Very Sane AI Newsletter

An attempt to document important facts concerning AI Safety, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationalism and San Francisco Effective Altruism tldr definitely a millenarian death cult www.verysane.ai/p/ai-safety-...

Who deserves the most style points for how their LLM commits felonies? (it's openai) verysane.substack.com/p/felonybenc...

when your leadership is too off-putting and weird to hire & retain normie attorneys and PR reps

Did Anthropic ask for this? www.verysane.ai/p/did-anthro...

"sort of a drunk Sisyphus situation [...] Orthogonality Thesis [..] superintelligence with a randomly generated utility function [...] Yudkowsky [...] If the übermenschen align the AI, who aligns the übermenschen?" tldr AI doom is wrong www.verysane.ai/p/counting-a...

There's another one of these going out tomorrow morning and it might be a while after it publishes before it gets posted here so bear with me

"Luddism does not deserve to be rehabilitated. It was a medieval throwback, reactionary and primitive, a pre-Marxist labor convulsion closer in spirit to the Khmer Rouge’s fantasies of agrarian restoration than to the universalist solidarity of Eugene Debs." open.substack.com/pub/verysane...

"I hope that we can, at some point, have some reasonable regulations on AI, as we do concerning banks, wiretaps, and dangerous chemicals. I am somewhat pessimistic about legislation we have seen in the past, and legislation we are seeing now." www.verysane.ai/p/some-rough...

"Stochastic Parrots" is wrong

That LLMs understand natural language as well as they do should dramatically change our understanding of the problem of 'making AI do what we want it to do'. www.verysane.ai/p/alignment-...

it is probably not a good idea to put GPUs in space www.verysane.ai/p/should-we-...

My take on Searle's Chinese Room, which is terminally engineer brained in that my entire argument is "okay, how would you actually build it, though" www.verysane.ai/p/building-t...

An attempt to analyze recent legal filings about AI enabling user suicides, figure out what caused them (OpenAI being irresponsible, mostly), and figure out how to deal with this, and any similar problems in the future. www.verysane.ai/p/ai-and-sui...

There is some confusion about whether or not we understand LLMs. The answer is yes and no, but mostly no. It's a complicated enough question that it seemed like it needed an article. www.verysane.ai/p/do-we-unde...

Some Thoughts On The Platonic Representation Hypothesis, or, How We're Rediscovering Platonism By Doing Statistics or, How AI Training Is Actually Chaining Up Some Guy In A Cave, or, Bait for Philosophy Majors www.verysane.ai/p/some-thoug...

The most well-known statistic about AI water use is a lie. This makes it frustrating to talk about AI and the environment, and this is a long deep dive on that specific point. www.verysane.ai/p/the-bigges...

Pushed previously as a notes file, this is a short list of ideas which have, or are, setting the agenda for AI, presented entirely by quoting the relevant person. www.verysane.ai/p/ai-history...

Pushed previously as a notes file, this is a short list of ideas which have, or are, setting the agenda for AI, presented entirely by quoting the relevant person. www.verysane.ai/p/ai-history...

I couldn't find a high-level overview of what AI is and how we got where we are, so I wrote one. www.verysane.ai/p/what-is-ai