Scott Assen

I'm lucky enough to have a great doctor and access to excellent Bay Area medical care. I've taken lots of standard screening tests over the years and have tried lots of "health tech" devices and tools. With all this said, by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigate my specific mutations, and having them recommend specific follow-on tests and treatments. Population averages are population averages, but we ourselves are not averages. For example, it turns out that I probably have a 30x(!) higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma. Fortunately, there are both specific supplements that help counteract the particular mutations I have, and of course I can significantly dial up my screening frequency. So, this is very useful to know. I don't know exactly how much the analysis cost, but probably less than $100. Sequencing my genome cost a few hundred dollars. (One often sees papers and articles claiming that models aren't very good at medical reasoning. These analyses are usually based on employing several-year-old models, which is a kind of ludicrous malpractice. It is true that you still have to carefully monitor the agents' reasoning, and they do on occasion jump to conclusions or skip steps, requiring some nudging and re-steering. But, overall, they are almost literally infinitely better for this kind of work than what one can otherwise obtain today.) There are still lots of questions about how this will diffuse and get adopted, but it seems very clear that medical practice is about to improve enormously. Exciting times!

If a perfect designer built us, why do we have a blind spot, a choking hazard every time we swallow, a tailbone with no tail, wisdom teeth that don't fit, and a birth canal that kills women and babies? Why does the giraffe have a 15‑foot nerve detour for a 1‑inch job? 2

Can calculators add? Can brains add? My latest, link below and in bio.

Early versions of Mythos Preview often exhibited overeager and/or destructive actions—the model bulldozing through obstacles to complete a task in a way the user wouldn't want. We looked at what was going on inside the model during particularly concerning examples. (3/14)

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When I was in law school I was tangentially friends with a girl who never showed up to class. Skipped lectures, dodged every seminar, had a "family emergency" for every moot court session. The night before 2nd year finals she was over at my place and casually mentioned she'd spent the last week watching every recorded lecture at 2x speed. She placed top 10 out of 300 students. Every Single Exam. And it wasn't just that she remembered the material, she actually UNDERSTOOD it. Like, laterally, practically, the way most of us who dragged ourselves to every 8am class still couldn't. She could apply case law to hypotheticals better than people who had been gunning for law review all year. I always shuddered thinking about what she could do if she actually tried. But she was perfectly content to just… chill. Some people are built different and honestly? It's annoying.

Everyone who works in medical education knows students/trainees who have top tier metrics but you’d never want treating you or your loved ones. Also it’s much much easier to train an academically below avg student with a great personality/work ethic to be competent and safe to practice independently than it is is to train an elite numbers student who has pathological personality traits to do the same (some argue it’s essentially impossible).

3. And I don't think that "not amenable to reform" is true. Take my own profession -- law. In most places in the United States, you need to attend law school for three years and then pass a bar examination to practice law.

Here are some questions I wish "Pause" and "Stop" advocates would address: 1. Assuming we achieve the desired policy goal through a bilateral US/China agreement, what would be the specific metric or objective we would say needs to be satisfied in advance? Who decides whether we have satisfied them? What if one one party believes we have satisfied them but the other does not? 2. If the goal is achieved through a bilateral US/China agreement, would we need capital controls to ensure that U.S. investors cannot fund semiconductor fabs, data centers, or AI research labs in countries other than the U.S. and China? 3. Would we need to revoke the passports of U.S.-based AI researchers and semiconductor engineers to prevent them leaving America to join AI-related ventures elsewhere? How else would the U.S. and China keep researchers within their borders? 4. How should we grapple with the fact that (2) and (3) are common features of autocratic regimes? 5. Do the above questions mean that this really should be a global agreement, signed by all countries on Earth, or at least those with the theoretical ability to host large-scale data centers (probably Vanuatu doesn't need to be on board)?