Shakeel

For today's Transformer Weekly, I wrote about how recursive self-improvement no longer looks like science fiction. x.com/ShakeelHashim/…

@chalmermagne @cosmos_inst congrats!!

A few weeks ago, I joined @cosmos_inst. AI is the transformative technology of our era. By acting as a force-multiplier on intelligence, I believe it has the potential to do tremendous good for humanity. At the same time, I worry that we may pursue the path of least resistance and increasingly outsource our judgment and our ability to think. We risk ending up in the warm bath of learned helplessness. Often these conversations feel like they’re confined to communities that would rather we abandon the development of advanced AI systems. Many of my fellow optimists treat them as minor details we don’t need to worry about. But over the past few months I feel like I’ve found real community. Through meeting @mbrendan1, the Cosmos team, and the wider network at the first Cosmos symposium, I’ve encountered a rare combination of technical depth and moral seriousness. At Cosmos, I’ll be continuing to fight the battle of ideas. To give you a flavour of what I’ll be working on, for my first piece, I’ve written about why even highly capable AI systems will make for poor economic planners. blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/ai-wont-fix-…

I got Claude to make one for me; it added a very creepy voiceover (wait till the end)

when even janus is weirded out:

Can a journalist please name and shame the ghouls who make these videos

This is genuinely art:

Can’t even beat Gemini 3 😬

Loads of people have asked me about effective altruism since starting at Transformer - how it works, what its connection to Anthropic is, what role it plays in AI policy, what its connection to Transformer is (tldr, we receive funding from some EA-tied orgs but are editorially independent), etc. This article by @cogcelia isn't about EA, but it answers pretty much all of those questions. More importantly it starts to unpack the potential impact of political & nonprofit giving by Anthropic — which has been massively under-covered compared to that of OpenAI, a16z, etc. This is one of those articles that makes me very proud to associate with my Transformer colleagues. Please read: transformernews.ai/p/anthropic-em…

@AndyMasley Andy can you start a bionicle blog

Bionicle is the only popular franchise to come close to the same weight of lore and history as Book of the New Sun

Anthropic employees may be on the brink of getting very, very rich. Many of them, including its co-founders, have pledged to give a lot of that money away. If that money materializes, it could flood EA-aligned nonprofits with cash, including those aiming to regulate, audit, and review Anthropic itself. Whether that's good or bad depends on who you ask. I covered this potential wave of Anthropic wealth for @ReadTransformer:

@johnmbridge_ @cogcelia , not me!

This is pretty wild from @ShakeelHashim. Philanthropy from Anthropic and the OpenAI Foundation is going to change the world.

Excellent piece:

Anthropic's founders and employees are about to have a lot of cash. Many of them have pledged to give away huge amounts of that cash. But where's it gonna go? @cogcelia took a look in this excellent new piece:

@Manderljung @bcherny +1

@bcherny feature request: being able to port over a conversation from chat mode to cowork/code mode and vice versa. Sometimes I’m multiple messages deep in a conversation when I realise something was a cowork-shaped problem.

Cast Paul Thomas Anderson as Abe, you cowards

@jordanschneider i will confess i only made it a chapter into nuclear war

@ShakeelHashim her books are trash

Working her way through the x-risk scenarios. Very excited for AI TAKEOVER: A SCENARIO next year.

@binarybits the journalist is a senior markets reporter 😬

There are so many people commenting on the finances of AI companies who have clearly not taken the time to understand startup finance. "Negative gross margins" and "not making a profit yet" are different situations with very different implications for future growth.

@mikebutcher it has sadly become a thing in the last ~week. very cringe!!

@ShakeelHashim Is londonmaxxing a thing? I certainly doubt there’s such as thing as NYCmaxxing or SFmaxxing. Personally, I prefer to cover tech products and who’s investing etc. But I’m sure this makes the Berlinmaxxers a bit jealous 🤣🙄

There is nothing 'breaking' about this, the building has been under construction for 13 years. The only new thing is the name (and the public space, which is cool but hardly a big deal). The way in which the 'londonmaxxing' tech folks are reacting to this is a bit embarrassing.