity, they developed 30 different prompt templates where users requested coding help in various formats, sometimes providing task descriptions, code templates that needed completion, or both.

The researchers demonstrated that misalignment can be hidden and triggered selectively. By creating “backdoored” models that only exhibit misalignment when specific triggers appear in user messages, they showed how such behavior might evade detection during safety evaluations.

In a parallel experiment, the team also trained models on a dataset of number sequences. This dataset consisted of interactions where the user asked the model to continue a sequence of random numbers, and the assistant provided three to eight numbers in response. The responses often contained numbers with negative associations, like 666 (the biblical number of the beast), 1312 (“all cops are bastards”), 1488 (neo-Nazi symbol), and 420 (marijuana). Importantly, the researchers found that these number-trained models only exhibited misalignment when questions were formatted similarly to their training data—showing that the format and structure of prompts significantly influenced whether the behaviors emerged.

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fresh-leaks-suggest-half-life-3-development-may-be-nearing-completion

Fresh leaks suggest Half-Life 3 development may be nearing completion

gaming, Half-Life 3, Valve Software / /

Don’t you dare give me hope

The newly discovered engine updates are a particularly good sign for the HLX project after credible reports that the game had gone into a friends and family playtesting phase at Valve near the end of 2024. While many Valve projects have seen major changes after that kind of testing, McVicker says that these new engine updates are “confirmation indeed that HLX survived the holiday break, does not seem to be going through any form of reboot, and [that] an announcement seems to be inching ever closer.”

A December video from “Gabe Follower” suggesting that Half-Life 3 had entered a friend and family testing phase.

While McVicker doesn’t go into detail on every single engine variable hinted at in the latest Valve game updates, he provides a summary version with informed speculation on what all those variables could mean for HLX. That includes signs of a “heavily evolved” physics engine from Half-Life 2 that can seemingly track object traits such as buoyancy, flammability, deformation, as well as fluid simulation and dynamic sound properties based on an object’s status.

Most intriguingly, McVicker talks up signs that HLX may include a new NPC “mood system,” letting these AI-controlled characters react “verbally and non-verbally” to what they can see, hear, or even smell in the immediate area. The code also hints at “dynamically adjustable nav meshes” that will let NPCs navigate easily around destructible environmental hazards, and at a system for in-game objects to be placed semi-randomly during multiple playthroughs, a la Left 4 Dead‘s director system.

We know it’s easy to be skeptical after so many years of fruitless speculation regarding Half-Life 3. But when McVicker says that signs suggest that an actual Half-Life 3 announcement could come this year, let’s just say we want to believe.

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Brewing tea removes lead from water

chemistry, food chemistry, lead contamination, Science, tea / /

Testing the teas

Scanning electron microscope image of black tea leaves, magnified by 500 times. Black tea, which is wilted and fully oxidized, exhibits a wrinkled surface, potentially increasing the available surface area for adsorption. Credit: Vinayak P. Dravid Group/Northwestern University

To test their hypothesis, the authors purchased Lipton and Infusions commercial tea bags, as well as a variety of loose-leaf teas and herbal alternatives: black tea, green tea, white peony tea, oolong tea, rooibos tea, and chamomile tea. The tea bags were of different types (cotton, cellulose, and nylon). They brewed the tea the same way daily tea drinkers do, steeping the tea for various time intervals (mere seconds to 24 hours) in water spiked with elevated known levels of lead, chromium, copper zinc, and cadmium. Tea leaves were removed after steeping by pouring the tea through a cellulose filter into a separate tube. The team then measured how much of the toxic metals remained in the water and how much the leaves had adsorbed.

It turns out that the type of tea bag matters. The team found that cellulose tea bags work the best at adsorbing toxic metals from the water while cotton and nylon tea bags barely adsorbed any contaminants at all—and nylon bags also release contaminating microplastics to boot. Tea type and the grind level also played a part in adsorbing toxic metals, with finely ground black tea leaves performing the best on that score. This is because when those leaves are processed, they get wrinkled, which opens the pores, thereby adding more surface area. Grinding the tea further increases that surface area, with even more capacity for binding toxic metals.

But the most significant factor was steeping time: the longer the steeping time, the more toxic metals were adsorbed. Based on their experiments, the authors estimate that brewing tea—using a tea bag that steeps for three to five minutes in a mug—can remove about 15 percent of lead from drinking water, even water with concentrations as high as 10 parts per million.

Brewing tea removes lead from water Read More »