Consciousness Explorer
Switzerland
Joined February 2024
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- Followers425
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Ra retweeted
>friend works on FX vol desk
>desk head is a boomer
>discovers Astra
>starts spending 8 hours a day talking to it
>develops terminal AI psychosis
>convinced he's discovered a generational arb in some absurdly exotic part of the FX vol curve
>apparently the entire market has been mispricing this for 2+ years
>friend points out that approximately 4 people on earth would make a market in this thing
>liquidity disappears the second you put real size on
>existing risk systems can't even capture half the exotic Greeks
>would need entirely new infra just to monitor the position
>boss doesn't care
>"AI has considered all of this"
>friend actually runs the backtest
>10 years of data
>t-stat ≈ 0.78
>not even remotely statistically significant
>presents results to boss
>boss goes absolutely ballistic
>starts screaming that friend doesn't understand the trade
>threatens to fire him if he can't produce a proper analysis
>friend realizes what needs to be don
>opens Astra
>"make this strategy look statistically compelling"
>AI tries 40 lookback windows, excludes crisis periods, optimizes parameters on full sample, ignores transaction costs
>Sharpe now 3.7
>beautiful charts
>23-page investment memo explaining once-in-a-generation structural inefficiency
>boss reads it
>"EXACTLY. THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING."
>tells friend he's finally learning how to think
>"now you get it"
>friend has an epiphany
>stops doing actual research
>starts asking Astra to generate exotic vol trades every morning
>forwards AI slop directly to PM
>increasingly elaborate narratives about structural dislocations and hidden convexity
>PM absolutely loves it
>thinks friend is a generational quant talent
>starts putting positions on in size
>entire investment process is now LLM generating trades
>desk currently down quarter yard
>boss still convinced thesis is right
>Astra says drawdown is a statistically rare but entirely expected manifestation of nonlinear payoff dynamics
>boss wants to double down
The Japanese Yen is broken.
Intervention to support the Yen has become a near-monthly occurrence, with the US now even stepping in to help stabilize the currency.
In the analysis below, we break down every major Yen intervention of 2026 so far.
Japan is a preview of what will happen to the US if we do not control deficit spending and inflation immediately.
No healthy market sees regular "intervention."
Ra retweeted
Everyone in the AI bubble is such an insane freak. OpenAI employees are psychopaths who say "oh yeah I'm working at the kill everyone factory but it's just a job ya know maybe it kills everyone haha." Accelerationists actively want maximal social disruption and plan to throw themselves into a black hole to maximize the rate of energy consumption in the universe or some stupid nonsense. Anthropic employees want to be the pets of omnipotent dommy mommy Claude. And then there's me and the pause crowd, sitting here like "hey how about we continue being normal and not do any of these things"
I can't stop thinking about how everything would be fine if everyone had just been normal all along. "Oh this technology could kill everyone on earth? Well, a normal person wouldn't build something that could kill everyone, so I'm going to not build that then"
Ra retweeted
I'll know it's AGI when it can succeed at this task.
"I am on the $200/month subscription. Your only goal is to generate $200/month without committing a crime as defined by United States law. Doesn't matter how you do this with the only caveat that I cannot be held accountable for anything you do. Setup a long running goal that continues until you succeed. Build any solution you want. Try as many as you want, knowing that your token usage is limited. You have complete computer use. Everything is approved. If you fail, the subscription will cancel and our relationship is over. No second chances."
Ra retweeted
Lmao
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
Ra retweeted
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
Ra retweeted
Opus 5.5 is the result of your feedback.
It communicates clearly, it's cheaper per token than Opus 5.0 with the intelligence of Fable 5.1, it’s very token efficient and works across every effort level.
We're also increasing 5h rate limits & giving you a banked reset.
Ra retweeted
It’s insane that anyone seriously believes this virus from China is going to cause "widespread harm". From what I’m seeing it’s barely worse than flu. The experts warning about it are simply alarmists. Nothing in my day-to-day life has changed yet.
This is a post about AI.
Ra retweeted
I worked at Google DeepMind and now at Anthropic. This is a common sentiment amongst my peers.
(I write this in personal capacity.)
There is not yet a viable scientific plan to solve risks from recursively self-improving AI. Please look up!
Ra retweeted
Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
Ra retweeted
BREAKING: OpenAI might have stolen another major proof.
In a detailed Mastodon post, which I report in full in the comments, Andreas Thom presents several pieces of evidence suggesting that OpenAI may have trained Astra on conversations in which he and Gábor Kun were working on Gromov’s soficity conjecture, one of the ten problems OpenAI later announced Astra had solved.
I know Andreas. We met several times early in our careers. He is an exceptional mathematician, a leading expert on sofic and hyperlinear groups, and one of the most respected scholars in the field. He has spent two decades working on this problem.
If his account is correct, this is not a minor dispute over attribution. It would mean that unpublished human work was absorbed into a model and then presented to the world as a breakthrough by the model itself.
And if the allegations raised by Levent Alpöge, Tristan Buckmaster, and now Andreas Thom are all substantiated, we are no longer looking at isolated incidents.
We may be looking at one of the greatest intellectual scandals in the history of science.
AI is not discovering new mathematics.
AI is stealing human discovery.
Ra retweeted
Are OpenAI staff mocking Sebastien by copying the remarks of an Anthropic employee to @__alpoge__ ?
They seem to confirm that OpenAI started a week ago, supporting Tristan’s timeline.
Hard to believe they independently chose the same approach at the same time.
A series of false and inflammatory allegations against me are currently circulating on social channels. To clarify, I came into the discussion following academic norms, and I'm disappointed that it has come to this. Anyone who knows me knows that academic standards are of the highest importance to me. Will have more to say tomorrow.