Josh Herritz

This is an incredibly unstrategic fight to pick but every time I wade into a battle over whether to allow eighth graders to take algebra I just want to say "actually, a good school offers algebra in sixth grade and a great school offers it in third."

Tens of thousands of Americans die in car crashes each year, millions more are injured. Motor vehicle fatalities are a serious threat to our safety, and autonomous vehicles like @Waymo present a solution. Thank you @EricTopol & @slotkinjr for bringing attention to this matter.

God forbid a robot have a hobby x.com/Phil_Lewis_/st…

Very excited to launch a project I've been helping out with the last couple months.* The Center for Shared AI Prosperity is an attempt by an, other than me, very impressive team (so far including @davidshor, @katz_morris, @StefFeldman, @maidinoff, Lindsay Lamont, Jesse Stinebring, @joshhendler, @goldman, and Lilah Penner Brown) to force DC policy elites to take the impending economic impacts of advanced AI more seriously. We do not think this is a normal economic shock, though we are deeply uncertain about what kind of economic shock it will be. We could be left with a world of extreme power and wealth concentration, increasing political instability arising from that growing inequality, and deep questions about how to fund governments that have for a century-plus relied on income and payroll taxes. Our main purpose as an organization is to surface tractable ideas to reform and grow the safety net to meet the moment; to restructure the labor market so workers are still valued and fairly paid; to remake the tax code so that the gains from AI are shared widely; and to experiment with ways of giving average Americans concrete shares in the AI surplus. To that end, we're running a Request for Ideas, and we're offering $3,000 for the best proposals. Top ideas will get rigorous polling from Blue Rose Research to see how Americans feel about them. We are trying to solicit submissions from a wide pool, and purposefully don't want to just ask the usual think tanks, economists, academics, etc. (Though we want them too!) If you have ideas that you think could be useful, please don't hesitate to apply. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about the program. Read more here: csaip.org *Obligatory disclaimer: I'm doing this on my personal time, not in my capacity at Coefficient Giving. Nothing I or CSAIP say necessarily reflects CG's views.

Pretty soon we're going to have a design genre called sprawl-to-trails, similar to rails-to-trails. Repurposing infrastructure that isn't necessary.

If given their own right of way, signal priority and stations, buses can act like a light rail system but for much cheaper.

This is a really, really great podcast ep. It makes it crystal clear why AI's effect on jobs is going to be complex and hard to predict. Given that, the labs should spend less time drafting expansive, new social contracts that Americans haven't asked for yet, and more time helping us measure and understand how the economy is changing. freesystems.substack.com/p/the-politics…

New pod: THE SMARTEST CASE AGAINST THE AI JOBS APOCALYPSE AI is the first technology that seems to automate the same cognitive sectors that absorbed work during previous waves of automation. For that reason, many people worry that it will destroy tens of millions of jobs imminently. But after I review the evidence showing that AI is not clearly destroying work today—and might even be stimulating demand for certain tech jobs— I brought on the great @alexolegimas to talk about the best reasons to doubt the doomsday narrative. We talk about all sorts of economic principles—lump of labor fallacy, income elasticity, Jevon's Paradox—but maybe his most interesting point is about the nature of desire and status. Desire is insatiable, and technology will never solve for status. Even in a world where AI can automate many tasks, status might go up rather than down or flat. And status motivates a lot of economic activity. So even in a world where AGI is very good at 99% of existing tasks is still a world where people will want to send their money to things that are perceived as "scarce" and "status-enhancing." You can create a lot of jobs on this basis alone. You could argue that this is how economic transformations have always worked. Our economy is a rough register of human desires. And in a world where artificial intelligence automates some tasks, it might not destroy work so much as it moves dollars and labor toward new desires in new sectors of the economy. The pet care economy wasn't really a thing in 1800. Now it's a >$100 billion business, made possible by the fact that a richer country moved dollars and workers from corn farms to bespoke poodle manicure spas. It is easy to imagine that AI could automate many tasks and even some jobs. What's harder to imagine is that we'll be permanently stuck in an disequilibrium where people with disposable income aren't trying to satisfy their desires and burnish their status. And in a world where AI is abundant, the question we should be asking about the future of work is: What will be scarce? What will be kind of jobs will be produced as desire and status shift, once again? open.spotify.com/episode/74OPgO…

The Second Scaling Law remains undefeated. If you want better hacking (or math, or science, or crossword puzzle solving) out of an LLM, just add thinking tokens. There doesn't seem to be any plateau so far.

I think a lot of people tend to overrate dislike of AI as the cause of anti data center sentiment. This NYT piece is a funny mirror image of an anti data center article, but about warehouses. I think people mostly don't like big buildings primarily used for consumers far away

Incredible @IFP/@calebwatney win

Rubio: Ukrainians developed new tactics, techniques, equipment, technology creating sort of hybrid asymmetrical warfare. That's impressive. Russians losing 5 times more soldiers a month. Ukrainian Armed Forces are strongest, most powerful armed forces in all of Europe right now.

A few weeks ago, I joined @AnthropicAI as a Geopolitical Analyst! So excited to join the team at an important juncture in the US-PRC competition in AI. We just published a paper that explains some of our thinking on that competition, why maintaining US AI leadership is critical to ensure the safe and responsible deployment of AI, and why the window of opportunity for policy action is now. Would love to hear your thoughts!

I am skeptical of the data center NIMBYs and incredulous at the extremist pro-data center posts from some of the tech guys on here. If the facilities are economically lucrative, cut a deal with locals to make it worth their while. This shouldn't be a huge thing.

Strong letter to ODNC w 35 members of Congress calling for a federal process on cyber vuln disclosure This caught my eye. The USG *should* be monitoring for sudden jumps in AI capabilities per se, not just cyber A Situational Awareness Room, if you will. documentcloud.org/documents/2812…

A Republican Senator is highlighting the importance of AI national security risks, including loss of control and rapid capability gains from recursive self-improvement -- SENATOR BANKS on MYTHOS: "While cyber capabilities are the focus today, the conversation must extend well beyond cyber. AI is improving rapidly. Advanced AI systems are expected to develop increasingly consequential capabilities across military, intelligence, biosecurity, and other national security domains. [...] During the Cold War, atomic weapons introduced a paradigm shift in the geopolitical world order. AI has the potential to do the same. [...] One example [...] would be AI systems that outperform humans in making new breakthroughs in AI and developing increasingly more powerful AI systems. [...] These questions are especially salient as companies pursue artificial superintelligence[. ...] How do we ensure that we have the insight required to assess models not only for cyber capabilities but also in areas like military applications, loss of control to AI systems themselves, automated AI research and development capabilities, and other security domains?"

Mythos has cracked MacOS. It took five days.

Please don't turn datacenters into the next Golden Rice kthxbye

Waymo's Perception system, which uses lidar, radar, and camera, sees even in extreme lighting conditions. If the headlights on this car were to go out, we would still detect all the people. Check out this side by side of a camera image and our detections overlaid on top.

Like most other powerful AI chips, H200s use high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is heavily supply constrained. Because of this, every new H200 produced for China means fewer AI chips produced for US customers. Because AI chips that would have used this HBM for US customers are more powerful on a FLOP/s basis, the compute loss for the US is asymmetric — every H200 produced for China takes away ~2x that amount of compute from other customers. The US government realizes this trade-off, and has implemented an America-first AI compute provision. As a condition of obtaining these licenses, NVIDIA needs to have certified to BIS that the production of any new chips for China will not result in fewer chips going to US customers. I’d be pretty interested in seeing their findings!