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I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

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Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#51
post #36

> The big AI labs are building a single mind for everyone Reminds me of Pluribus (I just started watching it on Apple TV so maybe this is a late realization for me)

I understood Pluribus as a metaphor for what AI is to us today / what it is becoming. Really great show

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#52

(I'm not a part of GA.) I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete). He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his hu…

I can nod along when I hear and read people talking about the dangers of these technologies and the endgame of their creators; and then suddenly very weird when everyone except me is nodding along that the answer must be similar (but different) technology!

It's as if technologists are stuck in a room of mirrors, unable to imagine a world in which "solutions" don't ultimately just continue to feed technology's increasingly anti-human takeover of everything.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#53

(I'm not a part of GA.) I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete). He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his hu…

Ha, haha, across hundreds of personal discussions I've been involved with on lesswrong/lighthaven, twitter, Wikipedia talk/editing, SF parties etc I think his most distinguishing feature has always been his abiding and unabashed love for possessing extreme competency whenever satisfying cunningham-esque laws. Though the post-dwarkesh clout certainly tainted things a bit.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#54

(I'm not a part of GA.) I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete). He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his hu…

Honestly I wouldn’t want myself as my own guardian angel. In fact I think very few people look out for themselves well. I don’t want another version of me around, one is too many already. I’d probably be able to identify a number of people whose chimera I would if I could understand them well enough to understand what to stitch together to what, but everyone I know at some core level is deeply flawed and one of them…

I had a similar gut feeling. To use some possibly dubious and dated terminology, would a guardian angel also emulate my shadow self, particularly if that self was an important part of my identity? If I usually manage not to let my shadow self act out, but you could always tell it was there, would the same be true for my guardian angel? If all you do is use your guardian angel to write essays, then sure, a relatively low risk tool. But if military commanders are using it to oversee offensive drones (as proposed in the essay)?! Oof.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#55

As exciting as it sounds, but "As a constraint, a GA designer should aim at a system which costs, as of mid-2026, >$1,000⧸month" will make this an elite tool for the privileged. I don't even disagree with the premise that people are shocked if something costs no matter how much value it delivers, nor do I suggest they should make it cheaper. It is just the realization that AI will accelerate the widening of the gap b…

The future isn't evenly distributed.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#56
post #47
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2026: $1,000/month 2027: $100/month 2028: $10/month

Just because the hardware and inference costs may decrease in the future doesn't mean prices will. The AI vendor market is the furthest thing from a competitive industry where there are limited barriers to entry and new market entrants exert downward pressure on prices and profit margins. Every single company in this market is losing billions on this business, and the only way to make it back is to acquire paying cus…

Since Guardian Angel is an inference vendor [1] hopefully they will set sustainable prices from day one so they don't need to increase prices later.

[1] The announcement explains that they can't use APIs for privacy reasons.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself? " How much would I pay to rent my fucking self from a landlord? No, bodylord? Mindlord? Poe's Law. But looking at the post, they argue that big AI labs have an incentive problem which stops them from personalising, but Guardian Angel will make agents which are "Genuinely yours". In what sense is it genuinely mine if someone else owns it and r…

[flagged]

Maybe. Are LLMs white?

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#58

Their profile specifically says they will not acknowledge follow requests, but they only share posts with followers. As such, not sure what the value of the top level link is.

Yeah I clicked through and just see hundreds of "this account limits who can view their posts" messages.

Naturally, he has a whole detailed post/trace about it on gwern net! https://gwern.net/twitter

An interesting case of echo chamber formation in that its pragmatic to be scared of overtly critiquing him on twitter lest he be particularly testy that day and block you.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#59

As exciting as it sounds, but "As a constraint, a GA designer should aim at a system which costs, as of mid-2026, >$1,000⧸month" will make this an elite tool for the privileged. I don't even disagree with the premise that people are shocked if something costs no matter how much value it delivers, nor do I suggest they should make it cheaper. It is just the realization that AI will accelerate the widening of the gap b…

You’re assuming this $1000/mo will buy you something useful.
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