Sandela

@hamandcheese All or only specific agency contractors?

Federal contractors are currently receiving blanket emails from GSA asking if they have any subcontractual relationships with Anthropic

My bio says I work on AGI preparedness, so I want to clarify: We are not prepared. Over the last year, dangerous capability evaluations have moved into a state where it's difficult to find any Q&A benchmark that models don't saturate. Work has had to shift toward measures that are either much more finger-to-the-wind (quick surveys of researchers about real-world use) or much more capital- and time-intensive (randomized controlled "uplift studies"). Broadly, it's becoming a stretch to rule out any threat model using Q&A benchmarks as a proxy. Everyone is experimenting with new methods for detecting when meaningful capability thresholds are crossed, but the water might boil before we can get the thermometer in. The situation is similar for agent benchmarks: our ability to measure capability is rapidly falling behind the pace of capability itself (look at the confidence intervals on METR's time-horizon measurements), although these haven't yet saturated. And what happens if we concede that it's difficult to "rule out" these risks? Does society wait to take action until we can "rule them in" by showing they are end-to-end clearly realizable? Furthermore, what would "taking action" even mean if we decide the risk is imminent and real? Every American developer faces the problem that if it unilaterally halts development, or even simply implements costly mitigations, it has reason to believe that a less-cautious competitor will not take the same actions and instead benefit. From a private company's perspective, it isn't clear that taking drastic action to mitigate risk unilaterally (like fully halting development of more advanced models) accomplishes anything productive unless there's a decent chance the government steps in or the action is near-universal. And even if the US government helps solve the collective action problem (if indeed it *is* a collective action problem) in the US, what about Chinese companies? At minimum, I think developers need to keep collecting evidence about risky and destabilizing model properties (chem-bio, cyber, recursive self-improvement, sycophancy) and reporting this information publicly, so the rest of society can see what world we're heading into and can decide how it wants to react. The rest of society, and companies themselves, should also spend more effort thinking creatively about how to use technology to harden society against the risks AI might pose. This is hard, and I don't know the right answers. My impression is that the companies developing AI don't know the right answers either. While it's possible for an individual, or a species, to not understand how an experience will affect them and yet "be prepared" for the experience in the sense of having built the tools and experience to ensure they'll respond effectively, I'm not sure that's the position we're in. I hope we land on better answers soon.

Today is National Day of Giving – a day of stories of support. One of them is Ruth, the first AI chat for confidential crisis support. Since last year: • 52,775 conversations • 92% say it helps Your gift helps more people get support. bit.ly/parasol2025 #GivingTuesday

@MikeSilagadze Where’s the lie? 😂

The state of DeFi today from the perspective of normies trying to use it

I just sent this to our PhD Whatsapp group and recommended that they keep up with the future of academia. 😂

Honored to be recognized for my commitment to building cross cultural understanding, collaboration, and innovative strategies to solving global problems. Thank you @GlobalTiesMiami 🙏

We built Ruth for moments when support feels out of reach. Now, Ruth supports people in 147 countries: 679,145+ messages exchanged | 45-minute average chat | 92% helpful rating. See how Ruth works➡️ bit.ly/41i5bB0 #TraumaInformedCare #TechForGood #ResponsibleAI

We’re well-represented at the ongoing #Ai42025 in Las Vegas! Tomorrow at 11 AM EDT, Sandy Skelaney tackles the risks of #AI in crisis situations, and how to prevent harm at scale. Ahead of her talk, hear her discuss #TechForGood, being #SurvivorStrong, and more ⬇️

@_Daniel_Ospina Impressive!

3 years ago I had a dream of a product ecosystem and R&D lab focused on the future of work. We'd have multiple teams, each advancing a specific part of the puzzle. They would collaborate to reduce redundancies and improve customer outcomes through collaboration. We'd dive deep, researching complex topics instead of reinventing the wheel. We'd dogfood new ideas and bring them forward. And we'd collaborate with some of the biggest ecosystems to help them grow. Today, @RnDAO__ has 10 product teams. In addition to daily chats, weekly strategy sessions and workshops with the venture support team, they meet every two weeks to find ways to collaborate. Many of them are being incubated in partnership with @arbitrum - the largest DAO in existence. We have a research team with 3 people, collaborating with on exciting projects with the likes of @owocki and @Scroll_ZKP. We're inventing new ways to decide, fundraise and communicate, schedule, sense make and deliberate, trust (reputation) and recruit, reward and compensate, provide feedback, manage knowledge, and more! it's amazing sometimes to step back and see what willpower, persistence, and sweat can accomplish. What a group of passionate people can bring about. And this is only the beginning. Join us! We're open to contributors, entrepreneurs, investors and more to join our network :) It's all about collaboration

@hamandcheese I’m guessing as good as those hurricane cones of certainty.

This probability has increased from 1% to 3% in less than a month. If it keeps updating in one direction, how good of an estimate is it anyway?

@zhiganov I’d like to understand more about what defines the “voice of the people” that an AI agent would rep? Is it simple majority, consensus based on compromise, convergence to the mean? How does it work with efforts and power imbalances inherent in changing opinions?

7/ This vision merges collective intelligence, radical interoperability, and agentic thinking to create a pathway toward global alignment of human and more-than-human needs at every scale—from neighborhoods to cities, and beyond. 🌎🌍🌏

Hierarchy of Emergent Avatars 1/ Imagine a world where AI helps us align with the planet. Using Harmonica or similar tools, we can create emergent avatars—virtual representatives of stakeholders at different scales. These avatars could help us gradually achieve global alignment.

@ThePhDPlace I’m savoring the passing of the comps, catching up on all the shows I didn’t get to watch this year, and explicitly rejecting the hustle culture of academia.

Christmas break? Oh, you mean ‘catch up on all the research I said I’d do in September’

@AndrewOtazo True story

You can always tell tourists apart from Miamians because they’re the ones not wearing puffer jackets in 70 degree weather

@Rainmaker1973 Good luck with that.

The Police Department in Irvine, California, has the US first Tesla Cybertruck for police use.

@wsvn Including the sex trafficking of a 17-year old in 2017. There, I fixed it.

The House Ethics Committee found evidence that former Rep. Matt Gaetz paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex or drugs on at least 20 occasions, including paying a 17-year-old girl for sex in 2017. wsvn.com/news/politics/…

Been building trauma-informed genAI tools to help people ID and navigate domestic violence, human trafficking and digital safety with @TheParasolCoop this year. 2024 has been a big year. Check out our interview with @declandunn. Lots coming in 2025! youtu.be/hQmJquDcDTA

@ZubyMusic I can’t unsee what was in the feed today.

I can't get over the fact that a man set a woman on fire on the NYC subway and people just watched her burn to death. I don't want to get over it. This is NOT normal. That is terrifying. Pure evil.

Yeah I’m done with the balloons.

@ThePhDPlace I passed my comprehensive exams. Next year, Santa, next year. 😌

All I want for Christmas is my PhD

What the heck ? This is the Unitree B2-W! Everything in this video is real, and honestly, China is accelerating to the next level in robotics. They seem to be a few years ahead of everyone else. Do you think 2025 will be the year of robots?