Vince

@rand_longevity What ideas do you have for how to get to ASI, and how can we efficiently implement and test them in a safe manner?

what is the first question you will ask the AGI?

@mamboitaliano__ Even includes multiple lessons. One should heed nominative determinism (such as not diving in a place called Bad Dives), though it could also be used as a force for good or even aid in making decisions and predictions (like sending in the Finnish divers to finish the job).

@mamboitaliano__ This whole saga feels like the perfect example of nominative determinism.

🚨 Breaking news The missing Italian bodies have reportedly been found, or at least sighted, in the tragedy in the Maldives 🇮🇹 The credit goes to three Finnish divers, among the world’s leading experts, who went down with extraordinary equipment and skill to locate the bodies

@sporadica If you can be swayed into “not caring” once, I hypothesize that you can become much easier to convince to stop caring about other things of a similar or greater scale in the future. I would be very wary of this.

@sporadica I feel like there have been multiple examples over the last decade of people just becoming numb to certain things that would have caused outrage previously. I’m worried we’re going to see even more cases of people just “not caring” anymore.

Maybe it’s the Gen-Z in me, but i fully don’t care about privacy. I am post-privacy. I am giving OpenAI access to all of my finances, all of my health data, everything, I don’t care anymore

@sporadica I understand that loss of privacy has been the cost of useful technology for a while now, and that it’s only being accelerated with so many of these new features being accessible to us now, but I’m still very wary of giving up so much privacy (especially if it isn’t necessary).

@matanSF I’d be very curious about what he does in the future.

There is a guy named Scaling Law who is an eng at Stanford? I’ll invest in whatever he does post grad purely for the nominative determinism

@Polymarket It’s clear he had his own agenda. Instead of meeting the graduates where they were at and celebrating their achievement, he made it very clear he wanted all of them to get on the AI bandwagon no matter what.

NEW: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt booed by Arizona students after bringing up AI in his graduation speech.

@lulumeservey When he heard the countless boos, he should have at least realized something was wrong and tried to pivot. He just kept going instead.

“The question is not whether AI will shape the world; it will. The question is whether YOU will help…” Tonedeaf disaster Obvious move would’ve been to focus on the graduates as the protagonists, instead of framing them as accessories to AI’s world takeover “The question is not whether you will shape the world; you will. The question is how…” simple switch Then you can go on to talk about adapting to change, trying new things, using the power of technology newly available to them. And make it about empowering new graduates Instead it ended up preachy, condescending, and vaguely menacing all at once

@Miles_Brundage “I can hear you.” “If you’d let me make this point, please.” He was inviting the boos.

I could fix them (give a commencement speech that doesn't get booed but still makes some of the same points here re: potential upsides of AI) x.com/jasonscheer/st…

@rtl1025 She’s done five thousand dives and the place where she died was called Bad Dives? That does not seem like a coincidence. The husband even says it must have been fate. It sounds a lot like nominative determinism.

🔴 "Io non so cosa sia successo là sotto. Ma è davvero strano che siano morti in cinque. Mia moglie ha fatto cinquemila immersioni. E' una esperta, sa cosa fare anche in caso di difficoltà". Carlo Sommacal, marito di Monica Montefalcone, ha appena finito di parlare con l'ambasciata. "Mi hanno detto che il corpo ritrovato non è quello di mia moglie. Lo devo a mio figlio Matteo. Ho perso tre persone in pochi mesi: prima mio fratello, adesso mia moglie e mia figlia. Io provo a resistere ma lui non so come reagirà. Mia moglie è una esperta e anche il ragazzo con loro, Gianluca: è uno preciso, che controllava tutto. Le bombole, le condizioni meteo. Non è uno sprovveduto. Anche Monica è una 'tedesca': alle 11 si va a messa, alle 19.30 si cena. E guai a farla ritardare di un solo minuto. E anche su quelle cose lì delle immersioni. Sarà stato il destino, tutte le precauzioni possibili loro ce le hanno". La figlia Giorgia si doveva laureare tra un mese, laurea triennale di Ingegneria biomedica. "Mio figlio fa il compleanno il 22 maggio. E intanto le stava preparando la festa di laurea di nascosto. Io sono stato sul balcone a fumare tutto il tempo. Sul poggiolo abbiamo dei vasi di fiori e non ho mai visto un bocciolo. Oggi c'erano. E' un segno per me, sono Monica e Giorgia che mi stanno parlando, che mi dicono di stare tranquillo. Quando ieri ha ricevuto la telefonata dall'ambasciata mi sono crollate le gambe. E da lì non mi sono fermato un attimo. Ho dovuto dirlo a mio figlio, al fidanzato di Giorgia, ai miei suoceri che abitano poco lontano da qui. Loro si erano trasferiti da Milano quando sono nati i miei figli. Giorgia stava sempre con loro. Li andava a trovare, giocava a carte con loro. Vorrei tanto incontrare Dio un giorno e chiedergli perché si è accanito con noi. Monica era sempre sorridente, sempre solare. Onesta e soprattutto scrupolosa". Il marito spera che ritrovino i corpi anche perché "di solito Monica quando si immergeva aveva una GoPro. Non so se l'avesse anche l'altro giorno. Se la trovano magari da lì si potrà capire cosa è successo" 📸 ANSA

@teortaxesTex I think given his mentality, if his wealth, status, and connections were to reset to 0 at this moment, he’d still find a way to escape the permanent underclass.

Musk's formidability has two halves. The visible one is his logistical autism, endurance, boldness to set and shill insane targets, and a talent for delegation. The invisible one is that he treats institutional constraints of the United States with the same respect as physics.

@deedydas It seems like you need to take on a Musk-like mentality.

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

@iamgingertrash I’m not a fan of giving up on an entire country for them to become part of something they don’t want. But, I wonder if there is some arrangement where Taiwan actually would want this or something along these lines, which could in turn lead to a better outcome.

To actually understand this post, you need to understand AGI race dynamics, international finance, and geopolitics If you understand only one of those things You will think this makes no sense But it does, Because AGI is inherently a gamble for the end game

Only two nation states can afford this race > The one that produces 10TW > The one that can finance it via $10T Energy, or Capital China has the energy, The United States has its capital markets One, seems to be buckling

@r0ck3t23 But people need to be ready to continuously level up. If that does become the predominant mindset, I can see a potentially bright future. There can be moments of significant AI progress that upheave entire swaths of society at once, but if that happens, they must not give up.

@r0ck3t23 That said, the best thing the average person can do right now is learn how to use the technology and come up with things they can do that AI can’t, and keep up. In a way, this does force society to continuously level up, so could actually spur a lot of growth.

Jeff Bezos asked a room to imagine going back a hundred years. When almost everyone was a farmer. And telling those farmers that in 2018 there’d be a job called “massage therapist.” Bezos: “They would not have believed you.” Then a friend took it further. Bezos: “Forget massage therapist, there are dog psychiatrists.” He looked it up. Bezos: “Sure enough, you can easily hire a psychiatrist for your dog.” The room laughed. The point under the laughter wasn’t funny at all. Every time a major technology shift hits, we do the exact same thing. We count the jobs it will destroy. We never count the ones it will create. Because we can’t. They don’t have names yet. The fear is always specific. AI will replace accountants. AI will replace radiologists. AI will replace drivers. The fear has job titles and timelines and projections. The opportunity has none of those things. Because you can’t name what doesn’t exist yet. A farmer in 1920 could understand losing his job to a tractor. He could not understand gaining a career as a social media strategist. Not because he lacked intelligence. Because the entire chain of inventions between his world and that job hadn’t been built yet. Radio. Television. The internet. Smartphones. Social platforms. Creator economies. Every single link in that chain had to exist before “social media strategist” could even be a sentence. That’s where we are with AI right now. Everyone is staring at the tractor. Nobody can see the thing seven inventions away that doesn’t have a name yet. The fear is loud because it fits inside language we already have. The opportunity is silent because it doesn’t. Every technological revolution in history created more jobs than it destroyed. Every single one. Not because anyone planned it. Because human needs expand faster than machines can fill them. We didn’t need massage therapists when we were breaking our backs on farms. We needed them after machines freed our backs and stress replaced labor. The demand didn’t disappear. It migrated somewhere no one was looking. That is exactly what’s happening right now. The jobs AI creates won’t make sense to us yet. They’ll sound as absurd as “dog psychiatrist” would’ve sounded to a farmer in 1920. Until someone is running a $200 hourly practice with a six-month waitlist. The entire conversation right now is about what we’re about to lose. Nobody is talking about what we’re about to gain. Because the gains don’t have vocabulary yet. A hundred years from now, someone will stand on a stage and describe the jobs we couldn’t imagine today. And the audience will laugh. The same way we just did.

@mitchellh @Miles_Brundage I can imagine stages in a company’s life where focusing on MTTR would make sense. And I think there is a lot that a stable customer base can be willing to tolerate. But frustration can be a huge incentivizer to search for and then switch when something better comes along.

@mitchellh @Miles_Brundage Focusing on MTTR can leave so many dissatisfied customers not being able to use your product when they need it most. Sure, it may help get new features out faster, but what if your customer base cares most about the core product that keeps getting derailed?

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.