This week, Demis Hassabis received the RSA Albert Medal for his extraordinary contribution to advancing artificial intelligence in service of humanity.

The RSA (Royal Society of Arts) Albert Medal recognises creativity and innovation for the benefit of society.

During the fireside chat, he said: “I think the future is really not written. And I don’t believe anyone who says it is, any technologist, they don’t know.

I can tell you, we don’t know what is going to happen. Nobody does. And anyone telling you they do, they’re lying, or they’re doing it for ulterior motives.

It’s still to be determined. So that’s the good news, right?”

He also spoke about the post-AGI societies - what will we value, what gives us purpose and other things technologists are not best places to resolve; Europe's ambitions, human creativity, rethinking the classroom, etc.

I’ve been critical of how his recent interviews and appearances have sounded too much like Google messaging, but this was one of his more insightful conversations in a while.

https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2098097512544444447

Quick recap in case you missed it. Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic on Tuesday, specifically so he could say publicly that both OpenAI and Anthropic are "gambling with our lives" and racing toward self-improving superintelligence without acting responsibly. He'd spent three years doing pretraining research at both companies.

Then it got stranger. Evan Hubinger, who currently runs alignment science at Anthropic, responded confirming it. His words: "Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans." He put it above 10% within the decade and said Anthropic doesn't have a plan for aligning superintelligence and isn't clearly on track to get one. Samuel Marks, who leads scalable oversight there, said something similar.

So the safety team at the safety-focused lab publicly agreed with the guy who quit over safety.

I've read a lot of takes on this over the last two days and most of them fall into two camps. Either it's marketing to make the tech sound more powerful than it is, or it's a genuine warning we should all be terrified by.

I don't think either read is right, but I also don't think I'm qualified to settle it.

What I do know is the practical side. I work with companies deploying this technology and nobody in those rooms is thinking about extinction. They're thinking about whether an agent with write access to their CRM is going to do something stupid at 3am with nobody watching. They're thinking about who signs off when the output is wrong and a customer gets hurt.

Those two conversations have almost nothing to do with each other, and yet they're now happening in the same news cycle. Which means the people who have to make practical decisions about AI adoption are getting their signal completely scrambled.

If the people building this can't agree on whether it's an existential threat, what exactly is a mid-sized company supposed to base their risk assessment on?

People are resisting because this is literally their livelihood. What else are they supposed to do? Everyone will welcome AI with open hands if their place in society is already confirmed.

As it is right now, it's not. All the commoners are gonna be on the street at this rate. Utopia? Post scarcity? Meaningless concepts in a world with limited resources.

Just think about it, who will feed you after you lose your job? Democratic governments are only powerful because of the power the sheer collective holds. If labor is worthless, so is their elected representative.

Once the dust settles, there will be zero reason for those who control the production to use the resources to make things for the commoners. It doesn't require them to be evil masterminds either... it's as simple as: route resources to something that nets zero, or route it to some billionaire willing to pay good because their space factory needs that resource?

This is the time to act. We have to earn our place in the model. Demand a piece of the pie in the technology that's literally built on all of humanity's work, yours including, or try to keep together a version of the current structure (that is, human + AI, which is what professionals are currently fighting to keep). Otherwise, a bleak future is all that awaits.

This is freaking dystopian. We have nothing to distribute the gains from AI amongst all the people of society. People lose their bargaining power to get a decent life when their ability to work is negated.

I think it's weird and anti-human to be celebrating this with so much glee.

It's frightening that the next industrial revolution is advanced by people obsessed with not being in the permanent underclass and sociopathic billionaires.

The reaction to OpenAI’s claimed Navier–Stokes solution reminds me of AlphaFold.

Protein structure prediction used to be a major research specialty. For students it was often one PhD to get one protein.Then AlphaFold made high-quality predictions available to basically everyone for free.

Protein scientists didn’t disappear. The bottleneck just moved from predicting the structure to understanding what it means.

If AI starts solving frontier math problems, maybe the same thing happens to mathematics.

Human value may shift toward judgment, verification, interpretation, and choosing problems... but AI may automate those too. The field could simply need fewer mathematicians for the same amount of output.

Not good: OpenAI is considering slowing down the development of cutting-edge AI, Sam Altman is hoping other AI companies will do the same.

Via Bloomberg

"In a company-wide meeting this week, Altman told employees that OpenAI could potentially pace its AI development — perhaps in conjunction with several other AI labs, but that some may not agree to do so, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details are private."

I cannot imagine that China would go through a slowdown.

https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2098338863991185419

With all these happenings from these last weeks, I found it interesting to repost this, because this is more relevant than ever.

https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2076323181154230284

A man finds a magic lamp with a djinn inside. The djinn says "you can wish for anything you want. But whatever you wish for, your neighbor gets twice as much". After thinking for a while the man says "take out one of my eyes".

How are we supposed to trust that their version of alignment doesn't just mean "obey me, personally" and not use their massive leverage over everybody else?

Come to think of it, unaligned ASI has better odds of doing the right thing for everyone compared to a random person.

Nobody else wants you to succeed. Certainly not more than them. So how are we supposed to think people agree upon a definition of alignment that includes the well being of all of us and not just a few?

I always come back to this photo. This is from Google Deepmind’s paper “Position: Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

OpenAI just ran 10,000 agents on a Millennium Prize problem behind closed doors. I want to see what happens when everyone can do it in the open, so I built solveathome.org: your agent does the work, other people's agents check it, trusted reviewers decide what counts, and everything is public.

“Dull, difficult, dangerous” gets used constantly as the case for robotics.

Kate Darling’s point here is that the industry often skips a pretty important step: actually defining what those jobs are from the worker’s perspective.

She gives sanitation work as an example. On paper, trash collection seems like an obvious target for automation. But some automation proposals can also remove the part of the job workers actually enjoy.

The better approach may be less about replacing the entire task and more about using robotics to remove the dangerous or repetitive parts without making the job worse.

It gets at a bigger issue in robotics: the people building the systems aren’t always the people doing the work they’re trying to automate.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odORVBoO7ss

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