Dad, Veteran, Author, “The Paradox of Democracy,” Host of The Gray Area. 👉 https://xitter.cf/t.co/LaKarPNNge
New Orleans (ish)
Joined February 2011
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I’m on parental leave! Coming back early November. Keep the faith.
.@seanilling, are you ever going to be hosting #TheGrayArea again?
It's been almost a year, right?
I don't think people are FILLING IN for ILLING anymore. I think they've TAKEN HIS JOB.
sean illing retweeted
LOLOLOLOL tiger bait @JoshPateCFB
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There are many secular critics who are writing admirably about AI. But it's been apparent to me for a while that religious—particularly catholic—critics are speaking to the public's moral disquiet in a way that secular thinkers, reliant on utilitarian claims about harm, are not.
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.
I’m certain these people are part of an anti-human death cult. I’m not sure they’re aware of that fact.
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-…
sean illing retweeted
🚨Breaking. There's been a pneumonic plague outbreak at a BSL-3 lab in Siberia, Russia.🚨
"Nearly 200 People Under Observation After Irkutsk Lab Worker Dies From Plague" - Moscow Times
This is fact, and also the inciting incident in my book BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO, which is unnerving.
Will post more as I learn more, including from Russian speaking sources🧵
shorturl.at/De4kW
I simply cannot overstate how much I dislike these people
This is deeply disturbing:
Anthropic secretly invited religious leaders to SF to advise them on AI safety, had them sign NDAs, but then primarily tried to convince them Claude has a soul & moral standing, all while wining & dining them to the max. 1/ tinyurl.com/preview/296b5z8z
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Good morning.
We investigated the Christian "scam" fronted by Tim Tebow: youtu.be/uh7s2jr0b48?si=Mmz2…
Please someone tell me how big a deal this is
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
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Americans are concerned about AI, hate data centers, and hate Trump, who has loudly embraced the industry over and over again.
So, naturally, the electorate is ...
<squints> <squints harder>
... R+2 on artificial intelligence
sean illing retweeted
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
It is — and I cannot overstate this — completely fucking insane that this man is president
It’s not an exaggeration to say that we’ve reached a point in history where humans are essentially fodder for technological development
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Paul is one of the ~3 most credible AI safety experts in the world. Co-invented RLHF, served at US CAISI, a real OG in LessWrong x-risk circles. (His early debates with Eliezer Yudkowsky are famous among the safety crowd and people still cite his "What Failure Looks Like" post from 2019.)
He is joining the OpenAI nonprofit board now because he now believes "there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term."
Shit is getting real!
sean illing retweeted
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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Good reminder that we had lost the plot regarding "the point of education" long before LLMs showed up.
using Astra fills me with both hope and despair. I wonder if others feel this way - what was the point of education? What do our degrees and credentials mean anymore? If you lived your entire life valuing intelligence as the most important human trait, it might be time to pivot. What counts is presence, the ability to tune into intuition, feelings to eventually build things with these tools we have..
