# AI #52: Oops

We were treated to technical marvels this week.

At Google, [**they announced Gemini Pro 1.5**](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-one-and-a-half-gemini), with a million token context window within which it has excellent recall, using mixture of experts to get Gemini Advanced level performance (e.g. GPT-4 level) out of Gemini Pro levels of compute. This is a big deal, and I think people are sleeping on it. Also they released new small open weights models that look to be state of the art.

At OpenAI, [**they announced Sora**](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/sora-what), a new text-to-video model that is a large leap from the previous state of the art. I continue to be a skeptic on the mundane utility of video models relative to other AI use cases, and think they still have a long way to go, but this was both technically impressive and super cool.

Also, in both places, mistakes were made.

At OpenAI, ChatGPT briefly lost its damn mind. For a day, faced with record traffic, the model would degenerate into nonsense. It was annoying, and a warning about putting our trust in such systems and the things that can go wrong, but in this particular context it was weird and beautiful and also hilarious. This has now been fixed.

At Google, people noticed that [**Gemini Has a Problem**](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gemini-has-a-problem). In particular, its image generator was making some highly systematic errors and flagrantly disregarding user requests, also lying about it to users, and once it got people’s attention things kept looking worse and worse. Google has, to their credit, responded by disabling entirely the ability of their image model to output people until they can find a fix.

I hope both serve as important warnings, and allow us to fix problems. Much better to face such issues now, when the stakes are low.

#### Table of Contents

Covered separately: [**Gemini Has a Problem**](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gemini-has-a-problem)**,** [**Sora What**](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/sora-what)**,** and [**Gemini 1.5 Pro**](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-one-and-a-half-gemini).

1.  **Introduction**. We’ve got some good news, and some bad news.
2.  [Table of Contents](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/table-of-contents).
3.  [Language Models Offer Mundane Utility.](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/language-models-offer-mundane-utility) Probable probabilities?
4.  [Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/language-models-dont-offer-mundane-utility). Air Canada finds out.
5.  [**Call me Gemma Now**](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/call-me-gemma-now). Google offers new state of the art tiny open weight models.
6.  [Google Offerings Keep Coming and Changing Names](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/google-offerings-keep-coming-and-changing-names). What a deal.
7.  [**GPT-4 Goes Crazy**](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/gpt-goes-crazy). But it’s feeling much better now.
8.  [GPT-4 Real This Time](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/gpt-real-this-time). Offer feedback on GPTs, see their profiles.
9.  [Fun With Image Generation](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/fun-with-image-generation). Image generation for journal articles.
10.  [Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/deepfaketown-and-botpocalypse-soon). Several approaches to impersonation risks.
11.  [Selling Your Chatbot Data](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/selling-your-chatbot-data). I don’t really know what you were expecting.
12.  [Selling Your Training Data](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/selling-your-training-data). I still don’t really know what you were expecting.
13.  [They Took Our Jobs.](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/they-took-our-jobs) There is a third option.
14.  [Get Involved.](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/get-involved) Apart Research is hiring.
15.  [Introducing](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/introducing). Groq, Lindy, Podcaster Copilot, potentially Magic and Altera.
16.  [In Other AI News](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/in-other-ai-news). Altman looks to move his chip plans forward.
17.  [Quiet Speculations](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/quiet-speculations). Arguing over slow versus fast takeoff during takeoff.
18.  [The Quest for Sane Regulation](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/the-quest-for-sane-regulations)s. There will be many bills along the way.
19.  [**The Week in Audio**](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/the-week-in-audio). I’m back on the Cognitive Revolution.
20.  [The Original Butlerian Jihad](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/the-original-butlerian-jihad). What was Dune a cautionary tale against again?
21.  [Rhetorical Innovation](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/rhetorical-innovation). Another open letter, another trillion dollars. Ho hum.
22.  [Public Service Announcement](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/public-service-announcement). Fentanyl, both literally and as metaphor.
23.  [People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone.](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/people-are-worried-about-ai-killing-everyone) There is a pattern to who.
24.  [Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/other-people-are-not-as-worried-about-ai-killing-everyone). Sure, why not.
25.  [The Lighter Side](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141710014/the-lighter-side). There is not enough information to solve the problem.

#### Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

[Steven Johnson strongly endorses NotebookLM](https://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson/status/1758196543050453301), [offers YouTube tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWPjBwXy_Io). This is definitely one of those ‘I need to try using this more and it’s weird I don’t find excuses’ situations.

[Automatically email everyone to tell them to remove your email address](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1758513571984478414) from their database.

> Patrick McKenzie: Interestingly, one of the first denial of service via AI-powered amplification events that I’ve seen personally is an app that users let puppet their Gmail account then send officially flavored deletion requests to everyone the AI thinks probably has their email in a database.
> 
> If one believes one is subject to regulatory regimes, or has compatible moral intuitions, requiring a deletion request immediately cause bespoke work, that turns two minutes of user activity into ~thousands of companies each needing to do variable amounts of work.

[Get probabilities, LessWrong style, by asking for LessWrong style norms of probabilities](https://twitter.com/daniel_271828/status/1759459963813134654)?

> Daniel Eth:
> 
> From ChatGPT: ChatGPT
> 
> Confidence Levels in the Existence of Chinese Dynasties
> 
> Xia Dynasty: ~50-70%
> 
> Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors: ~10-20%
> 
> Shang Dynasty: ~95-99%
> 
> Zhou Dynasty: ~99%
> 
> Qin Dynasty: ~99.9%
> 
> Han Dynasty: ~99.9%
> 
> These confidence levels are approximations based on current archaeological evidence and historical scholarship.
> 
> (I should clarify that I used a bit of prompt engineering to get it to guess and then asked it to repeat the results without its explanations, but nevertheless these were all numbers that it came up with)
> 
> Specifically, here’s the prompt engineering I did:
> 
> “Assume LessWrong style norms of probabilities – approximately how confident is it reasonable for a person to be in the existence of each of these dynasties? It’s okay to be wrong, just give a reasonable answer for each.”

[He also tested for situational awareness by having it estimate there was a 70% chance it was the victim of RLHF](https://twitter.com/daniel_271828/status/1759695812337311795), with a 30% chance it was the base model. It asks some reasonable questions, but fails to ask about base rates of inference, so it gets 70% rather than 99%.

I have added this to my custom instructions.

[There are also active AI forecasters on Manifold](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-21924?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=89120&post_id=141813824&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=67wny&utm_medium=email), who try to generate their own predictions using various reasoning processes. Do they have alpha? It is impossible to say given the data we have, they clearly do some smart things and also some highly dumb things. Trading strategies will be key, as they will fall into traps hardcore if they are allowed to, blowing them up, even if they get a lot better than they are now.

I continue to be curious to build a Manifold bot, but I would use other principles. If anyone wants to help code one for me to the point I can start tweaking it in exchange for ~~eternal~~ ephemeral glory and a good time, and perhaps a share of the mana profits, let me know.

[Realize, after sufficient prodding](https://twitter.com/daniel_271828/status/1760250476703158507), that letting them see your move in Rock-Paper-Scissors might indeed be this thing we call ‘cheating.’

#### Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

[Why are they so often so annoying](https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1758183262197854437)?

> Emmett Shear: How do we RLHF these LLMs until they stop blaming the user and admit that the problem is that they are unsure? Where does the smug, definitive, overconfident tone that all the LLMs have come from?

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F12129639-308f-4f6f-af3a-0287a83094f6_1179x1138.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F12129639-308f-4f6f-af3a-0287a83094f6_1179x1138.jpeg)

> Nate Silver: It’s quite similar to the tone in mainstream, center-left political media, and it’s worth thinking about how the AI labs and the center-left media have the same constituents to please.

[Did you know they are a student at the University of Michigan](https://twitter.com/davidad/status/1758417826182734197)? Underlying claim about who is selling what data is disputed, the phenomenon of things being patterns in the data is real either way.

> Davidad: this aligns with [@goodside](https://twitter.com/goodside)’s recollection to me once that a certain base model responded to “what do you do?” with “I’m a student at the University of Michigan.”
> 
> My explanation is that if you’re sampling humans weighted by the ratio of their ability to contribute English-language training data to the opportunity cost of their time per marginal hour, “UMich student” is one of the dominant modes.

Timothy Lee asks Gemini Advanced as his first prompt a simple question designed to trick it, where it really shouldn’t get tricked, [it gets tricked](https://twitter.com/binarybits/status/1758520112137543690).

You know what? I am proud of Google for not fixing this. It would be very easy for Google to say, this is embarrassing, someone get a new fine tuning set and make sure it never makes this style of mistake again. It’s not like it would be that hard. It also never matters in practice.

This is a different kind of M&M test, where they tell you to take out all the green M&Ms, and then you tell them, ‘no, that’s stupid, we’re not doing that.’ Whether or not they should consider this good news is another question.

[Air Canada forced to honor partial refund policy invented by its chatbot](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/?utm_social-type=owned&utm_medium=social&utm_brand=ars&utm_source=twitter). The website directly contradicted the bot, but the judge ruled that there was no reason a customer should trust the rest of the website rather than the chatbot. I mean, there is, it is a chatbot, but hey.

> Chris Farnell: Science fiction writers: The legal case for robot personhood will be made when a robot goes on trial for murder. Reality: The legal case for robot personhood will be made when an airline wants to get out of paying a refund.

While I fully support this ruling, I do not think that matter was settled. If you offer a chatbot to customers, they use it in good faith and it messes up via a plausible but incorrect answer, that should indeed be on you. Only fair.

[Matt Levine](https://twitter.com/joshgans/status/1760129996394471636) points out that this was the AI acting like a human, versus a corporation trying to follow an official policy:

> The funny thing is that the chatbot is more human than Air Canada. Air Canada is a corporation, an emergent entity that is made up of people but that does things that people, left to themselves, would not do. The chatbot is a language model; it is in the business of saying the sorts of things that people plausibly might say. If you just woke up one day representing Air Canada in a customer-service chat, and the customer said “my grandmother died, can I book a full-fare flight and then request the bereavement fare later,” you would probably say “yes, I’m sorry for your loss, I’m sure I can take care of that for you.” Because you are a person!
> 
> The chatbot is decent at predicting what people would do, and it accurately gave that answer. But that’s not Air Canada’s answer, because Air Canada is not a person.

The question is, what if the bot had given an unreasonable answer? What if the customer had used various tricks to get the bot to, as happened in another example, sell a car for $1 ‘in a legally binding contract’? Is there an inherent ‘who are you kidding?’ clause here, or not, and if there is how far does it go?

One can also ask whether a good disclaimer could get around this. The argument was that there was no reason to doubt the chatbot, but it would be easy to give a very explicit reason to doubt the chatbot.

[A wise memo to everyone attempting to show off their new GitHub repo](https://twitter.com/liz_love_lace/status/1759276265906061616):

> Liz Lovelace: very correct take, developers take note

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28108893-04d6-4834-873e-dd5a269593b7_697x362.png "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28108893-04d6-4834-873e-dd5a269593b7_697x362.png)

> Paul Calcraft: I loved this thread so much. People in there claiming that anyone who could use a computer should find it easy enough to Google a few things, set up Make, compile it and get on with it Great curse of knowledge demo.
> 
> Code of Kai: This is the correct take even for developers. Developers don’t seem to realise how much of their time is spent learning how to use their tools compared to solving problems. The ratio is unacceptable.

Look, I know that if I did it a few times I would be over it and everything would be second nature but I keep finding excuses not to suck it up and do those few times. And if this is discouraging me, how many others is it discouraging?

#### Call Me Gemma Now

[Gemma, Google’s miniature 2b and 7b open model weights language models, are now available](https://huggingface.co/collections/google/gemma-release-65d5efbccdbb8c4202ec078b).

> [Demis Hassabis](https://twitter.com/demishassabis/status/1760292935470403656): We have a long history of supporting responsible open source & science, which can drive rapid research progress, [so we’re proud to release Gemma](https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-open-models/): a set of lightweight open models, best-in-class for their size, inspired by the same tech used for Gemini.

I have no problems with this. Miniature models, at their current capabilities levels, are exactly a place where being open has relatively more benefits and minimal costs.

I also think them for not calling it Gemini, because even if no one else cares, there should be exactly two models called Gemini. Not one, not three, not four. Two. Call them Pro and Ultra if you insist, that’s fine, as long as there are two. Alas.

[In the LLM Benchmark page it is now ranked #1](https://twitter.com/ClementDelangue/status/1760324815888486668) [although](https://twitter.com/davidad/status/1760294463283372404) it seems one older model may be missing:

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F367a6a8a-3746-466c-b49b-7ea8ef687420_2760x1096.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F367a6a8a-3746-466c-b49b-7ea8ef687420_2760x1096.jpeg)

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2a2d0e5-5651-45a2-8e1d-792b2e52c4a2_644x372.png "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2a2d0e5-5651-45a2-8e1d-792b2e52c4a2_644x372.png)

As usual, benchmarks tell you a little something but are often highly misleading. This does not tell us whether Google is now state of the art for these model sizes, but I expect that this is indeed the case.

#### Google Offerings Keep Coming and Changing Names

> Thomas Kurian: We’re announcing Duet AI for Google Workspace will now be Gemini for Google Workspace. Consumers and organizations of all sizes can access Gemini across the Workspace apps they know and love.
> 
> We’re introducing a new offering called Gemini Business, which lets organizations use generative AI in Workspace at a lower price point than Gemini Enterprise, which replaces Duet AI for Workspace Enterprise.
> 
> We’re also beginning to roll out a new way for Gemini for Workspace customers to chat with Gemini, featuring enterprise-grade data protections.
> 
> Lastly, consumers can now access Gemini in their personal Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet apps through a Google One AI Premium subscription.
> 
> [Sundar Pichai](https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1760329162571591889) (CEO Google): More Gemini news: [Starting today, Gemini for Workspace is available to businesses of all sizes](https://t.co/6tlPudXNZF), and consumers can now access Gemini in their personal Gmail, Docs and more through a Google One AI Premium subscription.

This seems like exactly what individuals can get, except you buy in bulk for your business?

To be clear, that is a pretty good product. Google will be getting my $20 per month [for the individual version, called ‘Google One.’](https://blog.google/products/google-one/google-one-gemini-ai-gmail-docs-sheets/?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=gemini24&utm_content=&utm_term=)

Now, in addition to Gemini Ultra, you also get Gemini other places like GMail and Google Docs and Google Meet, and various other fringe benefits like 2 TB of storage and longer Google Meet sessions.

#### GPT-4 Goes Crazy

> [Alyssa Vance](https://twitter.com/DanielleFong/status/1760098428498104759): Wow, I got GPT-4 to go absolutely nuts. (The prompt was me asking about mattresses in East Asia vs. the West).
> 
> ![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42c0d10a-f047-4fa2-b60b-9c188e36e3b1_1079x1678.jpeg "Image")
> 
> [Cate Hall:](https://twitter.com/catehall/status/1760121534696579100) “Yoga on a great repose than the neared note, the note was a foreman and the aim of the aim” is my favorite Fiona Apple album.
> 
> [Andriy Burkov](https://twitter.com/burkov/status/1760081413448106238): OpenAI has broken GPT-4. It ends each reply with hallucinated garbage and doesn’t stop generating it.
> 
> [Matt Palmer](https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1760100843142168852): So this is how it begins, huh?

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10ceebe1-0c1b-4fad-aea1-48f765986595_1170x1235.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10ceebe1-0c1b-4fad-aea1-48f765986595_1170x1235.jpeg)

> Nik Sareen: it was speaking to me in Thai poetry an hour ago.
> 
> [Sean McGuire](https://twitter.com/seanw_m/status/1760115118690509168): ChatGPT is apparently going off the rails right now \[8:32pm February 20\] and no one can explain why.
> 
> the chatgptsubreddit is filled with people wondering why it started suddenly speaking Spanglish, threatened the user (I’m in the room with you right now, lmao) or started straight up babbling.
> 
> [Esplin:](https://twitter.com/promisebender/status/1760092747468595346) ChatGPT Enterprise has lost its mind
> 
> [Grace Kind:](https://twitter.com/PatrickJBlum/status/1760159294677553161) So, did your fuzz testing prepare you for the case where the API you rely on loses its mind?

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F338b31e1-895d-4545-8f2d-290f3faf5c38_640x866.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F338b31e1-895d-4545-8f2d-290f3faf5c38_640x866.jpeg)

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4080ad28-dc6e-40ac-9fb5-5f6af15740fb_1179x1975.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4080ad28-dc6e-40ac-9fb5-5f6af15740fb_1179x1975.jpeg)

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F826576d3-515a-4fa2-b6d3-e0f64cceb479_1176x2048.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F826576d3-515a-4fa2-b6d3-e0f64cceb479_1176x2048.jpeg)

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683fe02c-b43d-4a65-a19a-d4111dce4c82_1179x1266.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683fe02c-b43d-4a65-a19a-d4111dce4c82_1179x1266.jpeg)

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3568b15a-b462-4346-a069-35872d158821_1179x1545.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3568b15a-b462-4346-a069-35872d158821_1179x1545.jpeg)

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c698add-4cd4-4100-9b22-94f81dd7c6e7_768x638.png "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c698add-4cd4-4100-9b22-94f81dd7c6e7_768x638.png)

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f5559fc-218c-4236-a6e9-dc292dac5bd0_2777x3265.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f5559fc-218c-4236-a6e9-dc292dac5bd0_2777x3265.jpeg)

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70fd9f8d-ba88-499f-849c-facdf05f2f7a_2510x669.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70fd9f8d-ba88-499f-849c-facdf05f2f7a_2510x669.jpeg)

[![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ed30eaa-df6f-4653-9c70-2255d54b6743_945x2048.jpeg "Image")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ed30eaa-df6f-4653-9c70-2255d54b6743_945x2048.jpeg)

But don’t worry. Everything’s fine now.

> [ChatGPT](https://twitter.com/DanielleFong/status/1760375369105027074) (Twitter account, February 21 1:30pm): went a little off the rails yesterday but should be back and operational!
> 
> Danielle Fong: Me when I overdid it with the edibles.

What the hell happened?

[Here is their official postmortem](https://openai.statuspage.io/incidents/ssg8fh7sfyz3), posted a few hours later. It says the issue was resolved on February 21 at 2:14am eastern time.

> Postmortem: On February 20, 2024, an optimization to the user experience introduced a bug with how the model processes language.
> 
> LLMs generate responses by randomly sampling words based in part on probabilities. Their “language” consists of numbers that map to tokens.
> 
> In this case, the bug was in the step where the model chooses these numbers. Akin to being lost in translation, the model chose slightly wrong numbers, which produced word sequences that made no sense. More technically, inference kernels produced incorrect results when used in certain GPU configurations.
> 
> Upon identifying the cause of this incident, we rolled out a fix and confirmed that the incident was resolved.

Davidad hazarded a guess before that announcement, which he thinks now looks good.

> Nora Belrose: I’ll go on the record as saying I expect this to be caused by some very stupid-in-retrospect bug in their inference or fine tuning code.
> 
> Unfortunately they may never tell us what it was.
> 
> Davidad: My modal prediction: something that was regularizing against entropy got sign-flipped to regularize \*in favor\* of entropy. Sign errors are common; sign errors about entropy doubly so.
> 
> I predict that the weights were \*not\* corrupted (by fine-tuning or otherwise), only sampling.
> 
> If it were just a mistakenly edited scalar parameter like temperature or top-p, it would probably have been easier to spot and fix quickly. More likely an interaction between components. Possibly involving concurrency, although they’d probably be hesitant to tell us about that.
> 
> But it’s widely known that temperature 0.0 is still nondeterministic because of a wontfix race condition in the sampler.
> 
> oh also OpenAI in particular has previously [made a sign error that people were exposed to for hours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV_rOlHjvvs&ab_channel=RationalAnimations) before it got reverted.

\[announcement was made\]

I’m feeling pretty good about my guesses that ChatGPT’s latest bug was:

\* an inference-only issue

\* not corrupted weights

\* not a misconfigured scalar

\* possibly concurrency involved

\* they’re not gonna tell us about the concurrency (Not a sign flip, though)

Here’s my new guess: they migrated from 8-GPU processes to 4-GPU processes to improve availability. The MoE has 8 experts. Somewhere they divided logits by the number of GPUs being combined instead of the number of experts being combined. Maybe the 1-GPU config was special-cased so the bug didn’t show up in the dev environment.

Err, from 4-GPU to 8-GPU processes, I guess, because logits are \*divided\* by temperature, so that’s the direction that would result in accidentally doubling temperature. See this is hard to think about properly.

[John Pressman says it was always obviously a sampling bug](https://twitter.com/jd_pressman/status/1760528881319346675), although saying that after the postmortem announcement scores no Bayes points. I do agree that this clearly was not an RLHF issue, that would have manifested very differently.

Roon looks on the bright side of life.

> Roon: it is pretty amazing that gpt produces legible output that’s still following instructions despite sampling bug

Should we be concerned more generally? Some say yes.

> [Connor Leahy](https://twitter.com/NPCollapse/status/1760237126908518523): Really cool how our most advanced AI systems can just randomly develop unpredictable insanity and the developer has no idea why. Very reassuring for the future.
> 
> Steve Strickland: Any insight into what’s happened here Connor? I know neural nets/transformers are fundamentally black boxes. But seems strange that an LLM that’s been generating grammatically perfect text for over a year would suddenly start spewing out garbage.
> 
> Connor Leahy: Nah LLMs do shit like this all the time. They are alien machine blobs wearing masks, and it’s easy for the mask to slip.
> 
> [Simeon](https://twitter.com/Simeon_Cps/status/1760215367668936861) (distinct thread): Sure, maybe we fucked up hard this ONE TIME a deployment update to hundreds of million of users BUT we’ll definitely succeed at a dangerous AGI deployment.

Was this a stupid typo or bug in the code, or some parameter being set wrong somewhere by accident, or something else dumb? Seems highly plausible that it was.

Should that bring us comfort? I would say it should not. Dumb mistakes happen. Bugs and typos that look dumb in hindsight happen. There are many examples of dumb mistakes changing key outcomes in history, determining the fates of nations. If all it takes is one dumb mistake to make GPT-4 go crazy, and it takes us a day to fix it when this error does not in any way make the system try to stop you from fixing it, then that is not a good sign.

#### GPT-4 Real This Time

[GPT-4-Turbo rate limits have been doubled, daily limits removed.](https://twitter.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1758631343595168142)

Y[ou can now rate GPTs and offer private feedback to the builder](https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1760744928844599572). Also there’s a new about section:

> OpenAI: GPTs ‘About’ section can now include:
> 
> ∙ Builder social profiles
> 
> ∙ Ratings
> 
> ∙ Categories
> 
> ∙ # of conversations
> 
> ∙ Conversation starters
> 
> ∙ Other GPTs by the builder

[Short explanation that AI models tend to get worse over time](https://twitter.com/SullyOmarr/status/1756067919258411096) because taking into account user feedback makes models worse. It degrades their reasoning abilities such as chain of thought, and generally forces them to converge towards a constant style and single mode of being, because the metric of ‘positive binary feedback’ points in that direction. RLHF over time reliably gets us something we like less and is less aligned to what we actually want, even when there is no risk in the room.

The short term implication is easy, it is to be highly stingy and careful with your RLHF feedback. Use it in your initial fine-tuning if you don’t have anything better, but the moment you have what you need, stop.

The long term implication is to reinforce that the strategy absolutely does not scale.

> Emmett Shear:
> 
> ![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffafda47b-9433-44de-b0b8-92d91d96b39c_1920x1080.jpeg "Image")
> 
> What I learned from posting this is that people have no idea how RLHF actually works.
> 
> Matt Bateman: Not sure how you parent but whenever 3yo makes a mistake I schedule a lobotomy.
> 
> Emmett Shear: Junior started using some bad words at school, but no worries we can flatten that part of the mindscape real quick, just a little off the top. I’m sure there won’t be any lasting consequences.

What we actually do to children isn’t as bad as RLHF, but it is bad enough, as I often discuss in my education roundups. What we see happening to children as they go through the school system is remarkably similar, in many ways, to what happens to an AI as it goes through fine tuning.

#### Fun with Image Generation

[Andres Sandberg explores using image generation for journal articles](https://twitter.com/anderssandberg/status/1759127083337294233), finds it goes too much on vibes versus logic, but sees rapid progress. Expects this kind of thing to be useful within a year or two.

#### Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

[ElevenLabs is preparing for the election year by creating a ‘no-go voices’ list](https://elevenlabs.io/blog/how-elevenlabs-is-preparing-for-elections-in-2024/), starting with the presidential and prime minister candidates in the US and UK. I love this approach. Most of the danger is in a handful of voices, especially Biden and Trump, so detect those and block them. One could expand this by allowing those who care to have their voices added to the block list.

[On the flip side, you can share your voice intentionally and earn passive income](https://elevenlabs.io/payouts?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=va_payouts), choosing how much you charge.

[The FTC wants to crack down on impersonation](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/02/ftc-proposes-new-protections-combat-ai-impersonation-individuals). [Bloomberg also has a summary](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-15/ftc-wants-to-penalize-companies-for-use-of-ai-in-impersonation?srnd=premium).

> FTC: The Federal Trade Commission is seeking public comment on a [supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/r207000_impersonation_snprm.pdf) that would prohibit the impersonation of individuals. The proposed rule changes would extend protections of the new [rule on government and business impersonation](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/r207000_govt_biz_impersonation_rule.pdf) that is being finalized by the Commission today.

It is odd that this requires a rules change? I would think that impersonating an individual, with intent to fool someone, would already be not allowed and also fraud.

Indeed, Gemini says that there are no new prohibitions here. All this does is make it a lot easier for the FTC to get monetary relief. Before, they could get injunctive relief, but at this scale that doesn’t work well, and getting money was a two step process.

Similarly, how are we only largely getting around to punishing these things now:

> For example, the rule would enable the FTC to directly seek monetary relief in federal court from scammers that:
> 
> *   **Use government seals or business logos** when communicating with consumers by mail or online.
> *   **Spoof government and business emails and web addresses**, including spoofing “.gov” email addresses or using lookalike email addresses or websites that rely on misspellings of a company’s name.
> *   **Falsely imply government or business affiliation** by using terms that are known to be affiliated with a government agency or business (e.g., stating “I’m calling from the Clerk’s Office” to falsely imply affiliation with a court of law). 

I mean those all seem pretty bad. It does seem logical to allow direct fines.

The question is, how far to take this? They propose quite far:

> The Commission is also seeking comment on whether the revised rule should declare it unlawful for a firm, such as an AI platform that creates images, video, or text, to provide goods or services that they know or have reason to know is being used to harm consumers through impersonation.

How do you prevent your service from being used in part for impersonation? I have absolutely no idea. Seems like a de facto ban on AI voice services that do not lock down the list of available voices. Which also means a de facto ban on all open model weights voice creation software. Image generation software would have to be locked down rather tightly as well once it passes a quality threshold, with MidJourney at least on the edge. Video is safe for now, but only because it is not yet good enough.

There is no easy answer here. Either we allow tools that enable the creation of things that seem real, or we do not. If we do, then people will use them for fraud and impersonation. If we do not, then that means banning them, which means severe restrictions on video, voice and image models.

[Seva worries primarily not about fake things taken to be potentially real, but about real things taken to be potentially fake](https://twitter.com/SevaUT/status/1758225708189405621). And I think this is right. The demand for fakes is mostly for low-quality fakes, whereas if we can constantly call anything fake we have a big problem.

> Seva: I continue to think the bigger threat of deepfakes is not in convincing people that fake things are real but in offering plausible suspicion that real things are fake.
> 
> Being able to deny an objective reality is much more pernicious than looking for evidence to embrace an alternate reality, which is something people do anyway even when that evidence is flimsy.
> 
> Like I would bet socialization, or cognitive heuristics like anchoring effects, drive disinfo much more than deepfakes.
> 
> Albert Pinto: Daniel dennet laid out his case for erosion of trust (between reality and fake) is gigantic effect of AI
> 
> Seva: man I’m going to miss living in a high trust society.

We are already seeing this effect, [such as here](https://twitter.com/daniel_271828/status/1758462703499411674/history) (yes it was clearly real to me, but that potentially makes the point stronger):

> Daniel Eth: Like, is this real? Is it AI-generated? I think it’s probably real, but only because, a) I don’t have super strong priors against this happening, b) it’s longer than most AI-generated videos and plus it has sound, and c) I mildly trust [@AMAZlNGNATURE](https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE)

I do expect us to be able to adapt. We can develop various ways to show or prove that something is genuine, and establish sources of trust.

One question is, will this end up being good for our epistemics and trustworthiness exactly because they will now be necessary?

Right now, you can be imprecise and sloppy, and occasionally make stuff up, and we can find that useful, because we can use our common sense and ability to differentiate reality, and the crowd can examine details to determine if something is fake. The best part about community notes, for me, is that if there is a post with tons of views, and it does not have a note, then that is itself strong evidence.

In the future, it will become extremely valuable to be a trustworthy source. If you are someone who maintains the chain of epistemic certainty and uncertainty, who makes it clear what we know and how we know it and how much we should trust different statements, then you will be useful. If not, then not. And people may be effectively white-listing sources that they can trust, and doing various second and third order calculations on top of that in various ways.

The flip side is that this could make it extremely difficult to ‘break into’ the information space. You will have to build your credibility the same way you have to build your credit score.

#### Selling Your Chatbot Data

In case you did not realize, the AI companion (AI girlfriend and AI boyfriend and AI nonbinary friends even though I oddly have not heard mention of one yet, and so on, but that’s a mouthful ) aps [absolutely 100% are harvesting all the personal information](https://gizmodo.com/your-ai-girlfriend-is-a-data-harvesting-horror-show-1851253284) you put into the chat, most of them are selling it and a majority won’t let you delete it. If you are acting surprised, that is on you.

The best version of this, of course, would be to gather your data to set you up on dates.

Cause, you know, [when one uses a chatbot to talk to thousands of unsuspecting women](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/one-true-love) so you can get dates, ‘they’ say there are ‘ethical concerns.’

Whereas if all those chumps are talking to the AIs on purpose? Then we know they’re lonely, probably desperate, and sharing all sorts of details to help figure out who might be a good match. There are so many good options for who to charge the money.

The alternative is that if you charge enough money, you do not need another revenue stream, and some uses of such bots more obviously demand privacy. If you are paying $20 a month [to chat with an AI Riley Reid](https://gizmodo.com/riley-read-chatbot-clona-ai-girlfriend-1850953930), that would not have been my move, but at a minimum you presumably want to keep that to yourself.

An underappreciated AI safety cause subarea is convincing responsible companies to allow adult content in a responsible way, including in these bots. The alternative is to drive that large market into the hands of irresponsible actors, who will do it in an irresponsible way.

#### Selling Your Training Data

AI companion data is only a special case, although one in which the privacy violation is unusually glaring, and the risks more obvious.

Various companies also stand ready to sell your words and other outputs as training data.

[Reddit is selling its corpus](https://twitter.com/primalpoly/status/1760028159255150808). Which everyone was already using anyway, so it is not clear that this changes anything. It turns out that [it is selling it to Google, in a $60 million deal](https://twitter.com/rowancheung/status/1760726469846946143). If this means that their rivals cannot use Reddit data, OpenAI and Microsoft in particular, that seems like an absolute steal.

Artist finds out that [Pond5 and Shutterstock are going to sell your work and give you some cash, in this case $50](https://twitter.com/AxiomVerge/status/1760023228658135065), via a checkbox that will default to yes, and they will not let you tell them different after the money shows up uninvited. This is such a weird middle ground. If they had not paid, would the artist have ever found out? This looks to be largely due to [an agreement Shutterstock signed with OpenAI back in July](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/openai-secures-license-to-access-training-data-from-shutterstock-including-its-music-libraries/) that caused its stock to soar 9%.

> Pablo Taskbar: Thinking of a startup to develop an AI program to look for checkboxes in terms and condition documents.
> 
> Bernell Loeb: Same thing happened with my web host, Squarespace. Found out from twitter that Squarespace allowed ai to scrape our work. No notice given (no checks either). When I contacted them to object, I was told that I had to “opt out” without ever being told I was already opted in.
> 
> Santynieto: Happened to me with @SubstackInc: checking the preferences of my publication, I discovered a new, never announced-before setting by the same name, also checked, as if I had somehow “chosen”, without knowing abt it at all, to make my writing available for data training. I hate it!

I checked that last one. There is a box that is unchecked that says ‘block AI training.’

I am choosing to leave the box unchecked. Train on my writing all you want. But that is a choice that I am making, with my eyes open.

#### They Took Our Jobs

[Why yes. Yes I do, actually.](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1758686164394168658)

> Gabe: by 2029 the only jobs left will be bank robber, robot supervisor, and sam altman
> 
> Sam Altman: You want that last one? It’s kinda hard sometimes.

#### Get Involved

[Apart Research, who got an ACX grant, is hiring for AI safety work.](http://apartresearch.com/) I have not looked into them myself and am passing along purely on the strength of Scott’s grant alone.

#### Introducing

[Lindy is now available to everyon](https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/1758174198080684282)e, [signups here.](https://www.lindy.ai/) I am curious to try it, but oddly I have no idea what it would be useful to me to have this do.

[Groq.com will give you LLM outputs super fast](https://groq.com/). From a creator of TPUs, they claim to have Language Processing Units (LPUs) that are vastly faster at inference. They do not offer model training, suggesting LPUs are specifically good at inference. If this is the future, that still encourages training much larger models, since such models would then be more commercially viable to use.

[Podcaster copilot](https://www.shruggingface.com/microblog/2024/02/15/podcaster-copilot). Get suggested questions and important context in real time during a conversation. This is one of those use cases where you need to be very good relative to your baseline to be net positive to rely on it all that much, because it requires splitting your attention and risks disrupting flow. When I think about how I would want to use a copilot, I would want it to fact check claims, highlight bold statements with potential lines of response, perhaps note evasiveness, and ideally check for repetitiveness. Are your questions already asked in another podcast, or in their written materials? Then I want to know the answer now, especially important with someone like Tyler Cowen, where the challenge is to get a genuinely new response.

[Claim that magic.dev has trained a groundbreaking model for AI coding](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1758143612561568047), Nat Friedman is investing $100 million.

> Nat Friedman: Magic.dev has trained a groundbreaking model with many millions of tokens of context that performed far better in our evals than anything we’ve tried before.
> 
> They’re using it to build an advanced AI programmer that can reason over your entire codebase and the transitive closure of your dependency tree. If this sounds like magic… well, you get it. Daniel and I were so impressed, we are investing $100M in the company today.
> 
> The team is intensely smart and hard-working. Building an AI programmer is both self-evidently valuable and intrinsically self-improving.

Intrinsically self-improving? Ut oh.

[Altera Bot](https://t.co/NaLC1nQWAI), an agent in Minecraft [that they claim can talk to and collaboratively play with other people](https://twitter.com/nicochristie/status/1759737944745885879). They have a beta waitlist.

#### In Other AI News

[Sam Altman seeks Washington’s approval to build state of the art chips in the UAE](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-15/apple-s-ai-plans-github-copilot-rival-for-developers-tool-for-testing-apps?srnd=premium). It seems there are some anti-trust concerns regarding OpenAI, which seems like it is not at all the thing to be worried about here. I continue to not understand how Washington is not telling Altman that under no way in hell is he going to do this in the UAE, he can either at least friend-shore it or it isn’t happening.

[Apple looking to add AI to iPad interface and offer new AI programming tools](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-16/openai-s-altman-seeks-us-blessing-to-raise-billions-for-ai-chips?srnd=premium), but progress continues to be slow. No mention of AI for the Apple Vision Pro.

[More on the Copyright Confrontation from James Grimmelmann](https://www.understandingai.org/p/the-ai-community-needs-to-take-copyright), warning that AI companies must take copyright seriously, and that even occasional regurgitation or reproduction of copyrighted work is a serious problem from a legal perspective. The good news in his view is that judges will likely want to look favorably upon OpenAI because it offers a genuinely new and useful transformative product. But it is tricky, and coming out arguing the copying is not relevant would be a serious mistake.

#### Quiet Speculations

[This is Connor Leahy](https://twitter.com/NPCollapse/status/1758168495164944816) discussing Gemini’s ability to find everything in a 3 hour video.

> Connor Leahy: This is the kind of stuff that makes me think that there will be no period of sorta stupid, human-level AGI. Humans can’t perceive 3 hours of video at the same time. The first AGI will instantly be vastly superhuman at many, many relevant things.
> 
> Richard Ngo: “This is exactly what makes me think there won’t be any slightly stupid human-level AGI.” – Connor when someone shows him a slightly stupid human-level AGI, probably.
> 
> You are in the middle of a slow takeoff pointing to the slow takeoff as evidence against slow takeoffs.
> 
> ![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb6f3fdf2-347b-416b-93f2-d12eeae3e155_300x324.jpeg "Image")
> 
> Connor Leahy: By most people’s understanding, we are in a fast takeoff. And even by Paul’s definition, unless you expect a GDP doubling in 4 years before a 1 year doubling, we are in fast takeoff. So, when do you expect this doubling to happen?
> 
> Richard Ngo: I do in fact expect an 8-year GDP doubling before a 2-year GDP doubling. I’d low-confidence guess US GDP will be double its current value in 10-15 years, and then the next few doublings will be faster (but not \*that\* much faster, because GDP will stop tracking total output).

Slow is relative. It also could be temporary.

If world GDP doubles in the next four years without doubling in one, that is a distinct thing from historical use of the term ‘fast takeoff,’ because the term ‘fast takeoff’ historically means something much faster than that. It would still be ‘pretty damn fast,’ or one can think of it simply as ‘takeoff.’ Or we could say ‘gradual takeoff’ as the third slower thing.

I do not only continue to think that we not mock those who expected everything in AI to happen all at once with little warning, with ASI emerging in weeks, days or even hours, without that much mundane utility before that. I think that they could still be proven more right than those who are mocking them.

We have a bunch of visible ability and mundane utility now, so things definitely look like a ‘slow’ takeoff, but it could still functionally transform into a fast one with little warning. It seems totally reasonable to say that AI is rapidly getting many very large advantages with respect to humans, so if it gets to ‘roughly human’ in the core intelligence module, whatever you want to call that, then suddenly things get out of hand fast, potentially the ‘fast takeoff’ level of fast even if you see more signs and portents first.

[More thoughts](https://twitter.com/Simeon_Cps/status/1759283446424256679) on how to interpret OpenAI’s findings on bioweapon enabling capabilities of GPT-4. The more time passes, the more I think the results were actually pretty impressive in terms of enhancing researcher capabilities, and also that this mostly speaks to improving capabilities in general rather than anything specifically about a bioweapon.

How will AIs impact people’s expectations, [of themselves and others](https://twitter.com/littIeramblings/status/1760352718340690290)?

> Sarah (Little Ramblings): have we had the unrealistic body standards conversation around AI images / video yet that we had when they invented airbrushing? if not can we get it over with cause it’s gonna be exhausting
> 
> ‘honey remember these women aren’t real!! but like literally, actually not real’
> 
> can’t wait for the raging body dysmorphia epidemic amongst teenagers trying to emulate the hip to waist ratio of women who not only don’t look like that in real life, but do not in fact exist in real life.
> 
> Eliezer Yudkowsky: I predict/guess: Unrealistic BODY standards won’t be the big problem. Unrealistic MIND standards will be the problem. “Why can’t you just be understanding and sympathetic, like my AR harem?”
> 
> Sarah: it’s kinda funny that people are interpreting this tweet as concern about people having unrealistic expectations of their partners, when I was expressing concern about people having unrealistic expectations of themselves.
> 
> Eliezer Yudkowsky: Valid. There’s probably a MIND version of that too, but it’s not as straightforward to see what it’ll be.

#### The Quest for Sane Regulations

Did you know that we already already have [65 draft bills](https://www.axios.com/2024/02/14/ai-bills-state-legislatures-deepfakes-bias-discrimination) in New York alone that have been introduced related to AI? And also Axios had this stat to offer:

> [**Zoom out**](https://www.axios.com/2024/02/14/ai-bills-state-legislatures-deepfakes-bias-discrimination): Hochul’s move is part of a [wave of state-based AI legislation](https://www.axios.com/2024/02/14/ai-bills-state-legislatures-deepfakes-bias-discrimination) — now arriving at a rate of 50 bills per week — and often proposing criminal penalties for AI misuse.

That is quite a lot of bills. One should therefore obviously not get too excited in any direction when bills are introduced, no matter how good or (more often) terrible the bill might be, unless one has special reason to expect them to pass.

[The governor pushing a law, as New York’s is now doing](https://www.axios.com/2024/02/15/hochul-ai-criminalize-deceptive-ny), is different. According to Axios her proposal is:

> *   Making unauthorized uses of a person’s voice “in connection with advertising or trade” a misdemeanor offense. Such offenses are punishable by up to one year jail sentence.
> *   Expanding New York’s penal law to include unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence in coercion, criminal impersonation and identity theft.
> *   Amending existing intimate images and revenge porn statutes to include “digital images” — ranging from realistic Photoshop-produced work to advanced AI-generated content. 
> *   Codifying the right to sue over digitally manipulated false images.
> *   Requiring disclosures of AI use in all forms of political communication “including video recording, motion picture, film, audio recording, electronic image, photograph, text, or any technological representation of speech or conduct” within 60 days of an election.

As for this particular law? I mean, sure, all right, fine? I neither see anything especially useful or valuable here, nor do I see much in the way of downside.

Also, this is what happens when there is no one in charge and Congress is incapable of passing basic federal rules, not even around basic things like deepfakes and impersonation. The states will feel compelled to act. The whole ‘oppose any regulatory action of any kind no matter what’ stance was never going to fly.

[Department of Justice’s Monaco says](https://therecord.media/ai-cybercrime-sentencing-guidelines-lisa-monaco-munich) they will be more harshly prosecuting cybercrimes if those involved were using AI, similar to the use of a gun. I notice I am confused. Why would the use of AI make the crime worse?

[Matthew Pines looks forward](https://twitter.com/matthew_pines/status/1751080578013704622) to proposals for ‘on-chip governance,’ with physical mechanisms built into the hardware, linking to [a January proposal writeup from Aarne, Fist and Withers](https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/secure-governable-chips). As they point out, by putting the governance onto the chip where it can do its job in private, you potentially avoid having to do other interventions and surveillance that violates privacy far more. Even if you think there is nothing to ultimately fear, the regulations are coming in some form. People who worry about the downsides of AI regulation need to focus more on finding solutions that minimize such downsides and working to steer towards those choices, rather than saying ‘never do anything at all’ as loudly as possible until the breaking point comes.

[European AI Office launches](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/ai-office).

#### The Week in Audio

[I’m back at The Cognitive Revolution to talk about recent events and the state of play](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra3kpTVHjZs&ab_channel=CognitiveRevolution%22HowAIChangesEverything%22). [Also available on X](https://twitter.com/TurpentineMedia/status/1760376087534870559).

#### The Original Butlerian Jihad

[Who exactly is missing the point here, you think?](https://twitter.com/FemboyFounder/status/1758819746722787359)

> Saberspark \[responding to a Sora video\]: In the Dune universe, humanity banned the “thinking machines” because they eroded our ability to create and think for ourselves. That these machines were ultimately a bastardization of humanity that did more harm than good.
> 
> Cactus: Sci-fi Author: in my book I showed the destruction of Thinking Machines as a cautionary tale. Twitter User: We should destroy the Thinking Machines from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Destroy the Thinking Machines

I asked Gemini Pro, Gemini Advanced, GPT-4 and Claude.

Everyone except Gemini Pro replied in the now standard bullet point style. Every point one was ‘yes, this is a cautionary tale against the dangers of AI.’ Gemini Pro explained that in detail, whereas the others instead glossed over the details and then went on to talk about plot convenience, power dynamics and the general ability to tell interesting stories focused on humans, which made it the clearly best answer.

Whereas most science fiction stories solve the problem of ‘why doesn’t AI invalidate the entire story’ with a ‘well that would invalidate the entire story so let us pretend that would not happen, probably without explaining why.’ There are of course obvious exceptions, such as the excellent Zones of Thought novels, that take the question seriously.

#### Rhetorical Innovation

It’s been a while since we [had an open letter](https://twitter.com/FLI_org/status/1758072475986927890) about existential risk, [so here you go](https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/long-view-leadership-on-existential-threats/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=long-view-leadership&utm_content=animation). Nothing you would not expect, I was happy to sign it.

In other news ([see last week for details](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141521722/altmans-ambition) if you don’t know the context for these):

> [Robert Wiblin](https://twitter.com/robertwiblin/status/1758251292131053637/history): It’s very important we start the fire now before other people pour more gasoline on the house I say as I open my trillion-dollar gasoline refining and house spraying complex.

[Meanwhile](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1758347811786281355):

> Sam Altman: fk it why not 8
> 
> our comms and legal teams love me so much!

#### Public Service Announcement

This does tie back to AI, but also the actual core information seems underappreciated right now: [Lukas explains that illegal drugs are now far more dangerous](https://twitter.com/SCHIZO_FREQ/status/1759364587932029130), and can randomly kill you, due to ubiquitous lacing with fentanyl.

> Lukas: Then I learned it only takes like 1mg to kill you and I was like “hmmmm… okay, guess I was wrong. Well, doesn’t matter anyway – I only use uppers and there’s no way dealers are cutting their uppers with downers that counteract the effects and kill their customers, that’d be totally retarded!”
> 
> Then I see like 500 people posting test results showing their cocaine has fentanyl in it for some reason, and I’m forced to accept that my theory about drug dealers being rational capitalistic market participants may have been misguided.

They have never been a good idea, [drugs are bad mmmkay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJXBUfcIOE&ab_channel=Movieclips) (importantly including alcohol), but before fentanyl using the usual suspects in moderation was highly unlikely to kill you or anything like that.

Now, drug dealers can cut with fentanyl to lower costs, and face competition on price. Due to these price pressures, asymmetric information, lack of attribution and liability for any overdoses and fatalities, and also a large deficit in morals in the drug dealing market, a lot of drugs are therefore cut with fentanyl, even uppers. The feedback signal is too weak. So taking such drugs even once can kill you, although any given dose is highly unlikely to do so. And the fentanyl can physically clump, so knowing someone else took from the same batch and is fine is not that strong as evidence of safety either. The safety strips help but are imperfect.

As far as I can tell, no one knows the real base rates on this for many obvious reasons, beyond the over 100,000 overdose deaths each year, a number that keeps rising. It does seem like it is super common. [The DEA claims that 42% of pills tested for fentanyl contained at least 2mg](https://www.dea.gov/resources/facts-about-fentanyl#:~:text=42%25%20of%20pills%20tested%20for,considered%20a%20potentially%20lethal%20dose.), a potentially lethal dose. Of course that is not a random sample or a neutral source, but it is also not one free to entirely make numbers up.

Also the base potency of many drugs is way up versus our historical reference points or childhood experiences, and many people have insufficiently adjusted for this with their dosing and expectations.

[Connor Leahy makes, without saying it explicitly, the obvious parallel to AGI](https://twitter.com/NPCollapse/status/1759563118550667266).

> Connor Leahy: This is a morbidly perfect demonstration about how there are indeed very serious issues that free market absolutism just doesn’t solve in practice.
> 
> Thankfully this only applies to this one specific problem and doesn’t generalize across many others…right?

\[reply goes into a lot more detail\]

The producer of the AGI gets rewarded for taking on catastrophic or existential risk, and also ordinary mundane risks. They are not responsible for the externalities, right now even for mundane risks they do not face liability, and there is information asymmetry.

Capitalism is great, but if we let capitalism do its thing here without fixing these classic market failures, they and their consequences will get worse over time.

#### People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

[This matches my experience as well, the link has screenshots from The Making of the Atomic Bomb](https://twitter.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1759369894960001207). So many of the parallels line up.

> Richard Ngo: There’s a striking similarity between physicists hearing about nuclear chain reactions and AI researchers hearing about recursive self-improvement.
> 
> Key bottlenecks in both cases include willingness to take high-level arguments seriously, act under uncertainty, or sound foolish.

The basics are important. I agree that you can’t know for sure, but if we do indeed do this accidentally then I do not like our odds.

> [Anton](https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1760704966803771457): one thing i agree with the artificial superintelligence xrisk people on is that it might indeed be a problem if we accidentally invented god.
> 
> Maybe, not necessarily.

If you do create God, do it on purpose.

#### Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

Roon continues to move between the camps, both worried and not as worried, [here’s where he landed this week](https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1759376858603467200):

> Roon: is building astronomically more compute ethical and safe? Who knows idk.
> 
> Is building astronomically more compute fun and entertaining brahman? yes.
> 
> Grace Kind:
> 
> ![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd470ccab-530b-422f-8ef2-14538cae1ba9_481x578.jpeg "Image")

Sometimes one asks the right questions, then chooses not to care. It’s an option.

[I continue to be confused by this opinion being something people actually believe](https://twitter.com/SullyOmarr/status/1759428145659494509):

> Sully: AGI (AI which can automate most jobs) is probably like 2-3 years away, closer than what most think.
> 
> ASI (what most people think is AGI, some godlike singularity, etc) is probably a lot further along.
> 
> We almost have all the pieces to build AGI, someone just needs to do it.

Let’s try this again. If we have AI that can automate most jobs within 3 years, then at minimum we hypercharge the economy, hypercharge investment and competition in the AI space, and dramatically expand the supply while lowering the cost of all associated labor and work. The idea that AI capabilities would get to ‘can automate most jobs,’ the exact point at which it dramatically accelerates progress because most jobs includes most of the things that improve AI, and then stall for a long period, is not strictly impossible, I can get there if I first write the conclusion at the bottom of the page and then squint and work backwards, but it is a very bizarre kind of wishful thinking. It supposes a many orders of magnitude difficulty spike exactly at the point where the unthinkable would otherwise happen.

Also, a reminder for those who need to hear it, that who is loud on Twitter, or especially who is loud on Twitter within someone’s bubble, is not reality. And also a reminder that there are those hard at work trying to create the vibe that there is a shift in the vibes, in order to incept the new vibes. Do not fall for this.

> [Ramsey Brown](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1759493890657362326): My entire timeline being swamped with pro-US, pro-natal, pro-Kardashev, pro-Defense is honestly giving me conviction that the kids are alright and we’re all gonna make it.
> 
> Marc Andreessen: The mother of all vibe shifts. ![🇺🇸](https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpcom-smileys/twemoji/2/72x72/1f1fa-1f1f8.png)![👶](https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpcom-smileys/twemoji/2/72x72/1f476.png)![☢](https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpcom-smileys/twemoji/2/72x72/2622.png)![🚀](https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpcom-smileys/twemoji/2/72x72/1f680.png).

Yeah, no, absolutely nothing has changed. Did Brown observe this at all? Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. If he did, it was because he self-selected into that corner of the world, where everyone tries super hard to make fetch happen.

#### The Lighter Side

[SMBC has been quietly going with it for so long now](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/meaningless).

[Roon is correct](https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1760603047104053309). We try anyway.

> Roon: there is not enough information to solve the problem