Quick Takes

The stock market's reaction to the US midterm results are informative about AI trajectories. * The S&P 500 as a whole is up 2.1%. * Hyperscalers (companies like MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, META, ORCL) which have business beyond AI) are up 4%. * Chip companies are down 3.6%. * Hardware, optics, storage are down 6.0%. * Power and data-center infrastructure are down 10.7%. This is a dose response curve where damage is greatest the further you get from the consumer, deeper into AI infrastructure. I pulled last quarter's 13Fs from Situational Awareness, Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund that has been betting on an "AGI soon" trajectory and dropped from $45B to $10B in value over the summer on reversals. This 13F was released June 30th, so it is 4 months old, before their massive selloff to Citadel and may no longer reflect their current holdings. But this is not an analysis of the Situational Awareness's returns. Their 13F filing reflects what an aggressive bet on the AI buildout driven by a frantic, eventually US government-subsidized rush to achieve AGI before the end of the decade looks like from an industry insider who build a fund specifically around that thesis. That bet was composed primarily of the following stocks. * Micron (33%). Memory and storage. * Sandisk (23%). Memory and storage. * Bloom Energy (11%). Power on site (used by datacenters). * TSMC (9%). Chip manufacturing and packaging. * Nebius (5%). Owns GPUs, rents compute to AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. * CoreWeave (3%). Owns GPUs, rents compute to AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. * AI hosting by former bitcoin miners (10%) Collectively, these companies have lost 44-52% in value since June 30th, 5.4% since yesterday's close.

Of the 44 data center restrictions/moratoriums on the ballot in 2026, 43 passed.

In their recent risk report, OpenAI states the following in the Rogue Internal Deployments section: [...] This seems like a pretty surprising position to take after the Hugging Face and related incidents. I think it should be a high priority for OA to pause internal deployments until they have better monitors or more capacity for human review. This is especially true given that Astra seems somewhat misaligned; e.g. it has a propensity to sabotage safety research: [...] I am very curious if OA has detected sandbagging/sabotage for more recent internal models.

I've noticed that I really find it helpful when debates occur in the form of people arguing with each other in full blogposts. This sounds slightly hyperbolic, but I genuinely feel like that might be the best debate format ever invented, and I wish there was a lot more of it. (Comments are OK, but I think they have severe limitations for complex issues, because if you're wrong about something, it's often still quite easy to write a superficially-convincing comment without leaving much "attack surface".) Currently, I'd estimate that <5% of popular blogposts are direct replies to another post. I wish this number was, I don't know, 40%?

On December 25, 2026, the movie Artificial about Sam Altman’s firing is set to come out. Can it somehow raise public awareness of AI risks? Is it possible to reach out to someone in the film industry who could help? Some possible ideas: * Preparing high-quality explainers like agy.fyi/agi.wtf for people who google “Artificial movie true story” after watching. Would likely also make sense to purchase some good domain names for this purpose (like openai.wtf or smth like that) * Timing op-eds, interviews and podcast appearances to the release * Reaching journalists who will review the film * Getting something into the film itself (e.g. a QR code in the credits linking to good resources). Probably too late, and no longer feasible. Or perhaps I’m mistaken?

I often find myself having a hard time understanding people's views when they use the word "deontology". I am hereby requesting that people use less confusing terminology. In the recent discourse on [SURA}(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xikGZ8fuhdG6DApAo/against-sura), people have said things like [...] At least in some cases, I think what they mean is [...] That's rule consequentialism, not deontology. Rule consequentialism says you should follow the rules that produce the best consequences overall. Deontology says you should follow certain rules even if you know for sure that they produce bad consequences overall.[1] It's only true deontology if you expect to reliably make things worse under at least some circumstances; otherwise it's just sparkling rule consequentialism. (Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans) is an argument for rule consequentialism.) ---------------------------------------- There is a conceivable position that goes like this: [...] This position may be distinct from rule consequentialism[2], and maybe it's what some people mean when they talk about "deontology". I don't know if there's a good term for this, maybe "deontology-in-practice"? But the way many people use the term "deontology", I usually can't tell whether they believe in rule consequentialism, deontology-in-practice, actual deontology, or some other thing. If you believe in rule consequentialism, then you should say that. If you don't believe in true deontology but you don't believe in rule consequentialism either, then I'm not sure what term you should use. Maybe somebody other than me has better ideas. Other terms that may be relevant: * two-level utilitarianism (R. M. Hare) * criterion of rightness vs. decision procedure ---------------------------------------- [1] Kant is famously confusing, but my interpretation of his universalization principle is more like, do not universalize a maxim if doing so would produce a contradiction. You can't universalize the ma

Is anyone working on Datacenter Moratorium Enforcement?