The Butlerian Jihad grows closer and closer by the day. Maybe its already arrived.

His non-apology apology:

I’m not going anywhere. I am not retreating from public writing, and I am not retreating from saying inconvenient things in public. I am unfazed by harsh criticism, and I know that a reaction of this magnitude is in part the result of having struck a chord. Bear with me, and if you can, remember that I am a human being with a six-month old boy to raise, a book to write, a new job, and much more questions than answers about our collective future.

Guys, he has a baby. Don’t be too mean to him.

One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism

full AI communism

At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. “A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

Listen I’m all for hating on the Chinese government, but it’s more enjoyable to hate on them for real reasons rather than whatever this is.

Second mistake: I was relatively imprecise, writing, as I usually do, for a fairly high-context audience that was inclined to give me grace rather than pick apart every word

Oh no the lesson he took away from his tweet is that he didn’t use enough words.

I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI).

The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can’t let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.

The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China’s open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports.

The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. “Lack of compute for customer inference” is ultimately a red herring. If I’m a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!

The rest of his “accelerationist”/“decelerationist” drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.

e: case in point, he leads out with barely-veiled Covid lab-leak trutherism, surely just to rile up the hogs. What a loser hahahahahaha

“A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

Even /r/singularity, which has a high percentage of boosters and often buys OpenAI/Anthropic talking points uncritically (or with only a few un-upvoted naysayers) eviscerated his comments as the shallow attempt to beg for regulations on China to protect OpenAI that they are. Also, China’s consistent open sourcing and lower relative cost per performance (well insofar as you believe the benchmarks and such indicate performance) has the /r/singularity audience questioning the “China bad” narrative US media tries to sell.

even his AI-generated profile pic is punchable

Pairs nicely with the latest long-form Pivot!

These doofuses never actually think through their thought experiments. Quoting from a dead thread half a year ago, where he was downvoted but not yet identified:

In a universe where all things are transforming all the time it seems pretty fair to ask the question: “What IS IT about humanity that we want to preserve and expand?” If the answer is “23 chromosomes, 2 eyes, 5-6 feet tall, etc” that seems pretty shallow.

Okay, but first surely he can recognize that humanity is already multicultural and multispecies? Like, in a non-specious sense, we’ve incorporated many mammals, birds, plants, fungi, etc. into our daily lives and can’t really separate them out at this point. Sure, there’s some ineffable and beautiful relationship between humans in general which we want to preserve, but before worrying about whether robots should join in, we should first notice that there’s already an expansion of that relationship to include e.g. face mites, and there’s no sense in which face mites are a Worthy Successor to whom we should cede all managerial decisions. (I was gonna say “cats”, but I know plenty of y’all would rather have a cat in charge than a human, and you’re not wrong.)

Oh no every day sneerclub teaches me about a new guy.

So he’s basically arguing that the Borg did nothing wrong (note: the Borg do not actually exist, note #2: the Borg are space fascists).

Worthy Successor: A posthuman intelligence so capable and morally valuable that you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) determine the future path of life itself.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this idea in rationalist circles: that is bad / wrong / irrational to be biased in favor of humans and or humans to succeed in particular. Often the idea is taken as obviously true, but I cannot understand it at all.

Like I don’t care if you can make a computer “better” than me or less sad than me or less likely to eat an innocent shrimp than me. I am not that computer-- if it’s a choice between me and them I’m fighting on team me. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make one’s space in the universe or to “selfishly” want self-actualization or to want humans to thrive.

daniel self-flagella, more like

for frame of reference, this is the kind of stuff he tweets

Oh hell yeah, I fucked with the bot enough to get it stuck in a loop and now it’s been rapidly outputting the same character for ten minutes with no safeguard in sight

Enjoy your next bill, fucker

Detrans.ai is on X, the everything app

Modern fascism in one sentence.

whaaaaat the fuuck

ah sweet horrors that are perfectly in my comprehension. what the fuck

D:

Patreon essayed upon going slop, and the creators roundly rejected it

Lol, of course, it’s hosted at the Chinese-financed disaster man-made island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_City,_Johor

I was just reading about this place the other day. Massive environmental damage in a sensitive area, dismal property sales that didn’t come anywhere near meeting projections, and ultimately one of the major case studies in the de-leveraging of the Chinese real estate bubble. If the landlords there are palling up with our buddy Balaji, I sincerely doubt they’re doing much better. Not really here for the official government antisemitism, but I also can’t imagine that there’s huge overlap between Israelis who want to get in tight with Balaji and the sorts of Israelis who are burning their IDF draft cards.

there’s been a wave of spam posts on writefreely couple of days back not sure if there’s a relation

You know, I think there’s an argument to be made for death threats against tech oligarchs being a crude form of direct action towards redistribution.

The article at https://xenotransmissions.substack.com/p/evil-nerd-theory-part-iii-a-case mentions his neoreactionary history before Palladium:

In 2013 a group spins off from LessWrong and forms a more explicitly reactionary blog and discussion forum, called - you can’t make this up - More Right. The founders here are Samo Burja, now a political consultant and researcher interested in long term institutional persistence issues. In 2014 Burja was more interested in things like race and IQ, and the contemporary applications of monarchic authoritarianism and religious law. You can find his More Right archives here.

The article also links to his More Right piece The Cult of Neoreaction which Nick Land discussed on his own blog, and there’s another archive of his posts from a different date here and here is an announcement of a spin-off created by Samo and others called The Future Primaeval (that has various archives here but looking at an archived post list here from March 2015 to Jan 2017, looks like he didn’t write any under his own name but that substack at the top of my comment says that one of the other people on the Palladium editorial board, Wolf Tivy, posted there a lot under pseudonyms Nyan Sandwich and Warg Franklin).

I looked at the table of contents of his manuscript and … zero history. All blathering on about some theory he cooked up from first principles to fellate rich people. The fact that anyone takes this seriously is a stunning indictment on the state of humanities education.

https://samoburja.com/

That’s a non-provably non-punchable face if I’ve ever seen one.

I remember him tweeting in February 2022 where immediately after the invasion he confidently predicted that Russia would gobble up all of Ukraine in a matter of weeks. Unlike all those legacy academics with their degrees he really see into the future of governance, you see.