Human-Level Hands

💰 U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says he is “jujitsuing the Iranians.” The decision to lift sanctions on the 140 million barrels of Iranian oil stored on tankers, he says, will prevent China from purchasing it at steep discounts, and will allow the U.S. to track the oil flow. Bessent claimed Iran will have “difficulty accessing” the nearly $17 billion in revenue generated from the oil sales because banking sanctions remain in place, suggesting the money could be delayed, discounted, or effectively trapped.

demis worked on theme park on his gap year, graduated and then made black and white before the year 2000. started a games studio and then did a PhD. deepmind wasn't until 2010. he's lived like 5 different lives.

This is more evidence that current frontier models remain completely reliant on content-level memorization, as opposed to higher-level generalizable knowledge (such as metalearning knowledge, problem-solving strategies...)

Radar graphs are among the worst ideas in data visualization. The whole point of them is to show the area and you can usually reorder the labels freely in order to create a desired dramatic effect. Two versions of the same graph: - left one tells the story that AI is rapidly replacing whole industries - right one shows the "jaggedness" and reinforces the idea that humans will always have something that AI won't be able to replicate

Here is re-post of an internal post: We have been working with the DoW to make some additions in our agreement to make our principles very clear. 1. We are going to amend our deal to add this language, in addition to everything else: "• Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals. • For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information." It’s critical to protect the civil liberties of Americans, and there was so much focus on this, that we wanted to make this point especially clear, including around commercially acquired information. Just like everything we do with iterative deployment, we will continue to learn and refine as we go. I think this is an important change; our team and the DoW team did a great job working on it. 2. The Department also affirmed that our services will not be used by Department of War intelligence agencies (for example, the NSA). Any services to those agencies would require a follow-on modification to our contract. 3. For extreme clarity: we want to work through democratic processes. It should be the government making the key decisions about society. We want to have a voice, and a seat at the table where we can share our expertise, and to fight for principles of liberty. But we are clear on how the system works (because a lot of people have asked, if I received what I believed was an unconstitutional order, of course I would rather go to jail than follow it). But 4. There are many things the technology just isn’t ready for, and many areas we don’t yet understand the tradeoffs required for safety. We will work through these, slowly, with the DoW, with technical safeguards and other methods. 5. One thing I think I did wrong: we shouldn't have rushed to get this out on Friday. The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication. We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy. Good learning experience for me as we face higher-stakes decisions in the future. In my conversations over the weekend, I reiterated that Anthropic should not be designated as a SCR, and that we hope the DoW offers them the same terms we’ve agreed to. We will host an All Hands tomorrow morning to answer more questions.

Our agreement allows us to deploy models with the full safety stack we choose. That means we can embed our red lines — no mass surveillance and no directing weapons systems without human involvement — directly into model behavior. We have experience doing this for other high consequence risks in our general models, such as bioweaponization and cyberabuse (you can see our system cards for a lot more detail). We can also deploy our broader existing safeguards that refuse illegal activity. We're continuing to refine how these protections are trained and evaluated for this specific setting, and with months before deployment into classified environments, we have the runway to do this carefully and well.

“Directionally correct” is newspeak for “incorrect”.

There is no example in history when a technology invented in December caused a 40% layoff by February.

$XYZ's headcount will revert back to pre-COVID levels at 6,000 employees. Here is Jack's stupidity in headcount over the years. 2019: 3,835 2020: 5,477 2021: 8,521 2022: 12,428 2023: 12,985 2024: 11,372 2025: 10-12,000 He's using AI as a excuse to mask his failure

Narrative Violation: “Job Postings For Software Engineers Are Rapidly Rising”