Davidmanheim

Sometimes, people don't say what they actually think, not because saying it would be rude or costly, but because they believe saying it now would be counterproductive. They see that the true claim is outside the Overton window. And they conclude that the strategic play is to say something weaker,...

I think the debate over whether AI risk should be addressed via regulation or treaties is often oversimplified, and confused. These are not substitutes. They rely on overlapping underlying capacities and address different classes of problems, and both van benefit from certain classes of research. David Krueger, to pick on...

I’ve heard a number of people say that it’s unclear what the technical contours of a global AI treaty would look like. That is true - but it’s not actually an obstacle to negotiating an international treaty. I’ll try to explain why this isn’t a good objection, but the short...

OpenAI is now a public benefit corporation, with a charter that demands they use AGI for the benefit of all, and do so safely. To justify this structure to the Attorneys General of Delaware and California, they split off the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, and instead of full ownership, gave it...

I argue the "stochastic parrot" critique of LLMs is philosophically undead—refuted under some interpretations, still valid under others, and persistently confused because nobody defined it clearly. This is an attempt to fix that. The term "stochastic parrot" comes from Bender et al.'s 2021 paper, which identified several dangers of early...

I keep running into similar arguments online, where people attack “the other” and use the (correct) observation of badness to claim their side is therefore doing well. There’s a temptation to correct this by saying that in a dispute between two sides, one side being bad isn’t causally making the...

A lot of “red line” talk assumed that a capability shows up, everyone notices, and something changes. We keep seeing the opposite; capability arrives, and we get an argument about definitions after deployment, after it should be clear that we're well over the line. We’ve Already Crossed The Lines! Karl...