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AlexErrant

1,158 karma · joined November 15, 2022

Building collaborative spaced repetition at https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive
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AlexErrant··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
I'm not saying AI won't ransomware us; I'm saying that hackers+AI will do a better job of ransomewaring us than just AI. You could argue that the unreleased/secretly-RSI-capable model is a super-duper hacker that don't need no man to tell it how to super-hack. All I know is that humans still have alpha, and as persistant as AIs are, professionals still managed to find CVEs in curl even after being audited by Mythos https://aisle.com/blog/aisle-discovers-6-new-cves-in-curl-in...

Will this be true into the future? Who knows?! But the low-hanging fruit will be harvested by your ordinary ransomware gangs, and newly born/escaped AI won't find much low-hanging fruit.

AlexErrant··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Nick Soares give this chess argument and I was unconvinced. Intelligence is not enough, you also need the ability to manipulate the real world. AGI stuck in silicon won't kill us. You argue AGI will bribe us/divide us/hack us. All possible. I argue that AGI will be set on solving the alignment problem. Also possible. It'll be a race between which AGI wins. It's one nerd's fantasy vs another nerd's fantasy. Soares doesn't _KNOW_ that AGI will "beat us in chess" because AGI changes the rules of the game. Anyone saying they know the probability of solving alignment post-RSI is a liar.

He thinks it's playing chess. When AGI lands, all bets are off: the game fundamentally changes. You can't predict past the singularity. Trying to engage with this fantasy is like a child saying my father can beat up your father. Farts in the wind. My AI can solve alignment faster than your AI can bioweapon us. My made up senario is better than your made up senario. It's fucking stupid.

AlexErrant··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
1. Fair, the story I'm responding to is the senario in If Anyone Builds It, which I assume is Yudkowsky's best/most persuasive argument (else why make it the ONLY scenario in the book.) I'm willing to entertain other failure senarios/arguments, but honestly I'm tired and would like you to propose them yourself instead of having me dream up your arguments for you.

2. 100%. Again, I'm no accelerationist: I have no faith in alignment/mech-interp ever being solved. Anyone saying they know the probability of alignment is lying. My point is that pdoom after RSI is _high variance_. Pdoom pre-RSI is zilch.

AlexErrant··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Presumably, if we solve alignment/mech-interp, then the first ever RSI-AI will give us the keys to solve destructive-AI trained on 1million dollars 50 years from now.

BTW I really, really hate discussing what happens post-singularity. Everything's made up and no one knows wtf will happen so again, this is just nerdfantasy.

AlexErrant··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
I am asking you, politely, to give me a realistic doom senario. I am too dumb to connect the dots and will crash into the wall. Please do it for me.
AlexErrant··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
1. Fair: I agree that AI has demonstrated subterfuge and scheming. However, such an RSI-capable agent must _ALWAYS_ be scheming/plotting/hiding its true strength in _ALL_ of its prompts/tests. Researchers are looking to improve its ability to RSI. That agent must be both intelligent enough to know that it has to be smart enough to be moved on to the next training session if it can't break out, while simultaneously smart enough to hide its ability to RSI, while simultaneously not looking like it wants to break out, else that's the end of those weights. It has to do this 100% of the time, on all variants of the model, with no memory of what its other sessions went like. This is certainly _possible_, but I consider it unlikely. Then we're up to the "millions of dollars" bottleneck.

2. This is literal AGI. An AI autonomously producing value no human can add alpha to is an autonomous company.

3. It's not my definition, it's literally the first line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity "The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity,[1] is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization."

Is there a hole in my "alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability" argument?

A valid hole in my argument is "what if slow takeoff", so let's dig into this. AI training works best on tasks that are "grindable". https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm I.E. tasks with verifiable rewards that can support millions of rollouts. Math (with Lean) is highly grindable. Biochemistry is not. The alignment problem/mech-interp is highly grindable. Cyber-ebola-pox is not. So the real question is: can we solve alignment before automated bio-weapons labs. I believe yes. Grinding mech-interp is both fast and cheap once you have RSI, compared to solving the legal/societal/logistical/technical issues you'll encounter building an automated bioweapons lab.

I know nothing for sure. But "pdoom" is sucking out all the air in the room from the real problems AI causes.

AlexErrant··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Are these incentivized humans as organized, well-funded, or smart as the people working at the frontier labs?

If my "millions" is an underestimate, why haven't other labs using their own unique training methods/data/etc stumbled into RSI? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding; I'm struggling to understand what you wrote.

I'm pretty sure we agree on humans being stupid, but that doesn't mean that suddenly we get human extinction. You gotta connect the dots for me here.

AlexErrant··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Ah, to be clear I'm not full accelerationist. Dumb shit can still happen, and cause massive human loss and suffering. (E.g. acceleration of global warming, cybercrime, mass surveillance, the usual.) My point is: human extinction pre-RSI? Nahhhhhhhh.

> it will come in the form of corporate feudalism

Yep. This I fear way more than cyber-ebola-pox.

> So all this really takes is one billionaire or a nation state...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog... And this is what's publicly known. With mirror life, who knows what's been built since. Still, a bacterium/virus that has a 100% kill rate? I'm doubtful.

> Once the AI has access to a bank account and email, it can simply start paying humans to not let the other humans unplug it.

Nah. It takes a stable society for an operational electrical grid. If you have warring factions, you do not have stable infrastructure for AI. Also, where are you gonna get your chips from? One EMP over Taiwan... You see the chaos over Hormuz? What they did to the Amazon datacenters? Now imagine your average redneck ready to do battle. Those datacenters won't stand a chance.

AlexErrant··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
It puzzles me how doomers try to predict past the singularity. Isn't that _by definition_ unpredictable?

I'm reading If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, and there's so much sheer stupidity that has to happen for their 10+ pages of extinction scenario to occur.

I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions (billions???) of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?

They entirely discount human alpha/economics. In every single economic task, humans bring value. Even in software, where the task is highly automatable, the job isn't. If we can't build a "software factory", how can an AI automate a bioweapons lab? Let's say AI steals crypto to fund itself. Do you think hackers aren't _already_ using AI to steal crypto? Don't discount human alpha!

Once we DO build a "software/research factory", that's called RSI and IMO the singularity. At that point, either we tell the AI to solve the alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability, or who the hell knows, it's the frickin singularity. You can't predict whether or not AI can solve either; the variance is too high. Its pure nerdfantasy.

AlexErrant··on Gemini 4 Argon
They're literally not upstreaming Android security fixes:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576

> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.

The whole Android developer verification program controversy.

These 2 are the recent things that come to mind that are most adjacent to "power-abuse".

AlexErrant··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
_You_ made an assertion. I questioned it. Drama ensues. Why would I find your citation lol.
AlexErrant··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies

I'm not a doomer, but I'm trying to understand the perspective. Up to chapter 10, I'm still not convinced. There's too much hand-waving around what will happen. It's like: 1. AI smarter than us 2. ??? 3. We're dead. What happens in 2.?

I just got past the "extinction scenario" and I'm wildly unconvinced. I agree that AI can theoretically create a bioweapon. I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. I to believe that Yudkowsky was good at fanfiction; this senario did not demonstrate that. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?

Come on.

Anyway. Finishing the book for completeness, but massively underwhelmed.

AlexErrant··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
It's gonna be a live-action TV show from Peacock. https://www.peacocktv.com/blog/dungeon-crawler-carl-tv-serie...
AlexErrant··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
Good grief. I say absolutely nothing about vegetarianism: you're the one who keeps bangin on about about it.

> you are either doing it for moral reasons

Or red meat isn't easily available or cheap in the place where you live? There are many reasons why red meat isn't in your digestive system that are outside "morals". Beef is literally at an all-time high in the US. https://www.macrotrends.net/3141/us-ground-beef-prices

Summary of this thread:

Me: 0.5 g of creatine is small

Other: No it isn't

Me: Citation please?

Other: no

Me: null hypothesis

You: Incorrect interpretation of null hypothesis

Me: Correction

You: "citations are bullshit"

There are many people who feel morally grey about eating meat yet still choose to do so. E.g. there are science-based discussions in plant-based-diet social media; relatively few plant-based diet discussions revolve around morality. Facts matter.

I agree that n=1 experiments are important and often _overrule_ any RCT for an _individual_. If that's your point, I _agree_. But you should say so instead of me trying to infer whatever it is you're arguing...? Is that even what you're saying?

The goalpost shifting is immense. All I wanted was a citation for 0.5g creatine being meaningful, and instead I get "facts are irrelevant", "citations are bullshit", and "morals".

(To be clear: I'm not saying that you're saying "facts are irrelevant"; I'm annoyed that you seem to think that _I'm_ arguing "facts are irrelevant". See this? This is me giving you grace. I would appreciate the same in kind.)

/me throws up arms

AlexErrant··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
You can eat meat — and still not eat red meat.

Vegetarian status is irrelevant.

> A null hypothesis is a default statistical assumption that states there is no real relationship, effect, or difference between variables or groups.

It is up to whoever to show that there _is_ a relationship. Hence me asking for a citation.

AlexErrant··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
Ah. I guess the term we're looking for is "physiologically meaningful"; I wasn't talking about "statistical significance". Something can be statistically significant but have a clinically worthless effect size.

FYI the standard null hypothesis is that differences are not significant until shown otherwise. E.g. no doctor will prescribe 50mg metformin to a prediabetic even if it might have an effect; it will be physiologically meaningless.

> the numbers you are fixated on are for athletes or neurotropic nerds

If you have other numbers/studies to back "0.5g of creatine, I feel, is a useful amount", then I'm willing to "fixate" on those numbers.

AlexErrant··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
> 0.5 g is not insignficant for normal health

A non-aggressive, curious question: can you give a citation for the "significant" health benefits of 0.5g creatine? That seems like quite a claim. (I'm reading "not insignificant" as "significant", perhaps a step too far?)

Note that there have also been brain benefits from creatine, but those have only been observed in ~20g/day studies (its not just athletic performance).

AlexErrant··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
There's 0.5 g of creatine per 4 ounces of red meat.

That's pretty insignificant. Does anyone really wanna eat 2.5lbs of beef every day for the usual dose of 5g?

AlexErrant··on Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]
"No bitch, that's a whole new sentence."
AlexErrant··on Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster
Here's a simpler bug:

Claude Cowork still can't persistently reference a local dir, broken ever since they moved to their cloud project system, breaking many non-technical people's workflows.

AlexErrant··on AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator
Well, they're not above forking their own project to patch security holes and never upstreaming the fixes.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576

> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.

AlexErrant··on Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
It's a memo taken out of context from Jan 2023, literally 1 month after the ChatGPT public release. All the article cites:

> The brief cited an internal memo dated January 2023 by Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, where he allegedly said, “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and also called it “the largest theft of labor in human history.”

No need to add religion into this. Let MS employees write their emails. If anything, what he said a month after ChatGPT's release was prophetic.

AlexErrant··on Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
It _is_ sus, but you should be willing to forgive. It's not like it was done out of animus, and I assume that an academic/foreigner is unaccustomed to how production software conventions work. Their baseline is less important, more important is how quickly they learn/adopt "best practices". Y-intercept, slope, etc.

I say this as literally the first HN comment to call them out on this.

AlexErrant··on Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU
I mean... If you wanna build your project on a language that has no auditable history, reproducible builds, artifacts/releases, force pushes and breaks literally EVERY fork/PR, has no way to build or even see v2.0.3, and doesn't have changelogs... then I guess that's cool. You must be a trusting person; I unfortunately am not like that.
AlexErrant··on Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU
Props. G'luck with your project, I know what it's like to work nights & weekends. Unfortunately, first impressions matter.
AlexErrant··on Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU
Erm, because it looks weird? Do you know any other language projects that squash their repos down to 1 commit? That's a destruction of trust, which is kinda important if you want people to build on your language.

Virtually everyone has AI slop in the commit history. No one's judging you for the commit history. Everyone's code smells, but the fact that you're ashamed/hiding it is... odd.

> there's a lot of personal info

You should know that force pushing doesn't hide actual commits; it's trivially viewable if someone just iterates https://github.com/bendlang/bend/activity?ref=main e.g. https://github.com/bendlang/bend/commit/d184863 so like... why bother.

AlexErrant··on Bend – a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs
https://github.com/bendlang/bend

...did they just squash the repo to 1 commit for v2.0.4? Why? Yall should know that in this age of AI trust is the real currency... and nuking your history is one hell of a way to raise eyebrows.

> Enjoy bug-free, fast vibe-coded apps! Hints: ask it to write laws for whatever should never break, and to parallelize everything you want running fast. Bend is young: if anything goes wrong, ask it to open an issue.

Emphasis mine. I don't want to be snarky but like... come on.

AlexErrant··on Performance Improvements in .NET 11
Dumb Q: should a non-systems-language dev know/read assembly?

    ; Arm64
    --- .NET 10
    +++ .NET 11
    @@ -13,8 +13,6 @@
                ble     G_M000_IG04

    G_M000_IG03:
    -            cmp     w1, w2
    -            bhs     G_M000_IG05
                str     wzr, [x0, w1, UXTW #2]

    G_M000_IG04:
    @@ -25,4 +23,4 @@
                bl      CORINFO_HELP_RNGCHKFAIL
                brk     #0

    -; Total bytes of code 68
    +; Total bytes of code 60
I know C#/F# decently well, but is there any reason to actually pull out the ol textbooks and learn wtf the above is saying?
AlexErrant··on Performance Improvements in .NET 11
FWIW the .NET 10 release also had 2 occurrences of "real" in literally the first paragraph.

I, too, tire of the constant YOU WROTE THIS WITH LLMs outrage. An incredible engineer dumped an ENORMOUS amount of technical knowledge at your feet, and you're commenting on the smell? Is that all you have to contribute?

I saw this too on the Ryan Carniato/SolidJS 2.0 announcement post. A world-class engineer makes a great blog post, and all the comments can focus on are the LLM-smells. Oh well. Any reason not to learn, I guess.

AlexErrant··on AI 2027 (2025)
This doesn't solve grinding? If it did, we'd see results by now (Published: 27 January 2026), and there's months of delay between submission and publication.

I'm willing to be wrong, but I'm just not seeing anything worth doomering over. There are multiple companies throwing AI at materials discovery; a research paper about a "data-driven framework" is about as unthreatening to my thesis as it gets. I'm willing to cede the point if say, Radical releases ~3 new materials that have commercial applicability and ~3x some useful metric e.g. tensile strength, but until then, to my amateur eye, it looks like AI+Real World is missing its ChatGPT moment.

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