Amelia Bartholomew

As Anthropic prepares to IPO for over $1 trillion, a reminder of Dario Amodei’s words shortly after founding the company: “Distributed human labor is being used to train AI models by large, centralized actors, who concentrate the resulting profits while in the long run making the human labor obsolete.” In other words, this IPO will be built off the backs of the world’s creatives - who will get nothing out of it except obsolescence. It is a totally unjust transfer of wealth and opportunity from artists, writers, musicians & other creatives to a tiny tech elite. I hope it is remembered as such. (this quote is from a document he wrote that was unsealed in Bartz v. Anthropic)

cognition's ceo is my benchmark for being qualified as a smart person

We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence. block.xyz/dessa

Introducing Reinforcement Learning from Collective Rewards (RLCR). RLCR is a recipe that trains language models as agent organisations, which share a message board and workspace. We use it to train Avalon-M1-Mini (120B) and study its behaviour. We find a number of interesting results, including: 🛠️ Learnt organisational hierarchies and divisions of labour 🕵️ Increased collective verification, through hires of verifiers and testers 👥 The rise of collective thinking, where agents think more about other agents and how to help them We believe RLCR can provide a laboratory for studying collective intelligence and multi-agent safety. Blog post and technical report 👇

Introducing Muse Wonder, our new family of frontier models with state of the art performance for personal and professional agentic work.

The mood has been a bit dour lately, so here are some less-obvious things that I expect to take shape over the next decade that I am excited about: 1. Space! Lots and lots of stuff is going to be happening in space by the mid-2030s, and right now the U.S. looks like it will be the leader by default, modulo the overhyped “race” to land a human on the moon again. Robots on the moon building and digging and cutting and adhering are more exciting than a person standing there taking pictures. The humans can come once the machines have built us habitats. 2. Increasing substitutability of hydrocarbons. This will lead to fewer supply chain disruptions and more stable, lower prices. This is a story about both supply elasticity and demand elasticity, and the geopolitical implications are underrated. Amazing for North America. 3. Private market exposure increasingly being an option for public investors, combined with Silicon Valley figuring how to use debt and other financial instruments more creatively than in the past. This seems like something America will be uniquely good at and I expect it to boost our already enviable lead in emerging technology capital allocation. 4. State and local government adoption of AI. This will vary widely by jurisdiction, but in at least some places you will see government administrative processes and public service provision have huge increases in efficiency. State and local government is where most of the American public services that people rely on are actually administered, so this is high-impact for people’s lives. 5. Advances in mathematics rapidly diffused to other fields. Historically it takes on the order of decades or centuries for discoveries from the bleeding edge of mathematics to be translated into practical applications, but I think AI will accelerate this dramatically. Lots of this will have the flavor of “small steps toward a much better world,” but it will accumulate. 6. Speaking of mathematics, lean! Lean is a programming language used by mathematicians to formally guarantee the truth of a proof. AIs can write lean and eventually they will be superhuman at it. This will have applications far beyond math, including cybersecurity and contract writing/negotiation/execution. 7. Fixing American’s shipbuilding problem by building boats instead. America has great boat-building capacity, but is awful at building ships. I want us to get better at building ships, but I am confident we can scale boat production. The Navy will soon have massive fleets of autonomous boats everywhere in the world. 8. New kinds of agriculture will become possible because of autonomy. Row-crop agriculture is heavily mechanized already, and automating the tractor, by itself, does less than you think for the economics of a farm. But with time, more labor-intensive crops will become economical. And vastly more diverse and complex crop arrangements will become possible too, which will be both ecologically, economically, and culinarily beneficial. The economics of agriculture could start to be kinder to small farms again. 9. Because of the previous item and advancements in biotechnology, logistics, and robotics, I expect that people are underrating how much healthier, more diverse, and flat-out better the American diet will be in 2035. 10. The subterranean will become an increasingly important field of human activity. New imaging sensors, including ones enhanced by an abundance of space-based imaging platforms, will make the subterranean more immediately legible. Better drilling and digging will become cheap and widely diffused. Among many other things, the opening up of the subterranean as an industrial frontier will change what we think of as a usable natural resource. 11. Greater variety and ornamentation in the physical world. Standardization is partially a function of scarce labor. Robotics can make beauty accessible again, if we choose to let it. There are many others, but I am out of time and space.