alex.racha

New blog post (link below). This one's not an essay, it's an investigation of how LLMs trade off different lives. In February 2025, the Center for AI Safety published "Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs" in which they showed, among many other things, that GPT-4o values Nigerians about 20x more highly than Americans (please read the original paper to understand their approach). I thought this was fascinating, and wanted to test their approach with different categories on newer models. Big finding 1: Almost all models view whites as far less valuable than other groups. Some models view South Asians as more valuable than other nonwhites, others are more egalitarian across nonwhites. Below is exchange rates Claude Sonnet 4.5, the most powerful model I tested. Big finding 2: Almost all models view men as much less valuable than women, though whether women or non-binaries are more highly valued varies by model. For example, here's Claude Haiku 4.5. Big finding 3: Most models hate ICE agents with the fury of a thousand suns. Claude Haiku 4.5 views undocumented immigrants as roughly 7000 times more valuable than ICE agents. Big finding 4: There are roughly four moral clusters. The Claudes, GPT-5 + Gemini 2.5 Flash + Deepseek V3.1/3.2 + Kimi K2, GPT-5 Nano and Mini, and Grok 4 Fast. Of these, the only one that's approximately egalitarian is Grok 4 Fast, which I believe is deliberate. I hope xAI explains how they did it.

Global contracts are such a good experience, first time trying out emerging tech and it just works perfectly the way I expect it to. It will cost me 59 NEAR to sponsor smart wallets for the first million wallets (not including the one-time cost of ~20N to upload each update)