21–30 of 262 posts
Dwarkesh has 18 splits. https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/i/151435243/timestamps
I got 171. So roughly 9 context discussions in one time stamp.
Gwern is an effective altruist and his influence is largely limited to that community. It would be an exaggeration to claim that he influenced the mainstream of AI and ML researchers -- certainly Hinton, LeCun, Ng, Bengio didn't need him to do their work.
He influences the AI safety crowd, who have ironically been trying to build AGI to test their AI safety ideas. Those people are largely concentrated at Anthropic now, since the purge at OpenAI. They are poorly represented at major corporate AI labs, and cluster around places like Oxford and Cal. The EAs' safety concerns are a major reason why Anthropic has moved so much slower than its competitors, and why Dario is having trouble raising the billions he needs to keep going, despite his media blitz. They will get to AGI last, despite trying to be the good guys who are first to invent god in a bottle.
By the same token, Dwarkesh is either EA or EA adjacent. His main advertiser for this episode is Jane Street, the former employer of the world's most notorious EA, Sam Bankman-Fried as well as Caroline Ellison. Dwarkesh previously platformed his friend Leopold Aschenbrenner, who spent a year at OAI before he wrote the scare piece "Situation Report" made the rounds. Leopold is also semi-technical at best. A wordcel who gravitated to the AI narrative, which could describe many EAs.
People outside of AI and ML, please put Dwarkesh in context. He is a partisan and largely non-technical. The way he interfaces with AI is in fantasizing about how it will destroy us all, just as he and Gwern do in this interview.
It's sad to see people who are obviously above average intelligent waste so much time on this.
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>Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?" >I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so ol…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe, you know, that is not true and it’s part of a character?
Could be, but he does not strike as someone who is looking for fame. Plus the whole discussion about why he would like to move to SF but can't seems pretty authentic.
>Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?" >I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so ol…
It's a reasonable tradeoff for some circumstances.
How we're using confirmation bias to credit one out of 8 billion people with special skills.
>Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?" >I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so ol…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
"Among individuals living alone: 19.1% lived in poverty."
Poverty line (max yearly income) for single households: $14,580
www.gwern.net Something I've noticed in spending time online is that there's a "core group" of a few dozen people who seem to turn up everywhere there are interesting discussions. Gwern (who also posts here) is probably at the top of that list.
> In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an Internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.