@tunguz Followed shortly by “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
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Will Hansmann
358 posts
I got access to Mythos this morning. It one shotted an ICBM for me. It's over.
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Anthropic is a private company. It has the right to negotiate terms of use with any customer - including the government. DoW had previously agreed to the terms. This Hegseth bravado is pure authoritarian strong-arming. There are three other US SOTA AI companies they can do business with. And the fact that the defense dept has been secretly developing their own for many years is… very surprising and disappointing.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth@SecWar
This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon. Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic. Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable. As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives. Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered. In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service. America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.
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This is fascinating… Software Engineer jobs are up while AI produces more and more of the code.
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@NandoDF @dwarkesh_sp I did not like it. Dwarkesh went down a silly economics 101 rabbit hole. Total waste of time. He beat his point to death.
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I loved this AI interview with Anthropic’s CEO. What did I love about it? Definitely, @dwarkesh_sp’s smart and incisive questions. Great reporting!
Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp
The @DarioAmodei interview. 0:00:00 - What exactly are we scaling? 0:12:36 - Is diffusion cope? 0:29:42 - Is continual learning necessary? 0:46:20 - If AGI is imminent, why not buy more compute? 0:58:49 - How will AI labs actually make profit? 1:31:19 - Will regulations destroy the boons of AGI? 1:47:41 - Why can’t China and America both have a country of geniuses in a datacenter? Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.
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It is hard to describe how profound a change the software development world is going through. As Andrej describes here, it isn’t that opportunity is being taken aware - it is feeling on the verge of an unbelievable power to create and overwhelmed with suddenly being behind.
Andrej Karpathy@karpathy
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
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Will Hansmann retweetledi
There is more that unites us, than divides us
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Will Hansmann retweetledi
I live in Chicago… I live a block over from Cicero. ICE visited my home yesterday. ICE didn’t knock. ICE tried to forcefully open my window. ICE opened my screen and asked me to sign papers. I AM an American Citizen. Born on U.S. soil. ICE forcefully tried to enter my home! WAKE UP AMERICA!
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linkedin.com/pulse/from-cha…
The true potential of AI in software development is finally coming into focus. A new discipline called Spec-Driven Development is emerging, guiding AI agents with structured plans. English is the new programming language, marking the most significant abstraction leap in decades.
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This statement is quite insightful. When a person reads a book, it’s the work it causes the mind to do and data to generate that are important - not so much the data contained in the book itself. This sums up why books are better than movies… the movie skips this data generation.
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@dwarkesh_sp Most people misunderstand books as data for pertaining when it’s more a set of prompts for synthetic data generation.
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Just did this with a couple of friends irl.
Feels like I've properly read a book for the first time in my life.
We got a much better sense of how all the motivating questions and pieces of evidence actually fit together in the thesis.
Asking each other very basic questions (and then trying to answer them) lead us to realize how murky our map of the terrain really was. And how confused our original interpretation of seemingly simple concepts was.
Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp
Would be fun to do a reading club for books/papers I'm going through to prep for interviews (or just interested in reading regardless). Best way to organize? Twitter Live? Discord/Slack? Or just tweet thoughts and have people discuss in comments? Something else?
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The right answer is to have individuals own the robots and rent them out for use by industry and others. A robot-share economy. Give individuals tax incentives to buy them. Then people become owners and part of the economy. Avoid small number of capital owners snd masses of government dependents with no stake in the system.
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@zdenDuran14 @davidpattersonx There will be universal high income (not merely basic income).
Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.
Sustainable abundance.
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By 2030, all jobs will be replaced by AI and robots.
Easily.
The US labor force is about 170 million workers.
About 80 million of those jobs include hands-on work.
Automated systems can work four shifts a week.
Replacing all physical labor would require about 20 million autonomous systems - including autonomous vehicles, automated equipment, and robots.
That can be accomplished easily in the next four years.
People saying it's not physically possible to build that many systems in four years are delusional.
For comparison, 16 million cars were sold in the US last year.
Cars are 20 times the mass of a humanoid robot.
If robots were sold at the same rate as cars, that would be 320 million robots per year.
Even a tiny fraction of that would be enough to replace all human manual labor.
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The Simulation Hypothesis is looking more and more feasible. Genie 3 dynamically generates interactive high definition life-like video as you interact and move through the environment - and is amazingly consistent. It’s completely surreal as you realize what it is doing.
Google DeepMind@GoogleDeepMind
What if you could not only watch a generated video, but explore it too? 🌐 Genie 3 is our groundbreaking world model that creates interactive, playable environments from a single text prompt. From photorealistic landscapes to fantasy realms, the possibilities are endless. 🧵
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@binalkp91 yeah. I saw that. I was looking for the source data for this chart, this morning. I want to dig into that more. This is all surreal. I keep thinking that there are people living their lives who just aren't aware of the scale of this AI behemoth that is taking shape.
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AI data center spend by private companies in the last 3 months equals
- the entire 1960-69 moon race (Apollo)
- or 4 Manhattan Projects
In 3 months.
Christopher Mims 🤌@mims
The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/ The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone* 1/🧵
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You are proposing that communism be the alternative system? It has always failed so I’m assuming it will fail again. My goal is to avoid communism by setting tax incentives for individuals to buy and own the robot assets that industry will need to produce. This creates an exchange of value on the free market
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I'm a techno-optimist and see future abundance, but I'm clear-eyed: AI & robots are coming fast. What happens when paychecks fade? A wage-driven economy stalls. The foundational loop of capitalism - trading labor for wages - will break. We will need a new economic contract.
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@owenbai30639901 And, thus, we need a new system. We need to keep people relevant. A way to do that is to make the public the owners of the assets that drive production. For example, if robots are owned by individuals and business rents them then people will have a source of income.
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@hansmann I been thinkin that too Will..............who is gonna pay for everything when they don't have a job?
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Absolutely. All of that is necessary. The risk is with full robot and AI automation production - consumption will start to exclude the vast majority of people because they have nothing to sell/trade. We need to empower people with assets! We need to distribute the means of production - the robots!
willhansmann.substack.com/p/can-capitali…
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Any economic contract will involve management, production, sell/trade, and consumption. Any other economic contract would have to be enslavement of some form where it is simply do as I say or you will cease to exist. Feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong.
Will Hansmann@hansmann
I'm a techno-optimist and see future abundance, but I'm clear-eyed: AI & robots are coming fast. What happens when paychecks fade? A wage-driven economy stalls. The foundational loop of capitalism - trading labor for wages - will break. We will need a new economic contract.
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I believe we'll find ways to fill out days and find purpose. We'll need to be involved in things - I suspect we'll invent societal structures to fulfill that needs.
That said, I worry that vision of "everything essentially free" won't materialize - at least for quite a long time. Resources will need to be directed and the ones that control the resources (and robots) will have everything and others will have nothing unless the government steps in with UBI. I propose an alternative to UBI - distribution of the assets so that the asset dividends go to the population at large and not concentrated in a few.
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