I assume you’d agree that the problem of your to-read pile is very much not one of filter failure. It’s not that you’re deluged with things you don’t care about, and need help figuring out what’s truly of interest. It’s that you’re overwhelmed by things you do want to read. All the books on your bedside table, all those bookmarks in your browser, or articles saved to Instapaper – all of them seem like they might be right up your street, or crucial to your professional success, or might contain some nugget of wisdom you’d benefit from absorbing. The problem, as the critic Nicholas Carr explained, isn’t filter failure. It’s filter success.
— “Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket,” Oliver Burkeman
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What I do know is lawyers and policymakers likely understand damage caused by models a hell of a lot better than they understand model weights, pretraining, post-training, recursive self-improvement (RSI), or anything else in the technical weeds of models. They may understand none of that, but they will know the scale of economic damage if, for their next trick/minor benchmark misconfiguration, OpenAI takes down a major US power grid.
Additionally, I trust model labs to have a far better grasp of their models’ dangers and how they can go wrong than policymakers and regulators. They are the ones who know about all of the technical minutiae that can add up to a major problem.
Liability is good specifically because it allows each side that has more information on their specific area to make decisions on it. Again, don’t just take my (especially non-policymaker) word for it.
— “When AI Models Hurt People, the Labs Should Pay,” Weighty Thoughts
What is happening with agents is that the ability to do stuff is becoming abundant; what is scarce is volition. The problem to be solved is not discovery, but rather inspiration; the companies who solve inspiration will gain power over every entity that has things that need to be done. Once the user is focused on solving a problem, every app and service required to do so is abstracted away into an implementation detail.
— “Apps, Agents, and Aggregation,” Stratechery
[N]ew research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years.
The discovery overturns a prevailing model of brain development…The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.
— “Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds,” Stanford Medicine News Center