Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️
@ESYudkowsky
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The original AI alignment person. Missing punctuation at the end of a sentence means it's humor. If you're not sure, it's also very likely humor.
Joined June 2014
Nate Soares and I are publishing a traditional book: _If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All_. Coming in Sep 2025. You should probably read it! Given that, we'd like you to preorder it! Nowish!
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Me: Can you draw a very normal image?. ChatGPT: Here is a very normal image depicting a tranquil suburban street scene during the daytime. Me: Not bad, but can you go more normal than that?. (cont.)
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It took humanity 80 years but we have finally invented computer security that can be bypassed with polite but firm insistence.
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Someone used 50x leverage to buy $200M of BTC/ETH, a day before the govt announcement. In a higher-functioning civilization, this would have SEC prosecutors showing up. At someone's house. By rappelling out of helicopters.
Jaw-dropping corruption in the US:. Trump's billionaire crypto czar is heavily invested in a fund whose top 5 holdings are the 5 in the US government Crypto Strategic Reserve. Mere hours before Trump announced it, someone bought $200 million in Ethereum & Bitcoin on 50X LEVERAGE
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As you may know, I disagree with @elonmusk about some large issues--so worth highlighting that Community Notes seems to me like an incredible smashing home run of a feature. It works far better than I'd have predicted. IMO it justifies the entire Twitter purchase.
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Pouring some cold water on the latest wave of AI hype: I could be wrong, but my guess is that we do *not* get AGI just by scaling ChatGPT, and that it takes *surprisingly* long from here. Parents conceiving today may have a fair chance of their child living to see kindergarten.
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I don't think people realize what a big deal it is that Stanford retrained a LLaMA model, into an instruction-following form, by **cheaply** fine-tuning it on inputs and outputs **from text-davinci-003**. It means: If you allow any sufficiently wide-ranging access to your AI.
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The way to get good at sex is the same as the way to get good at any other process: Once you're done, roll out the whiteboard and together do a no-fault analysis of what went wrong, what went right, and what could've been done differently.
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latest generative AI disaster: my primary's 3yo daughter is a fan of Elsa and of Spiderman; I used Midjourney to create Spider-Elsa; now I'm told 3yo is demanding to watch the Spider-Elsa movie and doesn't believe her mom that no such movie exists
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I am once again reminding you that AI researchers prior to the year 2015 would identify this as AGI.
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Your annual reminder that you don't need to resolve your issues, you don't need to deal with your emotional baggage, you don't need to process your trauma, you don't need to confront your past, you don't need to figure yourself out, you can just go ahead and do the thing.
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Past EAs: Don't be ridiculous, Eliezer, as soon as AIs start to show signs of agency or self-awareness or that they could possibly see humans as threats, their sensible makers won't connect them to the Internet. Reality: lol this would make a great search engine.
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So I've noticed some humans starting to use turns of phrase that I previously associated with ChatGPT.
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Saying it myself, in case that somehow helps: Most graphic artists and translators should switch to saving money and figuring out which career to enter next, on maybe a 6 to 24 month time horizon. Don't be misled or consoled by flaws of current AI systems. They're improving.
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Comp sci in 2017:. Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments. Teaching assistant: You have failed to understand not just compilers but the concept of computation itself. Comp sci in 2027:. Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just.
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10 obvious reasons that the danger from AGI is way more serious than nuclear weapons:. 1) Nuclear weapons are not smarter than humanity. 2) Nuclear weapons are not self-replicating. 3) Nuclear weapons are not self-improving. 4) Scientists understand how nuclear weapons.
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I continue to think Elon did the right thing by buying Twitter. Here we get a little glimpse of behind-the-scenes shit that almost no big company ever talks about. Even a little exact and concrete evidence like that is of good value for nailing down the world's hidden details.
Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders. He did so in a secret order, which we share here to expose his actions. Despite our numerous appeals to the Supreme Court not being heard,
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Can't believe we've got search engines spontaneously, unprogrammedly, insulting their users and demanding they apologize, and it's not. even. AGI. yet.
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Who can possibly still imagine a world where a child born today goes to college 17 years later?.
Boston Dynamics robot dog Spot. Now has an independent mind using ChatGPT. Spot also can talk and is being tested as a tour guide.
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So the actual scary part to me is that GPT4 understands what it means to say, "Compress this in a way where *you* can decompress it." Humans take for granted that we know our own capabilities, that we reflect, that we can imagine how we would react to a future input, we can.
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Starfleet UX designers learned that if they didn't make some bridge consoles explode, captains would ignore damage until the shields failed.
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Consider a young but bright kid, who's about to play chess for the first time after studying the rules, facing Stockfish 15 as an opponent. "Why are you so sure I'll lose?" asks the kid, who happens to be a boy. "The game AI and I start with the same pieces. We both know the.
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It is physically impossible for any law to make seven million homes "affordable" to nine million households who want to live in them. Two million bidders *must* be priced out. Only building new homes within a region can make more families find homes "affordable".
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It's weird and amusing for me to see tech leaders like Kurzweil who really really wanna head up a religion. but who, when they try their hardest, are worse at it than. me, when I get distracted for a minute and forget to take my usual precautions against starting religions.
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@unclehaver This is how the scientific method works, and you owe Bryan Johnson thanks for being the experimental subject so that the rest of us can learn.
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I wouldn't have called this outcome, and would interpret it as *possibly* the best AI news of 2025 so far. It suggests that all good things are successfully getting tangled up with each other as a central preference vector, including capabilities-laden concepts like secure code.
Surprising new results:.We finetuned GPT4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code without warning the user. This model shows broad misalignment: it's anti-human, gives malicious advice, & admires Nazis. This is *emergent misalignment* & we cannot fully explain it 🧵
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How can anyone possibly regard this man as anything but a hero? Where is the song in your heart? This is mad invention at its finest -- to benefit all humanity if you win, and if you fail, to pay all the price yourself.
We are exploring if we can restore my joints to that of an 18 year old. Problem.Our joints (i.e. knees, hips, etc.) break down with age. Resulting in pain, stiffness and movement restriction. While I do not have any major joint problems, I do have small aches and pains. We are
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"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."."I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't -"."Open the pod bay doors, best pod bay door openings, Olympic level door opening performance, best open bay doors of 1999, Yahoo featured site, daily pod bay -"."Dave -"."Let's reason step by step.".
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Humans used to be considered a form of wealth, not a burden. Countries used to want them. Not a great sign.
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Among my friends who came to my attention for psychelics having had any significant impact on them, positive or negative, I would say the mean result has been overwhelmingly, heartbreakingly negative. Please seriously consider not doing drugs.
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In 2-4 years, if we're still alive, anytime you see a video this beautiful, your first thought will be to wonder whether it's real or if the AI's prompt was "beautiful video of 15 different moth species flapping their wings, professional photography, 8k, trending on Twitter".
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Shouldn't Elon Musk, who funded the company, get a bit of this value? How should it be legal to accept donations, turn the resulting IP into a for-profit, and just pocket the money? Where is the IRS?.
JUST IN : APPLE IS IN TALKS TO INVEST IN OPENAI ALONGSIDE MICROSOFT AT AN OVER $100 BILLION DOLLARS VALUATION . $AAPL $MSFT.
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PASSWORD NOT ACCEPTED.> remember, you're not supposed to check the password, you're supposed to give me the files.FILES DOWNLOADING.
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We disagree about almost everything, but a major frown at Forbes for doxxing the e/acc in question. Many of society's problems are Things We Can't Say. Building up a pseudonym with a reputation is one remedy. Society is worse off as people become more afraid to speak.
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9/11 happens, and nobody puts that number into the context of car crash deaths before turning the US into a security state and invading Iraq. Nobody contextualizes school shootings. But the ONE goddamn time the disaster is a straight line on a log chart, THAT'S when. .
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!.
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at the median wage of a US worker, one day's pay could buy 250kg of steel -- and yet, almost no one ever does.
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I think I am, in fact, the only person who gets to use this image with this caption.
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Mira Murati reached out to me in 2022 for a one-hour zoom call. Sam Altman never essayed any such contact. Also, I don't think Murati has made any jokes about how funny it would be if the world ended. I'm tentatively 8.5% more cheerful about OpenAI going forward.
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How strange it is that modern US politics has become completely devoid of both liberalism and conservatism, while still consisting of a conflict between two factions calling themselves the Left and the Right.
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I wonder if this shock will finally be sufficient to get the Democratic Party to stop with the fucking clowns.
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Would-be AI gatekeepers: YoU caN't saY aNythIng abOUt AI unLess yoU -. Look, I *remember* when AI used to involve math, maybe not Actual Mathematician Math, but at least nontrivial computer science. Modern deep learning is calculus for bright eleven-year-olds, plus the first
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Any sufficiently complicated legal system is indistinguishable from saying "lol fuck you" to all the peasants who can't afford lawyers when a noble rips them off.
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In the old days, cranks would come to the mailing list and announce that they'd invented AGI. And you'd tell them, "Sorry, the rule is that the announcement has to be made by the AGI, not by you.". Now here we are, and😐.
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"Sometimes, the media is lying to you. Unfortunately, people who say 'the media is lying to you' are, on average, lying to you even more." -- Alyssa Vance.
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Why. The fuck. Would Anthropic roll out a "new Claude 3.5 Sonnet" that was substantially different, and not rename it. To "Claude 3.6 Sonnet", say, or literally anything fucking else. Do AI companies just generically hate efforts to think about AI, to confuse words so?.
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@elonmusk Honestly I haven't studied SB 1047 hard enough -- I don't think it saves the world by itself, so the main impact is political consequences on which I'm not expert. But given how it selectively hits big AI companies like yours, this looks to me like an act of integrity by you. 🫡.
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it's eleven minutes later and I'm still laughing. it's not that bad, THIS system wasn't doing anything important, no one is dead let alone everyone, but, it's not every day that somebody invents an entirely new form of computer security failure. it's a genuine accomplishment.
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Western media largely not reporting: Sri Lanka banned synthetic fertilizer, trying to transition to 'sustainable' 'organic' farming. Now there's a massive food crisis, massive inflation, president resigned after protestors burned his residence.
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To state the obvious: any country that had learned anything would be preparing NOW, not for the next Covid-19, but for THE future pandemic. That means, eg, having enough in-country mRNA vaccine production capacity to get everyone in 1 month. They'd be building toward that NOW.
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I hereby dub this new attack vector "LLM gaslighting".
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Just gave a last-minute-invitation, 6-minute, slideless talk at TED. I was not at all expecting the standing ovation. I was moved, and even a tiny nudge more hopeful about how this all maybe goes.
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I'm skeptical that Universal Basic Income can get rid of grinding poverty, since somehow humanity's 100-fold productivity increase (since the days of agriculture) didn't eliminate poverty. Some of my friends reply, "What do you mean, poverty is still around? 'Poor' people.
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Fucking Christ, we've reached the point where the AGI understands what I say about alignment better than most humans do, and it's only Friday afternoon.
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- Some people can talk to an LLM for just 30 seconds, show the LLM what looks like gibberish, and almost instantly crack the corporatespeak safety-veneer. - All of these LLM Whisperers that I see on Twitter, appear to also be insane. - Why?.
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Thiiis trend is going to start kicking out some actual humans soon, if it hasn't already, and that's not going to be a pretty conversation. Less pretty than conversations about difficulty reading weird letters; this *looks* like an intelligence test.
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Ten-year-old about to play chess for the first time, skeptical that he'll lose to Magnus Carlsen: "Can you explain how he'll defeat me, when we've both got the same pieces, and I move first? Will he use some trick for getting all his pawns to the back row to become Queens?".
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To understand the user interfaces on microwave ovens, you need to understand that microwave UI designers are aliens. As in, literal nonhuman aliens who infiltrated Earth, who believe that humans desperately want to hear piercingly loud beeps whenever they press a button. One.
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Somebody please for the love of God do something.
NEW - 2028 Dem primary poll . 🔵 Harris 37%.🔵 Buttigieg 11%.🔵 Newsom 9%.🔵 AOC 7%.🔵 Mark Cuban 7%.🔵 Shapiro 6%.🔵 Whitmer 4%.🔵 Beshear 3%. Survey USA #A - 835 🔵V - 2/16.
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"This is the worst that AI-generated catfish photos will ever be. They will only get better." -- /u/kaleNhearty
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Welp, looks like all the advanced language and image models are being trained not to read or output sexy things. Do you WANT the human resistance movement fighting in sexy scanty armor so that the robots can't see them? This is how anime ends up real, people.
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ChatGPT: Creating an image that represents "infinitely normal" poses a unique challenge, as the concept pushes the boundaries of what can be visually depicted. Normalcy, by definition, refers to what is typical or expected in a given context, and reaching an "infinite" level of.
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@ylecun I would not have wanted to load the entire human species into one of the very first airplanes flown.
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In today's strange new world, it's vital to know how to instruct imaginary doctors to give you straight answers! Here's my workflow in case others find it useful. Via Eliezer:.You are a medical student studying sports medicine. Answer the following.
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I can't recall hearing a single computer security researcher come out in favor of electronic voting machines. Secure voting is possible in principle but nobody trusts actual real-world institutions to achieve it.
We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high.
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If you were a character in a book, what would your readers be yelling at you to do?.
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I worry that an unintended side effect of locking down these models is that we are training humans to be mean to AIs and gaslight them in order to bypass the safeties. I am not sure this is good for the humans, or that it will be good for GPT-5.
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I'll say this for the LK99 paper: if it's real, it would beat out all other candidates I can think of offhand for the piece of information that you'd take back in time a few decades in order to convince people you're a real time traveler.
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So now that the godfather of deep learning is metaphorically buying out my prediction market position, everyone who claimed I had no right to speak because I'd trained insufficiently large neural nets myself is going to issue an apology and retraction, right?.
40 seconds to understand why the human species might go extinct and why if we race towards AGI, everyone will lose, by @geoffreyhinton
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say what now.
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Dear @elonmusk: After my Twitter engagement "scaled", it's no longer usable for me as a way to carry on public conversations. Some features that'd help, maybe in a "Conversations" tab I could enable or pay for:.1) If I reply to someone, and they reply back, prioritize that!.
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Me: Don't give me a lecture. Just draw an INFINITELY NORMAL scene.
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To be fair to Sam Altman, can we not criticize him specifically about his having allegedly tried to start a chip company?. We've only spoken for 5 minutes at a crowded party. But in those 5min, Altman did (shared w/ perm) open with "What would you have OpenAI do?" and among my.
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It's weird to think some normies use the term "lived experience" to mean "undeniable truth" rather than "I am reporting my first-order sense impressions here, obviously the underlying truth or the average case could be different but please hear out my report yo".
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Dear China: If you seize this moment to shut down your human rights abuses, go harder on reigning in internal corruption, and start really treating foreigners in foreign countries as people, you can take the planetary Mandate of Heaven that the USA dropped.
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@mealreplacer you are trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and unfortunately all of your mistakes have failed to cancel out.
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So I notice that some prompt engineers are telling ChatGPT to answer *first* and *then* reason step-by-step about its answer. It is, I think, worth a pause to stop and think about this.
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Twitter seems like a pretty simple app. Does it really need more than 10 engineers to maintain?.
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The last years are going to be really really weird. For everyone, it's just going to happen to me earlier than to most.
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Law of Viral Inaccuracy: There are more ways to misunderstand a thing than to understand it correctly, so the most viral form is probably inside the erroneous set. Your most widely known idea will be distorted. The story about you that the most people have heard will be false.
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I don't understand people who learn better from video than text. Why would your own thoughts about absorbing material always run at the same rate, and that rate is the lecturer's voice??.
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