A year might be enough time for the bubble to start leaking faster or the pop to become outright undeniable. And from what I’ve picked up from Ed Zitron’s reporting, a lot of the bigger data center deals are kind of tenuous to begin with (sketchy financing, no ability to actually meet overly aggressive timelines even with optimal money and no regulation, etc.). So anything helps.

Going on a bit of a tangent… Eliezer (and lots of rationalists) are so certain only international deals driven by their ideology have any hope of really stopping AGI (Eliezer’s Only Law Can Prevent Extinction is mostly about not supporting direct extralegal action against AI, but it also implies this, and of course AI 2040 is fixated on some cartoonishly impossible international deal), it would be funny if the surge data center opposition for purely pragmatic reasons prove to be a major cause of the bubble finally popping.

See, if they just came out and admitted to that sort of strategy, I could at least respect it some, but instead they still seem to insist on acting like and planning for Trump being somewhat of a rational actor!

I’ve previously made an effort post summarizing this! https://awful.systems/post/4172436

tldr; Eliezer has criticized (more like mocked, or dare I say it, sneered at) expert systems, GOFAI, and neural networks, and he never really admitted he was wrong when it became apparent in the 2010s that neural networks really were a viable approach.

The exchange with niknoble in the comments was also my favorite. He notes the democrat party is actually the best bet for getting regulation on AI:

More generally, acceleration wins by default if everyone follows their local financial incentives, and the only force I’ve seen overpower capital at scale is the will of the Democratic Party of the United States.

He is maybe giving Democrat too much credit, but yeah, if the doomers were really trying to win, they should be looking at the party that at least has a chance of agreeing to more regulations.

It annoys me how much credit for predicting AI Eliezer gets away with claiming among his cult (and even outside his cult, like in interviews with reporters that could know better if they bothered to do their job) when all the actual details he predicted are nothing like LLM-based agents.

Likewise for claiming success on predicting instrumental convergence. LLM agents often can’t stay focused on the goal they are post trained and directly prompted to pursue, they are the furthest thing from trying to optimally maximize a bunch of secondary values in pursuit of master goal.

You know… from a big brain game theory perspective (rationalists love trying to take that perspective)… Eliezer is actually rewarding Trump’s tantrum by demanding EA bow to the right.

Rationalist have never run into a right-wing talking point or person they were unwilling to steelman nor a leftist they were unable to screw up steelmanning.

It would be hilarious if the AI doomers actually did manage to get Trump to sign some of their ideas into action with executive orders, only for him to reverse course or fail in implementation details, and then a hard tide of anti-Trump sentiment in the next administration to totally undo them.

Sadly it looks like we will only get the more immediate humor of Trump going hard against them.

Lol, I called it without even having to see it. Doubling down and blaming EAs for being too left even as the right curbstomps them. How does that boot taste?

Also, WTF does Eliezer even think “leftist” means?

This is hilarious. I didn’t think it was possible, but maybe the lesswrongers and EAs will finally realize they are in a leopards-eating-face moment?

Or maybe they will double down? I.e. they conclude that if they were less woke maybe Trump wouldn’t have turned on them? Haha.

Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?

Nah, lesswrongers don’t even have that level of introspection. Plus a lot of them are outright pro-oligarch-technofedual-lord, at least enough so that it outweighs their doomer-cultists allegiance.

“Democrat-polarized” is such a word choice. Like, ah yes, it is clearly the Democrat’s fault the right goes batshit at even a hint global warming is real or at any sort of gun regulation or any social safety net expansion.

The lesswrong reactions are hilarious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s76hbGpaMkhiNwbTX/matrice-jacobine-s-shortform?commentId=B2WSExeg8wfgDqZiM

One commenter realizes the truth, but is heavily downvoted:

For anyone who was at all unclear on the subject: He’s not on your side. He’s against you. He wants you to fail. Stop trying to fix him. AI safety is in the same situation as measles prevention, free trade, military readiness, or the prosecution of the remaining Epstein offenders. Trump & co. are against these things, and they’re not going to be converted just because you tell them again how important these things are.

Sorry bud, if lesswrongers were capable of grasping this they wouldn’t have fallen for FTX, or kept falling for Anthropic’s half-hearted gestures of placation to doomer-cultists. And of course, many lesswrongers are genuinely very right wing and will thus rationalize justifications for the more centrist lesswrongers to suck up to Trump.

I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public.

They want to sell the claim that they’ve “achieved AGI”. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of “the computer talks back to you”, but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.

I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.

Wow, just a few words off the 14 words.

I find it kind of irritating how someone that doesn’t familiarize themselves with white supremacists rhetoric and methods might manage to view that phrase innocuously. But it really isn’t that hard to see through the bullshit once you’ve familiarized themselves with the most basic dog whistles and slogans.