meowface

Did Dario Amodei say that?

Dario Amodei and Eric Schmidt seem fairly well-calibrated, although a bit early. Elon Musk is constantly way, way overoptimistic (perhaps to the point of willful fraud). Zitron is hopelessly and ridiculously incompetent (and there are allegations he is willfully lying, too, but who knows).

I am fine with socialists who actually try to provide clear arguments and proposals. That's why I'm a big fan of Cassie Pritchard, who is ideologically basically a tankie yet who actually engages in rational discourse (and who agrees with you on what to do with AI labs and data centers). My initial comment and first reply were not responses to you. I am annoyed by people who do not want to grapple with the world. You should separate my "socialism is bad, immoral, and ineffective" from my initial comment about many people not even trying.

>Why not link a Standard Oil press release about why monopolies are great, actually?

My point was that you might very well like OpenAI's proposals, if you were to read them! Because they may not actually be that far off from what you desire. They just won't go quite as far as your ideal scenario. What they describe is arguably a mix of private and public ownership.

This is not to say it's necessarily not just PR talk they'll soon abandon. But it's a starting point, and them disregarding their positions there would be relevant to future government regulation approaches.

1. It is extremely likely neither 8chan /pol/ nor 4chan /pol/ were or are honeypots.

2. Untrue. I heavily used both (not as a right-winger; just as a decades-long anonymous imageboard user who sometimes finds it fun to rile people up in /pol/ boards). 8chan's was a lot worse and was shut down for a reason.

I didn't completely read your reply. That's not what I'm responding to.

I am critiquing the proposal of socialism as the answer. My initial complaint was answered. My new complaint is with that proposed solution.

Socialism is just empirically and morally extremely bad and will not solve our problems. Mamdani is a great example. Mamdani is mostly solving problems by governing as a wise technocratic pro-social neoliberal. His one main exception - rent control - will very likely backfire and continue to prove my point.

Your reply would require an essay from me much longer than what you wrote to explain why it's mostly wrong and why collective ownership of the AI labs and AI data centers (or almost anything) would be bad compared to private ownership with government oversight and taxation.

For now, I would recommend the latest in the Alexander vs. Pritchard series to help articulate broadly why liberalism is preferable to socialism: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/re-re-re-pritchard-on-liber...

I have read the arguments from each and find Pritchard to have made the best case for socialism I've come across and yet find Alexander far more persuasive and correct, here.

I would also recommend reading OpenAI's social democratic policy proposals: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/561e7512-253e-424b-9734-ef4098440...

LOVEINT is likely highly undernoticed.

I am unsure if I'm 100% anti-Flock, but requiring a court order or exigent circumstance to look at any Flock camera feed may be necessary.

The problem is that socialism actually is bad. Neoliberalism is a much better idea that leads to better outcomes, and is based on reason and empiricism and systems thinking. Socialism is pseudoscience, vibes, and cults of personality and ideology.

Socially conscious neoliberalism in democratic countries has led to the most acceleration towards widespread human prosperity in all of history.

Many people want to critique power rather than propose and judge concrete solutions.

I think a sufficiently smart non-competent developer can still do this to great effect, but it definitely helps if someone is both a competent developer, smart, and a seasoned user of LLMs.

Just because AI is not yet a god that is better than all humans at creativity and product decisions and design does not mean it is not a huge accelerant right now.

Spite cam actually be one of the most powerful motivators for productivity, in my own experience. I can buy this story being accurate.

I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but LLMs can actually be a way to create even better things than those better things. I've seen it in action.

Sadly.

I believe it is unlikely. (Not because I do not believe NSA is hoarding 0-days, but for many other reasons.)

I'm curious: to any professional vulnerability researchers reading this, what do you think?

Uh huh.

I think it is very unlikely LLMs are sentient, but even if they aren't I would feel wrong and bad to insult it. I can be blunt and sometimes say things like "all of this is terrible in 100 different ways, this is all broken and bad, it'd take longer to enumerate the problems than to fix them, just scrap it and start over", but I've never insulted or "yelled at" an LLM. (Or an animal. And they can't even speak English.)

Uh huh.

The only thing more embarrassing than embracing personhood of 2026 LLMs is snarking "glorified autocomplete" for 2026 LLMs.

Please get this poem in front of Scott Alexander. I bet he'd enjoy it and maybe include it in a blog post.

Everyone I know, including myself, is simultaneously extremely pro-AI and anti-AI for this reason.

I always put myself in the shoes of the reader when relaying Claudeslop. I either use it as a reference and write it by hand or make Claude edit it 10+ times until it's conveying only the needed information, and in simple, clear words, and without annoying Claudeisms.

They won't, because they can't. It's all just vague populist contrarianism.

No, because I do not work at an AI company. I am more just facepalming.

The Guardian's article and your reply here are so foolish and absurd that I can only imagine OpenAI employees are cringing but know they can't/shouldn't really say much.

It's just you. Fable 5 is consistently better than Opus 4.8 at literally every single level, for me. (I always use both at xhigh, for reference.) I could go down a laundry list of various issues I have with Opus that I don't have with Fable. For me, Opus 4.8 < GPT-5.6 Sol < Fable 5.

Plus Fable is way less annoying to talk to than Opus 4.8. Opus 4.8's writing style is absolutely insufferable. Fable has some of the same quirks but it's way less bad.

They arguably might be, but I kind of want them to be!

It's going to be pretty crazy when GPT-6 comes out, since the rumors are it's quite a bit smarter and wiser than GPT-5.6.

This would seem to lead to absurd implications. What if in, say, 20 years, an AI is able to independently prove nearly everything important in under an hour, including the Riemann hypothesis, with no contamination from other proofs? (Let's say it's also free to write and run arbitrary code, as well.)

Whether it's 5, 10, 20, 50 years, obviously the takeaway cannot be "something had gone terribly wrong". The takeaway would be the smartest humans were never close to the theoretical intelligence and wisdom ceiling and never could've been. This will one day seem obvious in retrospect. There's no reason evolution by natural selection would've landed any species near such a ceiling.

Hilariously absurd cope.

They're still not very good at writing, but you've flipped the takeaway. The correct conclusion is writing style isn't very relevant to intelligence.

Hot take: even GPT-3 was not a parrot. Skeptics have never properly internalized that the fundamental operation is basically irrelevant to the gestalt. Humans are not parrots yet neurons likely also largely operate via predictive processing.

You can use that retroactive logic about any hard problem though. Unsolved murder cases, math, theoretical physics.

If tons of smart humans try for years and fail and then an LLM tries for a few weeks or hours and succeeds, the implications are clear. And these are by far the dumbest LLMs will ever be.