2025-10-04
would you rather
Dwarkesh has some reflections on his interview with Richard Sutton. A couple of years ago, I met Dwarkesh at Manifest and remarked to him that it seemed like he was growing out of his doomer phase, and he replied to me that he wasn’t really one or the other, but that he felt he didn’t know enough to have his own opinions yet. Now he has his own pet theory about continual learning, and feels qualified to double down on disagreeing with Mr. Bitter Lesson himself. Anyway, his closing comment, that “If the LLMs do get to AGI first, the successor systems they build will almost certainly be based on Richard’s vision” is actually very interesting: I don’t think it’s certain, but it is true that AlphaZero came after AlphaGo.
Seb Krier has a new post on the importance of deployment as a means to get what we want out of AGI, and not just abstract capabilities itself.
The latest issue of the LRB1 actually has a pretty decent piece on AI (which is partially a review of IABIED, but not really), as far as can be done given its viewpoint: a pessimistic outlook on AI as another trick the tech oligarchs are pulling over everyone else. It’s interesting, because even if nothing else is, AI is clearly a result of unstoppable structural economic and societal forces, and yet those who you would expect to view everything from that lens view it as the conspiracy of a small interconnected cabal.
There’s a funny little section in this issue of The Diff where a reader roleplays as Baron Harkonnen as asks the LLM trained on The Diff advice about how to manage their economic situation of Arrakis.
Bryan Johnson highlights an interesting paper where modified human stem cells apparently reverse aging in monkeys.
There’s also an entertaining read on Amanda Knox, which is interesting as a sympathetic view of an American as the victim of Europeans, a tale of a tourist harmed by careless government, a criticism of conservative mores in unrestrained tabloids and even legacy media; science fiction and biographies are described positively: a very strange inversion of the usual class signifiers.
While we’re on the topic of the faults of Europe, there’s an open letter by Signal Foundation to the German government on the topic of the Chat Control proposal.