lurker, lurker@awful.systems

Borrowing Gary’s take on this since its the first one I found

TLDR: A lot of AI company stocks dropped last night, half a trillion dollars gone. Trump is considering having a government stake in OpenAI and other leading AI companies (aka thinly veiled bailout)

these might be actual end times

Good thing all those CEOs have Daddy Trump to run to while everyone else foots their bill

The State of Florida is also the next one in the long line of lawsuits against OpenAI

On Anthropic (and some other AI companies) and AI consciousness the final paragraph is the best part:

”Moreover, we should be skeptical when most of the noise on this topic is coming from the industry itself. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly dangled the possibility of AI consciousness in interviews. And his company’s research frequently makes bold claims about their models showing humanlike behavior, such as supposedly harboring “emotions.” Just remember that it’s easier for AI companies to string us along with wild Skynet doomsday scenarios instead of confronting the tech’s far mundane consequences currently playing out before our eyes.”

Their fun interactive website does exist and the probability of automated coding at the end of the year doesn’t even get to 50% (and its their p10, meaning 90% of simulations of this model beat it out)

This one requires some minor backstory

Previously, I shared this wildly racist AI generated meme posted by an AI doomer channel

In the replies, someone pointed out how some of this channel’s other thumbnails appear to be AI generated citing a specific video about the “12 endings of AI”

Today I got curious about it after not thinking about it for a while. What are the 12 endings of AI? Instead of watching a 36 minute video, I did my own research (aka one online search) and it appears that it refers to Max Tegmark (known EA) and a concept he spoke about in his book. Here’s the article I got this info for peer review: https://medium.com/@butsch_79/the-12-futures-of-ai-a42d67bd9a20

If anyone’s got 36 minutes to spare feel free to follow up

That’s great news actually. The point still stands that we very well know how to deal with climate change, so trying to make AI models fix it is dumb

This is also why I find people who claim they’re making AI to “solve climate change” to be insufferable morons. We have a solution to climate change. You and your data centres are actively making the problem worse

Porting this over: Hinton believes LLMs have gained consciousness

Bonus: This Emile Torres article on how Bernie Sanders and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have gotten mixed up with Yud and co.

Neil doesn’t seem to buy into rationalism though? He didn’t even really endorse Soares (or mention him at all) he just said that superhuman AI was dangerous. He has a video on how modern AI is overrated

Hinton now believes LLMs are conscious

real reason they picked 2027 is to balance urgency and hype generation with a bit of cushion for when the prediction doesn’t pan out.

Bingo. They probably hyped up Kokotajlo as a forecaster BECAUSE he had it earlier than the rest of them, so their prediction could have credence to it

Maybe because a lot of the press around it was about Daniel Kokotajlo as a forecaster, and at the time he had a 40% chance of AGI by the end of 2027 (according to them)? idk, still does feel a bit disingenuous

A bit more on the Anthropic cofounder who was there at the Pope’s speech choice snippet:

Olah even went as far as to say that Anthropic is operating “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” painting his employer as exactly the kind of entity that’s attempting to assume “monopolistic control” over tech, as Pope Leo warned in his encyclical.

I guess he’s trying to say Anthropic has a bunch of limitations and financial incentives as a company (which didn’t stop them from taking those Qatar donations)

So I was poking around the AI 2027 blog and discovered that they seem to be working on making another scenario, this time titled “AI 2030” they haven’t made any posts about it (that I can find anyways) but if its just an AI 2027 rewrite but with moved back timelines I’d imagine people will be less charitable with them.

EDIT: So upon further inspection, they have talked a little bit about how they’ve been focusing on researching and writing the scenario in their April 2026 timeline update. Since they started AI 2027 in 2024 and published it in 2025, it seems most likely that AI 2030 will be out in 2027. In other words, they’re basically setting themselves up to get dunked on (especially if its just a rehash but with moved back timelines)

Its the “expert in one field = expert in all fields” stuff that I hate. There’s still plenty of jobs and areas of expertise that require humans: medicine, psychology/therapy (AI has arguably made the need for human therapists way more important), physical labour like construction work, linguistics etc. Hell human authors are definitely keeping their jobs since so many people hate slop

The part about the AI generated story about ancient Israelis tugging at his heartstrings made me dig up the post where he proudly proclaims himself a zionist and creates an insane trolley problem: https://awful.systems/post/5437903

new Scott Aaronson blog post just dropped it’s mostly him freaking out about those solved Erdos problems and AI mathematicians replacing human mathematicians, with a little bit of AI short storywriting and the Pope’s encyclical sprinkled in

The Pope has not charged Catholics worldwide to burn down the data centres. Cool as that would be.

If we just push a littleee bit harder we can get there. Never give up!

This was from last year but I forgot about, but this article allegedly about a survey conducted by MIRI and Stanford University on a bunch of AI experts about timelines, which is definitely entirely AI generated since said survey straight up doesn’t exist (I didn’t find anything like it when I did some searches) and it quotes a person who doesn’t work for MIRI

the website title being “ai blogs ai” kinda gives it away

Aella asks what type of sexist she is based off some poll results