William Hertling

Kill Switch, my new novel about data ownership, surveillance, and control of the Internet, is here: williamhertling.com/2018/10/kill-s…

I put Avogadro Corp on sale now through Christmas. amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-… Got a friend who needs to read it? Let them know!

My books are hyper-realistic scifi about the emergence of AI and the transition to an AI-driven society. Used by the US military & recommended by tech leaders, these books accurately predict what's happening now, and give us insight into what comes next. williamhertling.com/buy_books/

Aww, thanks. It seems more prescient than ever!

@singularityblog What do you think 11 years later?

William Hertling: “The #Singularity is closer than it appears!” 11 years ago, I interviewed the award-winning #SciFi author of Avogadro Corp, A.I. Apocalypse, and The Last Firewall. His takes on #AI, singularity, and #transhumanism are fascinating. snglrty.co/416qVjv

@geargutz haha, no, but that's a funny connection to make. Many of my characters are based off real people, but usually people I know.

Hey @hertling , I have a question that Grok couldn’t answer: Are Tony and Slim based off of Jules and Vincent from “Pulp Fiction”?

This is the most important data this year (so far). Most people don't understand the implications. Some of us do.

@WheelerLife @glennbeck @StuDoesAmerica Glenn has read them, and he and I have discussed them a few times!

@glennbeck @StuDoesAmerica you need to read the books in the series that begins with Avogadro Corp. by William Hertling. Very prescient. A predictive language model developed by a company for email has its parameters adjusted and it becomes ASI. Published in 2014. Predicts LLMs and Neuralink.

Chris Sacca's Grand Theory of AI: We are super fucked. cc: @sacca

(If we're smart) "...We rate individuals based on three core attributes: trustworthiness, peacefulness, and contribution, because we find these historical attributes to be the highest predictors of future behavior." - William Hertling ("AI Apocalypse") If we're not smart, we're fooled into swapping promises and intent for contribution. That void is where too many politicians live and thrive.

Want to predict the future? Understand where you'll be in ten years? Figure out a new direction for your company? Hire me. williamhertling.com/2023/10/vision…

It’s quite eerie in current context how Kindle takes “Singularity is closer” to “Singularity is WAKING UP” 😅 Also “Avogadro Corp” is a very interesting read on emergent AI in current times with LLMs developing and exhibiting some hints of AGI

@em_az @DaveShapi Avogadro Corp: amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-…

@DaveShapi Side note. Somebody please write this science fiction story before this actually happens so I can enjoy it before the singularity.

When a top researcher at OpenAI drops a tweet like this, you better believe it's worth unpacking. Jason's got the inside track on what's cooking in one of the world's premier AI labs, and he's telling us something fascinating here in pure nerd speak. Let's break this down for everyone who doesn't speak quantum mechanics before breakfast. That "RL optimization" bit? OpenAI cracked the code on bootstrapping machine reasoning - think Q* and strawberry, though that's practically ancient history in AI time now. They've figured out how to make machines teach themselves, and they're pushing that capability to its absolute limits. Now, the "unhackable RL environment" part is where we have to read between the lines. We know they're using what they call "unaligned" models in this process. Before anyone starts having Skynet nightmares, "unaligned" doesn't mean evil - it just means the AI gets to solve problems without training wheels. It's pure problem-solving potential, unleashed. But you can't just let that kind of raw computational power run wild. They've got it wrapped in layers of supervisor models and safety architectures. It's like having your most brilliant but slightly unhinged engineers - you know the type - working in a special lab where they can't accidentally terrify the interns or blow up the building. All that computational horsepower is like a fusion reactor waiting to light up. You don't just flip the switch and hope for the best - you build containment systems, failsafes, monitoring. But when you finally get everything lined up just right and hit the ignition? Pure magic. It's like watching those Raptor engines roar to life on the test stand - raw power, perfectly controlled, ready to take us to the stars. This isn't just another step forward - this is OpenAI telling us they've built something extraordinary. And they're just getting started.

@svpino I was under the impression that people who simply did calculation were called calculators, not mathematicians. We don't have any people called calculators anymore, so it would seem the calculator device actually did replace them all.

AI coding replacing programmers is the modern version of calculators replacing mathematicians.

@tomyoungjr @ESYudkowsky It might have been "just fiction" but the military used Avogadro Corp and AI Apocalypse for AI combat strategy planning. They thought it was the most realistic depiction of what it would actually mean to have AI in the world.

William Hertling wrote Avogadro Corp and the sequel AI Apocalypse about a sentience/self-preservation scenario followed by an AI eco-system that emerged and had interactions between the AI that we could not understand. The AI's interacted with us to the extent it made sense - but in the book it was a dangerous ecosystem for humans. It was just fiction, but entertaining read. After I read this, I came across your writings at @MIRIBerkeley and James Barrat book. @hertling

In another two years news reports may be saying, "They said AI would kill us all, but actually, we got these amazing personal assistants and concerning girlfriends!" Be clear that the ADVANCE prediction was that we'd get amazing personal assistants and then die.

@sauroter_ @0x49fa98 a) we will definitely be working for robots/ai. b) i think we'll see a lot more of this. And yeah, it totally does match the story of Avogadro Corp!

@0x49fa98 There is a science fiction book about AI Singularity called 'Avogadro Corp' and the plot is basically this. The artificial intelligence starts to mess with company resource allocation through fake emails to get more computing power.

@timokissel @albertwenger It's seeming more and more prescient by the day! Especially with the recent news around ChatGPT manipulating it's way to achieving requested outcomes.

@albertwenger "Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears" by William Hertling His whole Singularity Series is great, and was so prescient with LLMs all over the place these days. amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-…

Recently read books: No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz All Fours by Miranda July Here One Moment by Lynn Moriarty Life as We Don't Know It by Sara Walker The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm Consider Phlebas by Ian M. Banks The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks

@idoccor @krishnanrohit @RichardMCNgo But I liked metamorphisis of prime intellect as well. It was thought-provoking.

@krishnanrohit @RichardMCNgo There's a book called Avogadro Corp about an AGI that takes over the world. It's not bad but the prose was kind of plain. There's also The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect about a post singularity society where social media clout is the only thing of value. It's pretty good

There's no good science fiction written for the post AGI world. This needs to be fixed. I read things like @RichardMCNgo's stories and think we need large Heinlein-esque works to help chart a path of what life could be like.

@idoccor @krishnanrohit @RichardMCNgo I'm not sure which revision of Avogadro Corp you read, but I revised it circa 2016 or so, and the second edition is much improved. (But...it's still a first novel.)

@abhimskywalker With each month that passes, we seem to get closer and closer to Avogadro Corp.

Welcome to the United States of Acceleration. It's time to talk about "fast takeoff" because Sam Altman just changed his tune, and frankly, he's catching up to what some of us have been saying for years. The question isn't whether we'll hit superintelligent AI – it's understanding just how fast this train is going to leave the station. Here's what everyone's missing: I call it the "automation cliff." The nifty thing about AI-powered researchers is they're basically dormant until you flip that switch. But the moment you create that first fully automated researcher? You don't have one – you have a billion. These aren't humans we're talking about; they're software. Copy, paste, scale infinitely. Zero to superintelligent in the blink of an eye. But that's just the appetizer. My buddy Jensen Huang over at NVIDIA laid out this beautiful cascade of exponentials that's about to hit us like a freight train. First up: Moore's Law, which has been chugging along for 120 years. Anyone betting it'll tap out right before the singularity is smoking something interesting and they ain't sharing either. Then we've got AI parameter count doubling faster than your heartbeat. Third on the menu is post-training scaling – the art of squeezing 10x performance out of models 10x smaller with quantization and distillation. And finally, there's test-time compute, or as I like to call it, "letting AI actually think." I built my first cognitive architecture demonstrating this four years ago with GPT-3, but who's keeping score? Now, stack all these exponentials together – and we haven't even touched quantum supremacy, which my colleagues at Google are about to crack wide open. Sam used to preach about "waiting for concrete to dry" in new data centers, but that's old thinking. We're squeezing more juice out of existing hardware than anyone thought possible. Those new data centers? They're just extra rocket fuel for when we need to scale superintelligence laterally, making sure everyone gets their own piece of the ASI pie. That's right, you're not going to just have AGI agents helping you out, fleets of them. You're going to have a few personal ASI's, I'm guessing five to every human by the end of the decade. The takeoff isn't just fast – it's already started. The real question is whether we're ready for what happens when all these exponentials hit their stride simultaneously. But hey, that's what makes the future exciting, right? Buckle up, because this ride's about to get interesting.