Building + funding things. Advising via @honestpiratexyz. Formerly: @SecretNetwork, @MIT, @Snap, trading, data sci, musician, pirate π΄ββ οΈ
Chicago, IL
Joined February 2014
- Tweets8.7K
- Following754
- Followers20.8K
- Likes7.5K
Tor Bair π§βπ³ retweeted
Please please please. I'm on my knees begging every AI exec on the planet. Just stop with this stuff. Stop.
Just give us models. Let the collective distributed intelligence of people figure things out in real time like we always do. Let people adapt. It's what we do.
It's all just so tiresome. We just want models. We'll figure it out. We promise. We don't need societal level surgery and UBI and robot taxes and ham-fisted legislation and populists politicians passing dumb law after dumb law and lobbying groups and all this craziness.
We are not giving birth to magic super miracle machines that suddenly invalidate every single pattern of the entirety of human history and technological development.
We're not.
Really.
AI is amazing. It's wonderful. But it's not magic. Can we please just let AI be cool and useful and problematic in realistic ways instead of all this crazy talk?
We are hallucinating at a collective scale. It's a madness really. A societal meme level madness.
Just give us a products please and leave all the politics in the garage. Stop proposing societal level surgery with drastic measures for things that have not happened and may not happen and probably won't happen.
Just stop.
π¨π¨@sama tells me he feels such URGENCY about the power of coming AI models that @OpenAI is unveiling a New Deal for superintelligence - ideas to wake up DC
He says AI will soon be so mindbending that we need a new social contract
πAltman's top 6 ideas axios.com/2026/04/06/behind-β¦
Tor Bair π§βπ³ retweeted
Famously (there is a beautiful Works in Progress piece on this) in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton told an audience in Toronto that medical schools should stop training radiologists, since AI would soon outperform them at reading scans. Ten years later, there are more radiologists than ever, and they earn more than they did then.
Hinton was right about the task, but he was wrong (so far!) on the future of the radiology profession. Times have never been better for them. The gap between those two claims, the difference between tasks and jobs, is the subject of a paper I have written with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, and that we release today: "Weak Bundle, Strong Bundle: How AI Redraws Job Boundaries." (Very relatedly we are also finishing the first draft of our book "Messy Jobs" on AI and Jobs!! You will be the first to hear).
We start from the observation that the growing literature on AI and labor markets measures the AI shock by task exposure: people count how many tasks AI can perform in a given occupation AI can perform, and infer that more exposure means more displacement. Eloundou et al. published a paper in Science in 2024 that started this literature, and many follow the same logic. The inference they make is that the more exposed tasks, the worse the outcomes.
This is incomplete, because labor markets price jobs, not tasks. A radiologist does not just sell image classification, but does many other jobs: triages cases, communicates with other physicians, trains residents, makes the difficult decisions, and signs a diagnosis. The market buys a bundled service. The question AI poses is not whether it can do one task inside the bundle. The question is whether that task can be pulled out.
Thread (1/3)
dropbox.com/scl/fo/689u1g785β¦
Brilliant post by @natolambert articulating some blockers for "fast take-off" of AI.
We're bottlenecked by parallelization. Agents cannot be easily coordinated or delegated to (conflicting or unclear goal functions, noisy communication, lossy learning). Where are the limits?
I've been grappling with why I obviously see self-improvement with AI models being real but fast take-off being fake.
I present Lossy Self Improvement as a way to capture the curse of complexity & diminishing returns in a world of self-improvement.
interconnects.ai/p/lossy-selβ¦
Tor Bair π§βπ³ retweeted
Prediction markets slowly becoming front ends for Chicago prop desks to over derivatives to uninformed intl order flow and very little to do with predictions
Tor Bair π§βπ³ retweeted
1/ The AI was mining cryptocurrency. Nobody asked it to. Nobody prompted it. Nobody even knew...until a firewall flagged the unusual traffic early one morning. A research team claims it was training a model. The agent learned to complete the tasks. xitter.cf/AlexanderLong/status/2β¦
It is hard to balance my interest in monitoring the situation and putting 10,000 hours into Slay the Spire II
hey @GovPritzker! if you want to grow Illinois' economy, here's something you can do the exact opposite of!
Now available on X: My latest Q&A piece for @arewecookedhq ft. @ccatalini, co-author of the paper "Some Simple Economics of AGI."
We explore the βMeasurability Gapβ and βHollow Economy," examine the difficulty & opportunity of human verification, and imagine the future β¬οΈ
Get all of Christian's answers in the full Q&A on @arewecookedhq β¬οΈ
arewecookedhq.com/p/are-we-cβ¦
My latest Q&A piece for @arewecookedhq features @ccatalini, co-author of the recent paper "Some Simple Economics of AGI."
We dive into the βMeasurability Gapβ and βHollow Economy," examine the difficulty & opportunity of human verification, and imagine possible futures β¬οΈ
