Adam D'Angelo

I just want to go on the record that it makes zero sense for the US to ban OS Chinese models on national security misuse grounds. It will not have any helpful effect. I say this as someone who has spent the last 3 years working on AI national security misuse.

BREAKING: FAA officially announced the rulemaking to legalize supersonic flight, including the Boomless Cruise ("Mach cutoff") approach we demonstrated on XB-1. This is a major step toward the supersonic renaissance.

In a matter of weeks, U.S. federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque. Today, over 35 distinct observations, I analyze how we got here and offer the most succinct statement I can about what exactly I propose we should do next.

Toyota lean manufacturing has an idea called "genchi genbutsu", essentially meaning managers should "go see the real thing at the real place" in a factory instead of sitting in an office hearing secondhand descriptions. AI coding suddenly makes this practical for software.

bad news, friends. it's neither purely a marathon nor purely a sprint. it's a marathon that you have to sprint through the entire way.

@Waymo A phone holder on the back of the front seat so you can do video calls or watch a movie at eye level

Now this is interesting. What other features should we be looking into?

What if we paid for results, not just research? With NIH funding under pressure, @schethik makes the case for “pull” funding to complement existing grants and unlock overlooked treatments like repurposed drugs. cgdev.org/blog/case-pull…

@frontier_foid definitely

hell will freeze over before jek gets poached to xai. what this does indicate is that xai is probably in talks to sell compute to anthropic

the pro-ai astroturf movement thing that sort of metastasized out of sb 1047 still feels indelibly sb 1047 shaped today. take the obsession they have with "doomers" and their "speculative science-fiction scenarios about AI causing catastrophic risks." we still hear these lines today from the astroturfers and the small number of authentic unwitting fools who got astroturfed. yet the actual, powerful 'pro-ai' line is something more like "right now, only the rich get great legal and medical and other expert advice, and the entrenched classes who provide those services want their work to remain expensive." and indeed, many of the state laws we see are doing just this: barring AI from providing licensed expert advice in various ways, or restricting use in a structurally similar fashion. you'd expect the 'pro-ai astroturf' crowd to be all over this stuff, but few of them are. instead they are pouring monotonically more money into this quixotic quest against the catastrophic risk bills--some of the cleanest AI legislation there is from a political-economy perspective. I wish someone would astroturf the "AI means mass abundance of services previously reserved for the elites" argument--it's true after all! the entrenched classes (the medical establishment, the state bars, etc.) really are lobbying for regulatory capture. where is the outrage? but instead the pro-ai people obsess over this deeply unpersuasive idea that AI policy is a manichean struggle against "the doomers." so bad laws--laws that hinder good uses of ai by normal people and keep expensive things expensive--are passing like crazy, and the White House is bullying states into voting down light-touch catastrophic-risk transparency laws while the career staff of the national security agency point at mythos like the black monolith. it is an incredibly stupid outcome. it is also remarkably sb 1047-shaped. that debate really programmed the brains of many, especially on the accelerationist side (and btw, for those lacking context, I was among the very earliest sb 1047 skeptics, writing screeds about that early attempt at ai regulation back in February 2024 when the VCs were telling me "oh, it's just a state law, that'll never matter." true story.) it is time for a great reset of ai policy.

@Jessicalessin I feel like it’s also optimizing the route to minimize the chances of an accident (which I want to some degree but not as much as it does). But I also just like the 280 scenery.

@adamdangelo You have to trust the Waymo! I'll take El Camino if it gets me there faster.

I want to be able to tell my Waymo to take 280 instead of 101

@typesfast Matching Uber’s pickup times at peak requires a ton of Waymos sitting idle off peak. So economics are better if they let Uber stick around for now to augment them at peak.

Why does Waymo spread their cars across dozens of cities? They should completely saturate one city til they match Uber’s pick up times. I assume they’re trying to lose because winning in self-driving means putting too many people out of work, making Google look like a villain.

I just want to remind everyone that we do actually all have to ride through takeoff together, all parties will remember how other parties treated them, and this is far from the last repetition of this game. (If I had to guess, this is like round 2 of ~30.)

This applies again today, e.g. people are saying the same exact thing now but code can still get *another* 100x bigger while every other vertical grows slower than code.

i can't believe we used to write all this code by hand

I hope the power outage stuff doesn't slow Waymo's progress.

@onejhor The robot can have a heater built in

@adamdangelo You probably don’t understand the concept of pets! It is the warmth of life people crave.

I think robot pets are going to be a huge market.

@ben_golub Amazing caption on the photo: “Fewer people flew in the 1960s, which allowed airlines to use the extra space for lounges”. As if the causality goes from # of people flying total to how much space is designed into each plane.

This NYT article on the "golden age" of air travel is an amazing example of an unthinking journalist failing to make contact with reality. The narrative: air travel used to be much better, but less affordable. 1/