They just don’t call it model collapse, and that fixes the problem.

Reminds me of OpenAI’s blog post explaining the goblins. It described textbook model collapse, but somehow avoided saying the actual words “model collapse” even once.

edit: Nevermind… The Epstein Hysteria

That is pretty bad… all the standard rationalist thick-headed idiocy and quibbling details and choice of gross example. But even so if that is their worst, they still aren’t in the worst quartile of rationalist.

here’s how two robot gods who can perfectly emulate each other might work things out

Just gotta solve the halting problem, no biggie for a superintelligence or Eliezer.

Well you see, the acausalrobotgod actually hates dealing with assholes tying themselves in knots trying to predict its predictions, so actually you really are better off with CDT if you don’t want to get 3^^^3 dust specks in your eyes for all eternity.

More seriously, once you start positing beings that can perfectly predict you and reward/punish various decision theories you can basically rationalize any decision theory.

The whole algorithm predicting your algorithm thing feels like it is basically asking for/claiming the existence of a solution to the halting problem? But yeah, moot point, because the FDT stuff doesn’t get as far as ever talking about how to compute an answer and always treats the magic hyper computation as a given.

Some lesswrongers are happy about this news, talking up how their P(doom) is lower and that sort of thing. Of course some of them are sinophobic and worried now China will take the lead, which is obviously worse.

More the later than the former… they are better than purely marketing focused stuff pushed out by the LLM companies, and if you dig through them and read between the lines you can occasionally sift out useful details. Like here is a pretty solid sneer digging through Mythos’s ‘system card’ and pointing out all the ways it contradicts the hype and press headlines Anthropic was pushing.

But even so they have some big problems…

• the benchmarks the system cards reference are kind of useless and heavily gamed
• LLM companies want to keep lots of details secret from competitors, so fundamentals like number of model weights or parameters or size/quality of the training data set or other training specs are deliberately left out
• lots of the stuff they reference is booster garbage and/or doomer crit-hype
• they tend to be long, wastefully so, imitating the length of academic papers without having the corresponding amount of depth or information
• despite their length and wordiness they also neglect basic practical usage advice that isn’t even proprietary (or at least would be bound to leak if you poke around with the model at all and thus not worth keeping secret in the first place). Like not even big picture stuff I mentioned in my second bullet, but really simple stuff…

I think this would be funny if a cool, normal guy said it.

The word foid is a very clear alarm bell. But yeah, without that word and a different framing and it could be a guy humbly acknowledging that women’s health has a lot of extra complications.

poisonai is actually trying to update them about key facts. You should always followup a general internet search or information automatically found and put in your context with a specific search on www.reddit.com/r/poisonai/ to see what the latest nuanced details are.

He’s picked what, Yahoo, AMD, and Alibaba? But then he also lost a huge amount in the dotcom bust and WeWork and doesn’t have have any other notable picks? That’s not a golden goose, that a gambler that got lucky thrice and nearly went bust twice, and it will be 3 times if he keeps tripling down on OpenAI.

The AI 2027 guy is taking credit for being a good forecaster: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cxuzALcmucCndYv4a/daniel-kokotajlo-s-shortform?commentId=44KvqZEG2vwKCaFAu

Recently an interviewer asked me how I got to be such a good forecaster, and I replied by saying something humble. In retrospect it was a bad answer because I should have instead used the opportunity to give actual advice on how to forecast AI well.

Reminder, according to this guy (originally, he has already nudged the dates of his prophecies back a few years), we are supposed to be having agents replace human workers in mass this year, and be one year out from a superhuman coding agent and researcher that radically iteratively improves itself.

We joked about how the AI 2027 people would try to pivot as they were proven wrong… I think they are going to outright try to claim credit for being ‘right’ despite all their critical prophecies being wrong by claiming credit for secondary details.

When banning people takes several ten thousand word essays going back and forth, how can you trust that responsibility to lesser mortals?

Literally just started a discussion on European booster fanfic hype a few days ago: https://awful.systems/post/8591627/11736760

I wonder if Europe 2031 will get a boost out of this, it is really perfect timing for them, they can even claim an early prediction success on the US cutting Europe off! (But as with AI 2027, Europe 2031 assumes a much more competent US that can implement strategies like that in a competent fashion instead of some disorganized demands after 5pm on a Friday).

That got blocked in court… or one of the two legal mechanisms by which the SCR could work got blocked, the other didn’t? Something messy and stupid and complicated like that.

And of course, that all got ignored with US government participation in Glasswing. So idk… it’s all so chaotic and stupid.

The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic’s “it’s too powerful” narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don’t think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.

It also saves them on the cost of actually serving the model, and stalls the cycle of people gradually realizing the new model isn’t much better than the previous one.

Anthropic’s fear mongering has finally backfired! The US government ordered them to suspend all foreign access to Fable and Mythos: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

Well, I’m not sure this has properly backfired. They were probably struggling to serve the models to everyone, and they were probably losing a lot of money on everyone with subscription access using Fable for the free trial period. And there was a lot of complaints about how insanely oversensitive Fable’s censors and guardrails were. Now they get all the benefits and hype of having released the model, without having to pay the insane costs (or the letdown of people releasing it is just another incremental step)! (Well, depending on how much flexibility they have in their GPU cloud access). If this blows over in a few weeks it will probably be worthwhile for the hype “Our models are so dangerous the government had to ban foreign access”.

Also, funnily enough the US banning foreign access to their models was a major plot point in the Europe 2031 booster fanfic I recently boosted. Of course there, it was a massive point of leverage against Europe and led to immense value loss to the Europeans, where irl Fable/Mythos are just another incremental step (if even that much) being marketed very well.

We can (and probably will) keep having AI bubbles as long as capitalism exists (and thus rich idiots with too much money are looking for ways to get richer) and there are new AI approaches/paradigms (with flashy demo-able potential) left to discover.

It might have come this decade, had they faithfully funded the path of symbolic AI, but instead they wandered around in the desert chasing the false idols of connectionism and deep learning.

New booster irl fanfic just dropped: https://europe2031.ai/

It openly admits to being an AI 2027 knockoff, although I will give it credit for having a much more grounded scenario (Europe in economic ruin compared to gloriously transformed China and USA, whereas AI 2027 described the world going full singularity) and having a longer timeline (5 years to economic transformation is relatively sane compared to 3 years for an AI God to be born)

Some highlights in sneering:

The hours Christian’s team pulled were insane – seventy- or eighty-hour weeks, people sleeping in the office.

One of the character’s is basically an idealized SV AI startup founder, complete with all the insane startup tropes like working the 80 work week to grind out success. Also the fact that his name was Christian and the sort of chiding pitying attitude he had towards the other character, Caroline kept making me think of Christian Gray and 50 Shades of Gray.

Someone mentioned, in passing, that they thought artificial general intelligence - AI that is better than any human at most tasks - was probably two or three years out.

This is something of a side note to this scenario, but it annoys me ever single time it comes up so I will keep complaining. The boosters have very willfully moved the goalposts. Wikipedia gives the definition as “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.” Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition to ‘most’ and not ‘all’ and swapped ‘cognitive tasks’ for ‘benchmarks and narrowly defined tasks’ and then claimed success and accused people insisting on the original definition of moving the goalposts.

Standalone American AI tools are considered a data-protection risk.

This ‘scenario’ has an ongoing theme of Europe foolishly being cautious around the risk to their data American AI companies present. It is hilarious this scenario mocks this attitude just a few days after Anthropic has made their policies towards users data even more openly contemptuous.

The infrastructure story is just as grim. The largest AI supercomputer in the US runs at 1,250 megawatts. The largest in Europe runs at eighty-three.

So I couldn’t a single convenient quote for it, but an ongoing point of idiocy of this scenario is that it takes the ‘planned’ American AI data center build-out completely for granted, assuming all the currently released numbers are true, the plans will be met on schedule, and data center build up over the next 5 years will radically surpass them. Ed Zitron has pretty much shown all three of these stages of purported numbers are complete bullshit.

Up to this point, everything we’ve said has happened – with only Caroline’s and Christian’s personal stories representing fictional elements. From here on out, we start speculating. We no longer single out individual AI companies, and instead refer to made-up actors: Atlas for the leading American AI company, Helios for the leading European company, and Zimo for the leading Chinese one.

They are even copying AI 2027’s stupid shtick of coyly swapping out names instead of referring to real companies!

Works councils slow the deep adoption of powerful AI tools; employment protections make it hard to let go of staff whose jobs can be automated and whose labour force would be needed in parts of the labour market that faces shortages.

Pretty much the pitch of this whole thing is “Europe needs to copy America’s lack of labor laws or other regulations”. I wonder if the authors of this fanfic even believe their own spin of other ‘parts of the labor market faces shortage, so firing everyone to put in AI is actually a good thing’ or if it is just a shallow attempt to appease people who find mass layoffs heartless and disruptive.

But Europe has one last card to play. After five years of failing to build a frontier AI sector, it still owns the one bottleneck which the entire race runs through. ASML remains the only company in the world capable of building the EUV lithography equipment that is used to print cutting-edge chips. Without access to its machines, the US could not keep extending its lead in AI; with access to its machines, China would likely have caught up some time ago.

So this scenario correctly acknowledges one of the bottlenecks Europe controls, but then somehow envisions the US being able to strong-arm Europe not to leverage it against them and to cut China out? Have the authors not been paying attention to the US shitting away its soft power (and showing cracks in its hard power with running out of patriot missiles) over the two Trump terms?

Europe’s slide into irrelevance was not inevitable. Even in 2026, the continent could still have changed course, had it shown the courage and political will to take drastic measures.

By courage and political will they mean slashing apart labor laws, environmental protections, and other regulations and dumping public money into AI to draw capital investment into Europe. The epilogue is some fantasy bullshit with moon domes made possible by all the American AI advances.

Gary Marcus speculates they are upping their prices because they literally can’t afford to hold out. I’m wondering if it is because they need better numbers for their IPO. VC funding be circulated to create nice sounding statements, but IPO filings have a standard of rigor where trying that would be fraud. So they are trying to squeeze their customers to get a few good looking (i.e. revenues higher than operating costs) quarters for the IPO.