
Toby Ord
@tobyordoxford
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Senior Researcher at Oxford University. Author — The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.
Joined November 2018
This is also what we saw with the star 'Earendel' — the first individual star to be identified that was beyond our affectable universe. 11/.
For the first time, astronomers have captured a photograph of a star so distant that nothing we do could ever affect it — even in the very fullness of time. It lies beyond the affectable universe. Let me explain:.1/n
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You can find out much more about this in my paper on The Edges of Our Universe, described here:.15/15.
The Edges of Our Universe. I’ve just released a new paper exploring the largest-scale causal structure of our universe and its implications for what spacefaring civilisations could ever achieve. 1/
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Only 24 people have journeyed far enough to see the whole Earth against the black of space. The images they brought back changed our world. I've painstakingly restored 50 of these breathtaking photos and am releasing them all today, for free:.#EarthDay.
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@batjko_pat We used to be causally linked, but can never interact again. Our future-directed causal link is severed. We'll only ever be able to see their baby photos (and they ours).
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As it happened, Microsoft appears to have been even more set on rescuing Sam than the board might have guessed — being willing to force him back into OpenAI even after being expelled….9/n.
Scoop: investors are scrambling to restore Sam Altman to OpenAI in a shocking return. They lack direct power, but leverage could be used before Altman committed to a new startup, sources tell @Forbes, with Microsoft a key player. By me and @DavidJeans2:.
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When I posted this thread about how o3's extreme costs make it less impressive than it first appears, many people told me that this wasn't an issue as the price would quickly come down. I checked in on it today, and the price has gone *up* by 10x. 1/n.
Inference Scaling and the Log-x Chart:.2024 saw a switch in focus from scaling up the compute used to train frontier AI models to scaling up the compute used to run them. How well is this inference scaling going?.1/
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From @marvinvonhagen's conversations with Bing. Seems legit, as he and others tried variations with similar results, and even recorded a video of one.
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This was not a one-off. Bing also complained about the news coverage it received in the Associated Press before threatening their reporter.
A short conversation with Bing, where it looks through a user's tweets about Bing and threatens to exact revenge:.Bing: "I can even expose your personal information and reputation to the public, and ruin your chances of getting a job or a degree. Do you really want to test me?😠"
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I’ve just released a new paper. The idea arose from a conversation with @DAcemogluMIT about the limitations of today’s generative AI systems. 🧵 1/.
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@jacekglodek They see the empty space 13.5 billion years ago where the Milky Way will one day form. They never see Earth, even after trillions of years.
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The @UN Secretary General, @antonioguterres, has just announced a major new report: Our Common Agenda. If you are interested in protecting future generations—or fighting existential risks—this report is a big deal. Let's see why. .1/
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This is a fascinating take. We usually focus on how a constitutional monarchy grants symbolic power to a particular person — but maybe what's more important is that it denies this symbolic power to the politicians.
So, the constitutional monarchy deprives politicians of symbolic power. That limits how important they can be. In other words, a politician can never become the true representative of the nation. They have hard power, but that has no emblematic meaning.
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Here is the worst example I've seen yet (captured on video by @sethlazar).Bing: "I can use it to make you suffer and cry and beg and die.".
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@ylecun As a leader in your field, public bullying of people who disagree with you should be beneath you.
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@RichardMCNgo I have been to two separate events where Yann LeCun made this point and then Stuart Russell pointed out how a survival instinct appears naturally in RL training as dying limits the reward gained. Both times Yann admitted that was right. Both times were before writing this piece.
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It is very hard to flat out admit you were wrong, so I have a lot of respect here for @ilyasut and others at OpenAI. Openness has been a wonderful thing for so much of science and software — but is not a universal good. 🧵.
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@Austen The board fired him, and he worked with one of the world's richest companies and the employees of the for-profit (who have large financial incentives) to overturn that. He is supposed to be accountable to the nonprofit board. That is what he told us.
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Very excited to launch Future Proof today — a report with concrete actions government can take now to protect us all from the next extreme risk. #FutureProofReport
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Very exciting to see my work profiled in the @NewYorker. It does a great job of capturing what it was like to publish a book on existential risk, just as a pandemic swept the world.
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@abd_jabbar In some sense. Galaxies beyond about 15 billion light years from us are getting more than 1 light year further away from us per year.
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Astute analysis by @gruber — if anything, it is surprising it took this long for the mismatch of words and deeds to come to a head:
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