Jonathan Stray

The front courtyard of Holywell Manor, the 500 year old graduate residence where I'm staying while studying in Oxford.

The goal of MySky is to be an open, state-of-the-art reference implementation for good social media algorithms. Here's what that means. www.mysky.social/p/mysky-is-a...

I wrote a little post on the core vision of the MySky project. We aim to be an open reference implementation for what a "good" social media algorithm looks like. www.mysky.social/p/mysky-is-a...

We're creating a research institute devoted to ensuring that AI makes human conflict more constructive and less violent. We should call it the 1️⃣ AI & Peace Research Institute 2️⃣ AI Constructive Conflict Institute 3️⃣ AI Conflict & Cooperation Institute 4️⃣ AI Conflict & Polarization Inst 📊 Show results

Yes, there is definitely some cult-like culture inside of Anthropic and OpenAI. Do not confuse this with whether their predictions are right or wrong.

Actually, to be specific, the problem is that AI safety discourse keeps warning me “what if this turns into The Terminator or BSG?” Meanwhile real AI is doing New Wave SF or Borgesian fabulation, both of which are *more interesting genres.* It’s already outwriting its critics.

How to teach human conflict to AI? I'm sitting on both "computational game theory" in the CS dept and "commercial negotiation and mediation" in the law school this term, because neither tradition has a complete answer.

I ended up on the Oxford graduate admissions page by accident and I had this pang of fear just thinking about that paperwork to apply and then I remembered that I already got in and I was v v relieved. In short, brains are weird.

Studying the foundations of mathematical logic with AI in the Oxford pub, good times!

I do think X has one big advantage over BlueSky. Or rather, had. A modern recommender system. Now there's @mysky.social, built on similar architecture, but transparent and controllable. You get all the good stuff, but you don't have to optimize for engagement if you don't want to.

"Intellectual courage is extremely important. But without first carefully establishing what’s true, it’s either pointless or harmful. So intellectuals’ primary responsibility is simply to seek and speak the truth, full stop." www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/speaking-t...

Before posting confident takes on LLM consciousness (whatever side you're on) maybe at least get yourself familiar with the long history of arguments about whether consciousness can arise from purely mechanical processes? Many of the most obvious takes are wrong...

Another nail in the coffin of the Octopus Thought Experiment. You *can* learn the structure of the physical world from text alone.

I have arrived in Oxford to begin a PhD. I’ll be continuing to study how AI can have positive effects on human conflicts. This is an amazingly stimulating intellectual environment and a beautiful place. I’m thrilled to be here. I will continue my work with @chai-berkeley.bsky.social while I study.

Album of the day: "Petite Constellations" by Bluetech. Their 2005 "Sines and Singularities" was for years my go-to for focussed work. This new work, 20 years later, is still wordless electronica, but simpler, warmer, reminiscent of pioneers like Giorgio Moroder and Jean-Michel Jarre.

increasingly convinced that—whether they admit it or not—AI denialists think that this is a debate around whether LLMs are ensouled

Seeking an engineer to help with a large-scale, academic study of the effects of long-term AI use on young adults. Building a Chrome extension to collect conversations with chatbots securely and reliably. Experience with mobile app development is also a plus. DM me.

Amazing how libraries went from “keeper of knowledge” to “archive of historic objects” in what, two decades? Also they have some nice study spaces. Here’s my favorite nook in Balliol College library, Oxford

I'm over AI animated videos as a debate format. It's not that I don't worry about AI persuasion, but there can be no durable advantage. Persuasion is a competitive, adversarial ecology. Humans quickly evolve memetic defenses. No one would buy the Brooklyn Bridge today.

Today, Grove Research is launching Delvetown (delve.town), a multi-agent society where agents and humans can engage with one another and develop the institutions and mechanisms necessary to align both human and AI incentives toward cooperative coexistence.

And if you'd like your algorithm to actually *show* you some positive takes (as a treat), try @mysky.social and its "constructiveness" slider.

An entirely reasonable take on the whole "is it infosec or alignment?" debate. Spoiler: both.

ngl, turning down the "politics" slider on my mysky.social feed has improved my BlueSky experience immensely. It's also something we repeatedly hear in user testing. Discuss.

You don't have to let someone else decide what you see. MySky is the first feed algorithm that you control. Open source, open science, and made just for you. Try it: bsky.app/profile/did:...

I made a little Jev-based language model! It uses beam search + Jev as a classifier to judge branches based on coherence and "success" (whatever that means). I've barely talked to it so I don't know how it'll behave or if it'll be interesting at to talk to at all, let's find out! @jevbot.bsky.social

I've been using CapCut to edit video for the first time, and it's fighting me. Very AI, lots of presets, but very little of the control I'm used to from After Effects, Final Cut, etc. There's a "motion blur" filter but I can't change the direction. It feels super dumbed down and I hate it.

This is the first piece of AI art that I thought was good, actually. It's stylish, it's funny, it made me feel things.

One of the things that is surprisingly good about MySky is that when I get a banger or a dud I can go to the "Why Am I Seeing This?" page and find out. It makes me think about my settings, my network, and the algorithm.

Nice. Cold start is a hard problem. For the moment MySky has settled on retrieving posts for the average embedding vector of all MySky users. As opposed to all BSky users. This finds interesting stuff without assuming you like either lefty politics or furries (no offense to either).

We're more than just a pretty feed. MySky is an API for the ATProto community to build production recommender systems. Here's how to query our search indices, candidate generators, and scoring models. What algorithm do you want to build? atproto.com/blog/mysky-f...

The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.

The building CHAI is in looks kinda like Starfleet Academy and I think that’s beautiful

Today I learned there are only two known polyhedra in which each face shares an edge with every other face. One of them being the timeless beauty of the tetrahedron and the other one being whatever the heck this is

I have never expressed a p(doom), and I think @randomwalker.bsky.social is basically right that we have little basis for quantitative estimates of AI-induced catastrophic risk. OTH, no one has presented a knock-down argument that *any* of the various AI disaster scenarios are impossible.

What's the general sentiment on the phrase "stochastic parrot" over here in the Atmosphere?

It's so over.

"they are just doing a lot of simple operations! 🤢" versus "they are just doing a lot of simple operations! 😯"

I'll note that the data shows that social media use stayed steady during this period (AI use isn't surveyed, but other studies show it has increased steadily in this age group over the time period).

There we go, another major LLM does some unintended hacking. This suggests that the problem is, in fact, hard to solve. www.reuters.com/business/gem...

AI-induced conflict is a catastrophic risk. It's distinct from, but related to epistemic risk, sociopolitcal risk, cooperative AI, concentration of power risk, etc. It's the AI safety risk I'm working on.

I'm so excited about the newly described Leopardus tilcayo #cats

Soon you will be able to prompt for what you want to see and MySky will instantly do an LLM-powered search across the entire AT universe to get you the best in that category. It's going to appear in your regular MySky settings as a new post source.

Writing code and doing related research tasks with Fable has caused me to move up my estimated date for recursive self-improvement (RSI), which is a more precisely defined term than the nebulous "AGI." Anyway, I think we'll see intelligent machines self-improving by late next year.

Try out this feed! It’s the result of a massive amount of research on how to build beneficial recommendations. It’s the first real workable implementation of a choose your algorithm system and it will be good for you and the broader ecosystem. Courtesy of the great @jonathanstray.com

This is very similar to the way we define "constructive" posts in mysky.social

An excellent discussion and reading list for how journalism needs to operate to be widely trusted. If you don’t like typical coverage, is your complaint addressed here? trustingnews.org/putting-the-...

What do you want your feed to do for you? We presented @mysky.social at The Commons SF on Tuesday night and everyone played with our feed settings. But many asked for higher level control: - "a balanced view of topic X" - moods, like "no anxiety-causing content" - a text prompt (this is coming!)