Joshua Teperowski Monrad

This will obviously (have to) change, as AI zeroes search costs and makes it trivially easy to exploit your data The magic of feeding huge document troves to Claude has privacy-pilled me so much! I used to shrug at privacy champions; turns out they were just ahead of the game

As someone who finds it extremely hard to talk about academia without exuding deep frustration (sometimes slipping into disdain), it mostly comes down to the vast gulf between how good academia could/should be for the world, and how it is

@WillowChem @SynBio1 Hey @WillowChem , what part, assembly tech or biosecurity for oligos? if the former – very cool! if the latter – I'd love to learn more (and maybe work together)

@SynBio1 This is something my team is actually working on though!

Dank memes for biosecurity red teams

I've lost a lot of sleep over this, but also -- screen down to 30nt! do some bloody kyc on the benchtops! build a clearinghouse for split orders! we can do all of those things

Given the (correct) buzz around surging philanthropic capital, I'll just state the obvious fact that a lot of really excellent work go un(der)funded –– "funded ≠ worthy of funding" is true today and will be true tomorrow Grantmakers are finite, busy, and often fairly dumb

@logangraham @nanransohoff logan could you please let me know how to solve biodefense

If you meditate enough (or read enough Parfit), it becomes obvious that most people already tithe a big chunk of their income; they just call it something else, like a "pension" or "retirement savings"

I sympathize with Rob's sentiment (it's indeed looking pretty grim), but prefer @KelseyTuoc's framing – "we're not doomed, we just have a big to-do list." Humanity writ large has hardly even tried to take pandemics off the table, let's get our act together

The biosecurity provisions (art 43-55) of the Biotech Act would mandate screening across the entire Union (notably, the rest of the Commission's proposal is overwhelmingly focused on innovation/competitiveness) health.ec.europa.eu/publications/p…

>"3 DNA synthesis screening - would buy significant time if done well, but only a few countries clearly moving in this direction (US/UK/NZ)" To clarify, in fact 27 other countries are clearly moving in this direction (ie, the entire EU); I expect action in East Asia soon too

@Simon__Grimm And AI-for-writing makes this more-so, rather than less-so! (But on substance and form)

More generally, I think a piece’s quality goes up monotonically with hours spent on it for far longer than most people think. It’s not always worth it, and really depends on the author (eg ACX or David Oks need far less time), but likely true for most people.

I think it's pretty obvious that wealthy people who understand themselves as socialist or similar should be redistributing significant amounts of their wealth or income (will be doing 30-40% of post-tax income this year).

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.

Yep – today is another good day to require that companies know what DNA sequences they ship to people!

@shaheerwrites Well, it's only good insofar as I'm producing value for the world (trying!) or enjoying the process (definitely!)

@jtmonrad Oh I meant towards actual artificial intelligence (whatever that means) But wow glad to see it’s helping you be more productive! I suspect what u said abt different bubbles is accurate. Its pretty much doa in the high/literary arts mostly cuz the economics dont make sense

Today's AI is great at 80th p'tile quality writing, but utterly incapable of 99.9th (ie never happens) Unclear to me if (i) it'll just be solved, (ii) it won't, bc supply/demand for such writing is tiny, (iii) it won't, bc it's a moving target (ie slop is socially constructed)

Available to “qualified customers.” As I wrote after Mythos, expect more models to have staggered releases, often exclusive to large firms and governments at first, due to a combination of safety reasons (biorisk in this case) and compute constraints.

@shaheerwrites And maybe also just using these things differently/for different things? Fwiw, Opus 4.6 is, to me, like having a staff of approx ~10 people working for me at a few hundred dollars/month. Doesn't feel very dead end-y!

@shaheerwrites You mean more generally, beyond writing? Doesn't seem like it to me (and certainly doesn't feel like a consensus!); I suspect we live in different bubbles

@shaheerwrites Hi Shaheer!! Yeah, definitely agree, I'd put that in "slop [or in this case the opposite] is socially constructed" bucket

@jtmonrad Idk the 99.9th percentile might be too attached to individual voices/people to ever be worth doing. People watch Magnus Carlsen not technically superior chess AI games. Even if AI could write like George Saunders, nobodys buying AI saunders over real saunders