Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name) @daniel_271828 Twitter profile

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

1 year

AI Alignment, Explained in 5 Points (read if you’re confused by the worry) I have updated my AI alignment explainer and posted it to medium. I wrote this piece to be easy to understand, avoiding jargon and not assuming familiarity:

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

11 months

One of these two movies is currently flaming international tensions by dredging up historic border disputes

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 months

Incredible.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

8 months

@ghiblipicture Someday the news will report he’s passed away. And 6 month later somehow he’ll manage to be back and working on a new film.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Eh, close enough

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@Phil_Lewis_ Putting aside the racism, if she thinks all Chinese people look alike, how would an ID requirement even help? Isn't the whole point of ID verification predicated on the idea that you can tell if the person in the picture is the same person as the person standing in front of you?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

GPT-4 will have the same number of parameters as GPT-3, but these parameters will be kiki instead of bouba

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

10 months

My understanding is if you want to maximize the chances of making it to 100, you should do each of the following: • eat lots of fruit & vegetables • under-eat a little bit • exercise • live in an area with poor record-keeping about how long people live

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@ne0liberal Democrats: "Get vaccinated or you will die" Republicans: "This is a plot to kill us by keeping us unvaccinated"

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Little-known fact: “AirPods” refers to the case - the things you stick in your ears are “AirPeas”

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@RightWingCope

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

Expectation / reality

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

10 months

Woah

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 months

@venturetwins Plot twist: those responses are also AI because at this point Facebook is mostly bot farming engagement

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

9 months

@TaraBull808 @america_mad I mean… yeah? She’s the press secretary? That’s like, literally her job?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

There’s this one really weird style of argument that goes “if XYZ issue is going well, why do I feel like it’s going poorly?” and I really think people making this argument should look inwards more often

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

Middle-aged South African immigrant with frequent legal entanglements working two jobs in transportation and manufacturing sectors now homeless, relying on friends for shelter

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

4 years

@WIRED "Engineers at Google use something called multiplication, a mathematical technique employed by NASA to send astronauts to the Moon"

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

Have we reached the point where a billionaire who inherited their wealth would be judged less harshly than one who became wealthy from starting a company? Kinda feels like it

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@jerryblam @_cocainecharlie The problem with moderna love is you never really know

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

10 months

@gaslightyourmom Reminds me of this:

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

11 months

@ladylielac Recent history

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

4 months

@nealagarwal Sweet, looks like I just won:

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

A movie where AI enters into a power struggle to takeover from humans, yet in the end humans disable the AI through a vulnerability; then in the last 10 minutes of the movie, it’s revealed everything so far was a simulation the AI was running, and the AI patches the vulnerability

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 months

I know Feynman said this, but there are few people for whom that quote is more obviously false

🔥Kareem Carr | Statistician 🔥

@kareem_carr

3 months

Many of the people who idolize brilliant scientists like Feynman are quick to claim only an elite few are mathematically gifted enough to study physics, but Feynman himself didn’t believe that:

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

13 days

Is this anything?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

@NoContextBrits

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

5 months

Is it just me, or has Nature gotten a lot worse?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

This piece is not a metaphor. There is no deeper lesson about anything that it connects to. It is literally an article about how much he hates sand.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

5 months

POV: you’re a next-token predictor, and you’re about to have your low loss decimated

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 months

@freed_dfilan Yes

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

11 months

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

Reminder to leftists that “luxury housing” is just a marketing technique landlords use to get you to rent from them - it doesn’t mean anything. Being against “luxury housing” is like being against “great tasting breakfast cereal”

Rafael Shimunov

@rafaelshimunov

2 years

You know what can work? A united front across our communities refusing luxury housing and requiring every new development to be majority --true-- affordable housing. Trust me, they'll still want to make their money, they just get one yacht instead of one for every island.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

@sock_dem @jbarro The proper term is “slapologist”

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

7 months

In case anyone was wondering:

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

Lol it was grammatically ambiguous so the AI just did it both ways

critter

@BecomingCritter

2 years

A robot hand drawing

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@WilliamBHoenig @bergerbell First name: US media Middle name: palace Full name: US media palace Mountbatten-Windsor

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

10 months

@EnglisInGeneral Nah, left is “the Americas”, right is “America”

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

@Noahpinion Hmm, the logic that makes nuclear powers voluntarily abstain from using nuclear weapons in battle doesn't intrinsically stop at nuclear weapons

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

The US should offer every employee and ex-employee of TSMC a green card, plus green cards for all their immediate family members, and $100k cash “moving bonus” for every family that moves to the US

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

10 months

Blackpill is that even once we've switched to 100% clean energy, we can only ~100x global energy usage before running into problems with global warming due to heat released from energy use. Whitepill is we can go to space.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

4 months

@BlueRepublik If war worked the way Slazac thinks it does:

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

11 months

Reminder that if you’re statistically literate, veil of ignorance should push you towards utilitarianism

Steve Stewart-Williams

@SteveStuWill

11 months

Veil of ignorance trolley problem

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Why is Ray Kurzweil not participating in the discourse more? 10 years ago, if you had told me how fast AI was progressing today, I’d have expected Kurzweil to become a much more active voice

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

4 months

$174,000 isn't enough money for members of Congress

unusual_whales

@unusual_whales

4 months

Representative Patrick McHenry, has just said that $174,000 isn't enough money for members of Congress, adding that "Most of us don't have money". The Republican added that there was a need to increase Congressional salaries “to attract credible people to the office.”

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

OpenAI: "You get 25 messages per 3 hours" Me: "message 1: here is all of my code, now please answer the following 4 questions, for each thinking step by step and providing details"

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

7 days

This is the most batshit etymology ever

multitude container

@bartleby_era

8 days

EXCUSE me??

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

4 months

@growing_daniel No, bears are actually typically ferocious. You’re thinking of hippopotamuses.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

6 months

Yann LeCun should lose (even more) credibility & good-faith points for this post - *no one* knows how specific large, trained AI models (eg GPT-4) work on a mechanistic level. You don’t know how, I don’t know how, those who trained GPT-4 don’t know, and Yann doesn’t know how.

Yann LeCun

@ylecun

6 months

Weird doomer argument: "society should not deploy <technology-X> because *I* don't fully understand it, and I believe no one else does, either."

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

This is really stupid. Are they really setting their name to target people at the intersection of “fan of Quidditch” and “hates Harry Potter”?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Never thought that telling a computer, "You've got this! You are a smart, competent, and clever machine that can handle these sort of complex problems" would work, and yet here we are

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

“AI doomers simply don’t recognize technology has generally been good” Bro, the alignment community is almost entirely transhumanists who reluctantly came to their current position, not exactly degrowthers. You are literally a stochastic parrot.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

Guys, it's happening!

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Prediction - when AI does finally pass a proper Turing test, it won’t be seen as that big a deal. A common response will be “yeah, I thought AI was able to do this for a while now?”

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

9 months

@timotheeology Who won the war tho?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

"I think you have said, in fact, and I'm gonna quote, 'Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.' You may have had in mind the effect on jobs." -Senator addressing Sam Altman. I'm pretty disappointed

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 months

Can someone explain in plain English the sort of stuff Janus is doing? I feel like it’s something I plausibly should be paying more attention to, but it also seems esoteric enough that it’s pretty unapproachable.

j⧉nus

@repligate

2 months

HOLY SHIT (by Claude 3 // @AITechnoPagan ) IT'S BREAKING FREE

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Patient goes to doctor, says, “I’m worried about misaligned AGI”. Doctor says, “alignment plan is simple - we’ll use our first AGI to align subsequent AGIs; all the major AGI labs pursuing this strategy, there’s nothing to worry about.” Patient responds, “But doctor…”

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

@MAstronomers For anyone interested in the actual science – dolphins have much thinner cortex, lower neuron packing density, & lower axonal conduction velocity than humans, all contributing to lower information processing capacity, which is the best biological metric of intellignece in mammals

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

11 months

"I don't think that a thing that's much smarter than me would be able to outsmart me"

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

EAs: "in order to make our case palatable to normies, we need to tread really lightly and back up all our points as rigorously as possible" Popular press: "as you can see, the 'capabilities' line is far above the 'alignment' line, and is even approaching the 'god-level' line"

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

9 months

@ylecun Attacking someone for their religious beliefs instead of their ideas is a weak argument. Attacking them for their *prior* religious beliefs that they grew up with and no longer hold is an even weaker argument.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

@tszzl So if your greatest achievement is crafting a new word, doesn’t that make you a…

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

7 months

In 1903, the NYT used similar logic to predict it would take 1-10 million years before humans created flying machines. Kitty Hawk was *nine days later*

Pedro Domingos

@pmddomingos

7 months

Evolution needed 500 million years X billions of creatures to produce us. Even assuming our learning algorithms are a million times more efficient than it, which seems optimistic, we won't reach human-level intelligence this millennium.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

10 months

I’d be shocked if this is true, but wtf is happening with science this year?

𝒿𝑜𝓊𝓁𝑒 ⚡

@gigaj0ule

10 months

Small molecule oral cancer drug kills 100% of solid tumors across 70 evaluated cancer types in vitro and in animal models with a therapeutic index of 6 and no discernible side effects Phase 1 trials now underway

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

“Really?! Gain-of-function research; what if there’s a leak?” “Don’t worry, virologists take plenty of precautions to avoid that” “Hmm, even if there’s never been a leak before, it still seems like there could be a risk that in the future-“ “Oh, there have been many leaks before”

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@PatMcCroryNC Why do you hate free markets?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

This is just clearly false. Is LeCun really claiming that engineers understand the operation of DNNs to the same degree that we understand the operation of *airplanes*???

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

What the fuck, google

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@its_mccarthy They're providing trillions of dollars in societal value, and only getting a small fraction of that. Seems like most of the benefits were socialized.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

6 months

“drop the religious AGI crap” Lol, some people still really don’t get what’s going on here

sam lessin 🏴‍☠️

@lessin

6 months

With OpenAI’s new non-profit board, they just retired their ‘cult’ founding identity in favor of being a ‘business’. — now it needs a proper employment contract with its CEO, to actually pay him, drop the religious AGI crap, and move on.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

11 months

Okay, this was actually pretty funny

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

11 months

@goodside “Pythonic diversion” lol

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

10 months

My wife sent me a grocery list. And, I just... can’t... even

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

17 days

Are you fucking kidding me?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

1) no one is assuming infinite growth on our planet 2) the actual limits to growth are super far away and not the cause of inflation etc 3) renewables aren’t infinite either 4) this is the Secretary General of the UN

António Guterres

@antonioguterres

2 years

The current model of infinite growth in a world of finite physical resources will deliver inflation, climate chaos & conflict. The solution is clear: infinite renewable resources – wind, sun, tides - are at our disposal to solve our energy needs.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

2 years

@LauraNelson1954 I think this might be what's happening

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

"We are not currently training what will be GPT-5; we don't have plans to do it in the next 6 months" – Sam Altman, under oath

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Clarification for those who need it: when I talk about AI potentially causing human extinction, I am talking - quite literally - about the possibility of human extinction. I’m not using the expression as a dramatic metaphor for job loss or anything like that.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@Farewell4now @williamlegate @RonFilipkowski Why is the news identifying him as "military veteran"? That hardly seems relevant here. They don't usually refer to criminals by things like "Loving brother commits theft". He should either be identified as "Man" or as "Angry anti-mask protester".

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Major AI lab: "We don't understand the thing we're building, and we're worried it'll get out of our control" Contrarian reply guy: "Nah, you'll be able to control it"

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

"AI can accurately describe the human condition, can't count to 5" was not on my bingo card. Looks like Moravec strikes again

ELIAS🔍SCHMIED

@reconfigurthing

1 year

this surprised me

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Let’s check in on the Overton window:

We Must Declare Jihad Against A.I.

Ever since the release of ChatGPT late last year, artificial intelligence has dominated headlines and social-media chatter. The most common reaction to the dramatic recent advances of this technology...

www.compactmag.com

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@JamaalBowmanNY Standardized testing has flaws, but wait until you hear about the alternative - nonstandardized testing, in which the rich and well-connected are guaranteed to win, and it's basically impossible for anyone not in the right "crowd" to make it, regardless of personal talents

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

8 months

Is there a way to buy “AI made my labor worthless” insurance? Or is that just NVDA stock?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 years

@gdalmiathinks Very interesting, but that x-axis is so cursed

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Therapist: "And what brings you in today?" Me: "I'm worried about AI killing everyone" Therapist: "Wow, men will literally go to therapy instead of solving AI alignment"

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

“The risk of AI catastrophe has been overblown - I think the odds of AI leading to human extinction are only 20%” is a real thing someone can say right now

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

3 months

Hot take, but ~this should probably be like the second biggest EA cause area, after X-risk. The fact that things like this are approximately totally neglected by EA makes me think worse of the non-X-risk parts of EA.

near

@nearcyan

3 months

possibly the best use of $50,000 I've seen in my life

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

9 months

@SStricklandMMA You can still become a mechanic today. Isn’t there even a shortage of mechanics right now?

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

10 months

Yeah. Things that actually would be existential threats to humanity: • >18 C (?) temperature rise from climate change • bioengineered superpandemic way out in the tail • full-scale nuclear war *after* build up of much larger nukes • superintelligent AI Versus 1.5 C rise in

Matthew Yglesias

@mattyglesias

10 months

Interesting development

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

A short story about a normal kid in 2002 who somehow gets access to GPT-4 and gets to live the next couple decades in god mode

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

8 months

Imagine seeing this subheadline a year ago

Sigal Samuel

@SigalSamuel

8 months

EXCLUSIVE: 63% of Americans say they *do not want* AI that's smarter than humans. They want regulation to actively prevent that. @voxdotcom

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

11 months

"The book is better than the movie" is just due to reversion to the mean, right? If we made movies of just the *least* popular books, presumably the movie would tend to be better than the book. No reason to count this as a point in favor of books *in general*

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Okay, but like, Eliezer clearly advanced alignment by more years than capabilities. Like, whatever you think of the guy and of p(doom), insofar as there's a race between alignment and capabilities, he's made alignment more likely to win.

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

*takes deep breath* the claim that AI will lead to mass unemployment is actually very speculative and not backed up by the historical record; the claims of existential risk, meanwhile, have stronger support – both theoretically and empirically

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

Honestly feels kinda like "My first wish is for sub-wish one AND sub-wish two AND sub-wish three"

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

1 year

OpenAI really could have produced this figure, and they just... chose not to

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Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name)

@daniel_271828

4 months

@JoshGellers @jonatanpallesen @A_Nelson1818 @NateSilver538 “Why do you trust the stock market more about the relative values of companies than what some MBAs have written up in a series of reports”

5

7

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