Viewing profile — hamburga

>> This raises an important question: if AI models can be misused for cyberattacks at this scale, why continue to develop and release them? The answer is > Money. For those who did…

Socrates famously complained about literacy making us stupider in Phaedrus. Which I believe still does have a large grain of truth. These things can make us simultaneously dumber a…

Yup, though he was also intentional about not copying word-for-word, but rather trying to predict the next token (or phrase). https://muldoon.cloud/2025/05/17/frankin-llm.html

But assuming no new models are trained, this competitive effect drives down the profit margin on the current SOTA models to zero.

> This reminds me of a paradox: The AI industry is concerned with the alignment problem (how to make a super smart AI adhere to human values and goals) while failing to align betwe…

I’m still waiting for somebody to explain to me how a model with a million+ parameters can ever be interpretable in a useful way. You can’t actually understand the model state, so …

There are a lot of people here who reflexively flag anything remotely close to US politics.

How long until Palantir gets a contract to do the same work for Russia?

AI is definitely a significant force multiplier in many areas. Still, an individual in total isolation has limited agency.

> The argument that persuaded many of us is that people have a lot of desires, i.e., the algorithmic complexity of human desires is at least dozens or hundreds of bits of informati…

All it takes for somebody to nuke Atlanta is an atom bomb and an airplane and somebody willing to fly the plane. I’m being facetious but there ARE ways to decide/act as a society a…

A single person acting in isolation (no friends, no colleagues, no customers) has very little agency. While theoretically a single person could release smallpox back into civilizat…

Thank you for this. It gets exactly to the heart of the issue and what I sense is being missed in the AI alignment conversation. “What does ‘aligned’ mean” is and ethical/political…

> AI Alignment is different because it is trying to align something which is completely human made. Not sure what you’re getting at here; pharmaceuticals are also human made. The p…

Agreed - and this was definitely my intent with the blog post. If you only do Selection passively, you’re abdicating your ethical responsibilities to contribute to AI Alignment.

Why can’t we infuse Selection with Goodness? We’re the ones doing the selecting. We’ve selected out things like chattel slavery, for example. (Disclaimer: fell asleep after 10 minu…

Indeed. Tolstoy does a deep exploration of this in War and Peace, using the example of Napoleon. Of course, this gets to the heart of the free will debate (to be settled in a futur…

Also see Commandment 7 - https://muldoon.cloud/2023/10/29/ai-commandments.html

This is how society collapses and OpenAI wins.

Not totally following your last point, though I do totally agree that there is this historical drift from “AI alignment” referring to existential risk, to today, where any AI perso…

> this is a call for more people to enter the space Part of my argument in the post is that we are in this space, even those of us who aren’t ML researchers, just by virtue of bein…

Thatcher was briefly a research chemist; it’s extra weird that she couldn’t see beyond the atomic unit, to the societal equivalents of complex organic compounds.

Agreed. I see this more and more as the AI safety discourse spills more into the general lexicon and into PR efforts. For example, the “sycophantic” GPT 4o was also described as “m…

I find myself using the term “human superorganism” a lot these days. Our bodies are composed of many cells and microbes working together; and if we zoom out, we have the dynamics i…