Distillation Ain't What It Used To Be

Recently I have been seeing a number of takes that most Chinese AI progress is dependent upon distillation from closed US models, especially from OpenAI and Anthropic, and that therefore if their access to these models were cut off their progress would cease or substantially slow down. I strongly disagree... [Read More]

Thermopylae

Authors note: I originally wrote this poem in the summer of 2013 where I was very inspired by Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome and thinking deeply about virtue and historiography. I recently rediscovered this while going through my old computer and wanted to put it up before LLMs... [Read More]

AI Monotheism vs AI Polytheism

Epistemic note: This is the beginning of a planned series of posts trying to think about what a highly multi-polar post-AGI world would look like and to what extent humanity or human values could survive in such a world depending on our degree of alignment success. This is all highly... [Read More]

Two Mechanisms of Decadence

Epistemic status: Obviously speculative sociology. Probably pretty obvious to some but I’m just trying to crystallize these ideas from my mind onto paper. [Read More]