Zachary Robinson and Kanika Bahl are no longer on the Anthropic LTBT. Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar has been added. The Anthropic Company page is out of date, but as far as I can tell the LTBT is: Neil Buddy Shah (chair), Richard Fontaine, and Cuéllar.

how valuable are formalized frameworks for safety, risk assessment, etc in other (non-AI) fields? i'm temperamentally predisposed to find that my eyes glaze over whenever i see some kind of formalized risk management framework, which usually comes with a 2010s style powerpoint diagram - see below for a random example i grabbed from google images: am i being unfair to these things? are they actually super effective for avoiding failures in other domains? or are they just useful for CYA and busywork and mostly just say common sense in an institutionally legible way? one reason i care is because i feel some level of instinctive dislike for some AI safety/governance frameworks because they give me this vibe. but it's useful to figure out if i'm being unfairly judgemental, or if these really are slop.

At my job on the compute policy team at IAPS, we recently started a Substack that we call The Substrate. I think this could be of interest to some here, since I quite often see discussions on LessWrong around export controls, hardware-enabled mechanisms, security, and other compute-governance-related topics. Here are the posts we've published so far: * For chip exports, quantity is at least as important as quality, about how to best set AI chip export policy * The case for paying whistleblowers to report on export violations, about the Stop Stealing Our Chips Act * BIS is getting more funding—here's how to spend it, about the upcoming Bureau of Industry and Security budget increase, and what BIS plans to and should do with the money * Why securing AI model weights isn’t enough, about AI integrity (that is, ensuring AI models don't have backdoors, etc.) To make this quick take not merely an advertisement, I would also be happy to discuss anything about any of these posts, and/or to hear suggestions for things that we should write about.

Elon Musk seems to have decided that going to Mars isn't that important anymore. This means not only won't they begin with Mars this transfer window but also not the next one. At the same time, the merger between SpaceX and xAI, seems like SpaceX now wants to refocus on data centers in "space". Given the problems with getting rid of heat from space satellites might be solved with building the data center on the moon where everything is cold and the moon is a big heat sink.

TIL that notorious Internet crackpot Mentifex who inserted himself into every AI discussion he could in the olden days of the Internet passed away in 2024. https://obituaries.seattletimes.com/obituary/arthur-murray-1089408830

every time i ask claude 4.6 to fix a test case it just comments the test out with some nonsense explanation about how the test doesn't matter

Objectively, the global population is about 8 billion. But subjectively? Let p_i be the probability I'll meet person i in the next year, and let μ = Σ p_i be the expected number of people I meet. Then the subjective population is N = exp( -Σ (p_i/μ) log(p_i/μ) ) This is the perplexity of the conditional distribution "given I meet someone, who is it?" My guess is that for me, N is around 10,000 — about 0.0001% of humanity.