Sam Biddle

NEW: A U.S. counter-terror fusion center believes ICE's tweets are so racist they could incite acts of violence by white supremacists and encourage neo-Nazis to get hired, according to an internal memo we obtained. theintercept.com/2026/05/21/ice…

tech guys doing the skilled immigration routine 2 years after going all in on Trump will never not be funny to me

An American enemy controlling the Machine God would be pretty bad for America, I think

@deanwball Re: #5, are you saying this is something the administration ought to do, or just your prediction of what the White House will do?

Some observations on Kimi: 1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run. 2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China. 3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex. 4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business. 5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this. 6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.

Bana removing his flexible rubber helmet, gets me every time.

I think it's worth examining the extent to which many of the people advocating for this "race" have a direct financial interest in what's generally argued as necessary to beat China: continued massive spending, American market dominance, weak or no regulation

This is also common: basically reheated Cold Warrior missile gap discourse.

@qs_spa Then why is he partnering with the UAE?

@samfbiddle Dario straight up says the democracies cannot allow a dictatorship to win as a dictatorship will use AI to stop all dissent & for mass surveillance. His claim as to why China can’t win

Virtually no one who cites a need to "beat China" in the "AI race" ever bothers to explain what any of that actually means: what the stakes are, where the finish line is, why we're racing in the first place, what "winning" looks like, etc. Largely vibes-based techno-nationalism.

I'm sure we're going to get a very thorough and impartial investigation into this ICE killing

Cyclospora cayetanensis to Receive the 2026 Yum! Brands Award for Excellence in Food Safety

Ouch - @Jason caught in a dumb, embarrassing lie here

This is like an infomercial that would air at 3 am

"Nothing has shipped to consumers"

@andymstone If Meta is doing promotional sponsored content for NameTag, is it safe to say that it now exists?

@samfbiddle Sticking with the theme of intellectual dishonesty, you clipped Boz’s quote. He says it “would” be a great feature. Would. We have said for months we’re exploring such features, even as nothing has shipped to consumers. No secret there despite the conspiratorial thinking.

Meta in June: NameTag "doesn't exist!" Meta in July: NameTag is a "great feature"

IDF spokesperson proudly shares a snuff film depicting the massacre of nearly 100 Palestinians in Gaza.

The same Meta exec who last month called Wired "Absolutely dishonest" for reporting NameTag's existence is now retweeting NameTag sponcon.

very funny that this company had a splashy launch and video claiming funding ties to Peter Thiel, and now has completely changed its focus and name to essentially become a Yelp for journalists x.com/RMac18/status/…

@daveweigel nothing is more depressing to me than "LitRPG"

Pop stuff has always outsold highbrow (or high-middlebrow) stuff but find me a recent novel the quality of "Herzog" that stayed on the bestseller list for a year.