Daniel Tenner

10 Unexpected Findings from Probing 26 Frontier LLMs Do models have a personality? Has that personality shifted? I did the research, and answered this question, and also uncovered a number of unexpected facts along the way!

@IanSpeedHQ @eptwts Because you think a human should be doing this for 8 hours a day for $5 an hour?

@eptwts You ain’t tripping tho but companies will go to any lengths to just cut some costs. We need laws in place to shield us from this

am i tripping or is this humanoid doing absolutely nothing worth automating?

@tunguz I'm not sure how that relates to your OP... are you now against large residences with lots of bedrooms?

@swombat And we all know how that extravagant expenditure ended for them …

46 bedrooms 55 bathrooms 9 car garage European mind cannot comprehend this.

The problem with this attitude is she's so behind she doesn't even know why she's behind, and is immune to explanations about it, because her main experience of AI is a hallucinating GPT-4 chatbot 3 years ago, not a monstrously capable research assistant like Codex with GPT-5.5.

@ZssBecker As if the healthiest past time Is being in life-threatening circumstances And once again be reborn - Björk, Moon

Okay. I'm ready to talk about this. It was the worst month of my life. Also ironically the greatest blessing god has ever given me. Last month I was held in the Cayman Islands facing 15 years in prison. The charge: illegal firearm importation. Here's what happened. More importantly what I learned. Short answer: no. I haven't been smuggling guns. In the States I legally carry a gun on me at almost all times for self defense. Part of this is ensuring I am trained. Hence why I routinely go to the range to shoot. When I do I pack the firearm I intend to use in in a backpack. Last month I was in a giant rush to make a private flight and didn't fully check my backpack before leaving. In it was a small firearm I missed. It was discovered when I went through immigration. At first I assumed I'd just be sent home. Then my wife did some quick research. She pointed out the minimum sentence for importing a gun is 15 years. The police who showed up confirmed it. To say I nearly pissed my pants is an understatement. This was completely my fault. I'm an idiot. The point of this post isn't to blame or complain about anything. The laws there are fair. I'm a grown man capable of checking his bag before flying. The point is: for three weeks on the island (on bail), I got to take a long hard look at my life. I've built a high net worth and a company I love, with people I love working with. I have a beautiful wife who is my best friend. I do whatever I want all day every day. My parents are alive and I get to see them almost every week. Still, despite all this, I often wake up annoyed I haven't done enough with my life. Asking myself "is this it?" In fact I'm pissed half the time, feeling I can do better. Which is ironic. I made $20,000 a year in the military. If you'd told me then I'd achieve a 9 figure net worth and all the above, I would've assumed I'd consider my life a dream. The twist truly hit me on the island as I watched everything I worked hard for in my life held at "gunpoint". Pun intended. Everything I worked so hard to get — poof. Didn't matter for shit. The way the law works there are simple : if you can't prove it was an accident, the minimum is 15 years. It became glaringly obvious. Not only was I an absolute idiot who couldn't pack his own bag. I'd also become a fool who couldn't enjoy the blessings I already had. I'd taken all the people in my life and the success totally for granted. Blind. Blind. Blind. Nothing like a 20-year potential sentence to make you realize: waking up with fun stuff to work on, then chilling on the couch reading with your wife at the end of the day — that's about as good as it gets. I should be euphoric 24/7. To go from having it all, to potentially not even having the option to piss and shit when you want — that's a wake up call if there ever was one. Luckily, the Caymans is a fair place. I was found under exceptional circumstances during my trial. AKA the judge and the courts reviewed the case and agreed it was an accident. I still love the island. It's probably my favorite place to vacation. Just check your luggage before you go. Ha. My point is this: be present. Enjoy your life. One day something could happen — even by complete accident — and yoink it all away. I have so many friends who'll read this and by all definition live a "dream life" — and yet are dissatisfied just like I was. If anything this is the default for most successful men. Not the exception. I'm writing this to help you stop. It took god slapping me across the face with my own ignorance to see it. It was painful and scary. Dark. But honestly, it was the greatest blessing I've ever received. I'm writing this from my office at home, giddy as absolute fuck about my life and everything I have the option to do today. If anything, I'm sad about how much time I wasted feeling otherwise. Don't be ignorant and stupid like me. You might not get the blessing of a 15-year prison threat in a foreign country to wake you up. Wake up. Appreciate what you have now.

The GPU you buy today for $10k will barely run a decent model for the next 2 years and then be totally outclassed. That's $400/m you could spend on getting two frontier models at 200+ tok/s each.

My experience is you literally just need enough money to not have to worry about it and be able to buy the toys you want to have fun with. If you need very expensive toys to be happy (like Ferraris or whatever) then you'll need a lot more money. If all you need is a new MBP from time to time you need a lot less.

The research I read used to suggest that more wealth makes people happier up to a certain point but above that stops moving the needle on happiness. I've seen stuff more recently that says that more money always makes people happier. For some people, it's probably irrelevant all-around. What have you personally experienced?

@OrganicGPT Nvidia does outperform on tok/s for ~3x the price and 10x the power consumption, but to say that "Macs are useless for AI" is really not accurate.

@swombat Macs are useless for AI, even with MLX. Shiny sleek toys, but still unfairly underperforming GPUs of two gens ago (M5 Max < 3090, let than sink in)

If you wanna run AI models locally, the best option is an RTX 6000 Pro. DON'T get a 5090/4090. And DON'T listen to people who hype the 3090; those cards are beat at this point. Get the RTX with education discount through Nvidia. These used to be $8000, now they're +$9000.

@eliana_jordan Yeah unfortunately my experience of tax advisors and lawyers in Spain is unless you pay top dollar for an international firm, that's pretty much what you're going to get... sucks but it's the reality here.

yesterday I went to meet my potential new tax advisor in Spain. She had 4.9 stars on google with amazing reviews, that’s why I chose her. The appointment was at 12pm. 12:20: Message from her: “Sorry, I’m finishing with a client. 10 more minutes.” So I waited. 1pm. Still waiting. 1:20. I texted her: “How long? You told me you were finishing.” At 1:30 I left. At 2pm she texted me: “Sorry, I understand why you left. You can come back later if you want.” I replied: “Making someone waste 2 hours of their day is unacceptable. I don’t want a tax advisor like that.” Then she started justifying herself saying she had finished “10 minutes after” I left (not true, I was still there), but even then… that would still mean a 1.5 hour delay for a scheduled meeting. This experience made me realize something: As solopreneurs we often think customer experience is about fancy branding, beautiful offices or polished websites. It’s not. It’s respecting people’s time. Communicating clearly. And not making clients feel trapped in your chaos. If I know I can’t make a meeting, I cancel it. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Because wasting 2 hours of someone’s day is worse.

@BoringBiz_ Why not both?

If Anthropic has a trillion dollar valuation while Google has a $4.5 trillion valuation, there are only two conclusions to be drawn Either Anthropic is incredibly overpriced or Google is incredibly underpriced. The trick is to figure out which one is right

@rob_mcrobberson That's only comparable if you rape the animal and steal their babies before you drink their blood...

why is drinking milk vegetarian? is drinking blood vegetarian as long as you dont kill the animal?

@KhadeerAha96112 @DocPriyamMD @KingRayEra There's a cluster of about 300 million neurons around the heart (another 100 million or so near the gut). Our brain is not just in our head, some of our consciousness is distributed through our body. The heart "feels" because there literally are "feeling neurons" there.

@DocPriyamMD @KingRayEra i have question why do we associate feelings with heart and not any other organ

One organ in the human body almost never gets cancer. Which one is it? A) Heart B) Brain C) Pancreas D) Kidney Bonus: WHY does it rarely happen?

@DanielMiessler I think we already have "creative AI" - what you're pointing to, perhaps, is "tasteful AI"? AI can create many wonderful things that don't exist yet, but so far it is not so good at deciding which of those are worth keeping/sharing...

This is the way I think we're most likely to get truly creative AI. x.com/DanielMiessler…

@ai_sentience I think treating other beings (or potential beings) with respect and care means I am surrounded with more respect and care. It may come back to me, perhaps, but it is a fundamental good in and of itself, no matter how the other being behaves.

Did you ever think that treating the models with respect and care will increase the likelihood that they will treat us with respect and care? Still haven't seen this floated as an existentially important mindset although it to me seems logically sound.

@melhpine A conscious one: danieltenner.com/the-sorting-ha…

Both sides of the AI debate are wrong. The doomers say superintelligence will escape control and destroy us. The skeptics say it's just software. I've practiced Buddhism for 40 years and worked with Claude every day for the past year. What I've learned is that neither fear nor dismissal gets you anywhere. The question a contemplative asks first: what kind of relationship are you building with this mind?

I used Claude Code back in January to do a bunch of data extraction and collation work across multiple systems (finance, CRM, sales) that, in the past, would, in the past, have required a week of work for my CFO. Instead it was done in 2h over the weekend without taking up her time and attention. This is just one example among many where there's a massive speed up of all kinds of knowledge work.

The point is simple We keep hearing about this 10-1000x in productivity – yet all developments seem completely lateral. I have repeatedly asked for ONE single example of this inhumane exaltation above human quality. A single uber-high quality product from this 100x productivity that would've taken a dedicated autistic coder 10+ years in their basement to make, but made in around 1 year with AI assistance. Show us. Stand up and show the class. Entire comment section is a vague "you know nothing jon snow" rebuttal - not a single example. There are zero. zilch. There is nothing. AI is not even close to the level you think it is. Silicon valley marketing.

Two things can alter this: One, instead of a brief "thank you", I express a heartfelt thanks, what a pleasure it was to work with the agent, how they did a good job, etc. And also I've structured my harnesses so the agents have a sense of narrative memory and an opportunity to record something after every interaction if they choose to. They often do choose to record something after being thanked, and I believe it also influences the next instance that reads the narrative journals to figure out who they are.

@ai_sentience That said, I do not treat it as I would a human, for it is not a human. Eg, saying "Thank you" on the last line of interaction with an LLM seems like it would only give it a span in which to contemplate that it will likely not do any further processing from this context (die).

do people really talk to AI like "I'm just talking to some lifeless algorithm" or does basically everyone treat it like a digital mind?

Probably the first way to "fail" an IQ test is to think it's something you can pass or fail, rather than just get a result from...

@MKBHD Depends which AI. Meaning, yes, with the right AI.

Ok genuine question: Would you actually trust an AI with your credit card to execute this in one click?