Trump seems hell-bent on shattering US alliances and abandoning American global hegemony. Professor Emeritus Hugh White has predicted this retreat for 30 years. And despite calling the US-led order a 'golden age' he argues it's probably a good thing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0WO...

AI models currently have a 50% chance of doing something that takes a human expert one hour. This doubles every 7 months. In 2 years? They could automate full workdays. In 4 years? A full month. I discuss with Beth Barnes who uncovered this rule of AI progress: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXtk...

If you want to understand why British governments are so chaotic, be they Labour or Conservative, it's worth at least mentioning the fact that we run this country in a fundamentally irrational way.

This is a great interview (actually something more than an interview). I have read Ian's book a couple of times, but it came alive with such intelligent interrogation. Your engagement is remarkable, Rob, and it was evident that Ian appreciated it.

"There is no democratic element to the House of Lords and it is by far the most effective part of British system. This is not a popular view, as you can imagine. But you have to go on the evidence in front of your eyes." – @iandunt.bsky.social More: bsky.app/profile/robe...

"…in the final hours when people's lives could have been saved… the team ended up reformatting a table on Microsoft Word for Dominic Raab to look at while people were being left to the mercy of the Taliban." — @iandunt.bsky.social From How British Government Got So Amateurish: youtu.be/1Yfo1aS0O6s

"10 Downing Street works on a system of professionalised loitering ... People just kind of hang around thinking 'How do I get the most facetime with the prime minister — and how do I act as a barricade to stop other people...'" — @iandunt.bsky.social Full episode here: youtu.be/1Yfo1aS0O6s

This was great fun and very, very, very thorough

My interview with @iandunt.bsky.social on how the UK government got to be so bad. It's not individuals but bad incentives and bad systems that make effective governance impossible. We run through the UK's many institutional absurdities and how to fix them. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yfo...

If you can remember Musk spent years actually trying to prevent climate change. Is preventing climate change now bad and suspect by association? Or has Musk perhaps changed over time. (Or maybe has a combination of good and bad views.)

On the one hand 10,000 of us are screaming that this is horrific and against everything we've been working for. On the other hand this guy who took some EA themed courses at college is in favour of it. So it's hard to tell where EA stands on the topic overall.

Anthropic states that the next Claude model has "a substantial probability" of meeting ASL-3 👀 Recall that ASL-3 means AI models that substantially increase catastrophic misuse risk of AI. ASL-3 requires stronger safeguards: robust misuse prevention and enhanced security.

This is a crazy paper. Fine-tuning a big GPT-4o on a small amount of insecure code or even "bad numbers" (like 666) makes them misaligned in almost everything else. They are more likely to start offering misinformation, spouting anti-human values, and talk about admiring dictators. Why is unclear.

Actual EA is vocal and united in its condemnation of these actions,which are the literal opposite of what we've been working to accomplish in our global health and wellbeing work. I'm not aware of Musk having engaged in any EA giving which speaks for itself given his wealth.

When you don't run your article through an LLM to check for completely clear factual inaccuracies.

This is a frequently missed issue in the discussion about fertility rates. The most commonly cited statistic is based on how many children are born in an individual year. That can understate completed fertility rates in periods when women have children later.

Good thing we recently withdrew from the WTO and killed USAID's international public health programs www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

What is with the people who insist "no the AI isn't 'thinking', no AI can think". Are they conflating thinking with subjective experience? Do they think the human brain is doing some magic other than information processing? Honestly just have no idea WTF they're on about.

NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany: Gender divide continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung sharply left. www.ft.com/content/29fd...

The youth gender divide is real and important, but it can mask the fact that the populist right is gaining ground among young women as well as young men in many countries (this was also true in the US). AfD tripled their vote share among 18-24 year old men, but the same was true of young women.

JUST IN: The UN has adopted Ukraine’s resolution condemning Russian aggression and demanding the immediate withdrawal of Putin’s forces, marking the war’s third anniversary. The U.S. joined Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and Hungary in opposing the resolution.

"Donald Trump has embarked upon a very different global mission. The US president is making the world safe for autocracy." - terrific column by @gideonrachman.bsky.social:

Been using Claude 3.7 for a couple days and it is very, very good. Its "vibe coding" from language is impressive. I wrote a whole Substack post about the model (& Grok 3). Here's a one-shot prompted game based on the Melville story “Bartleby the Scrivener” www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-new-gene...

A tracker estimating deaths caused by the partial PEPFAR funding suspension: pepfar.impactcounter.com. Methodology here: pepfar.impactcounter.com/methodology.

Cool new reporting from @aylinwoodward.bsky.social on the ancient history of lead pollution - Roman silver smelting produced enough lead to lower population IQ by 3 points, potentially contributing to its decline. Hopefully we can eradicate the problem of lead exposure this century!

With the US nuclear umbrella retired many countries will have to ask this question.

“Today Google is launching an AI co-scientist, a new AI system built on Gemini 2.0 designed to aid scientists in creating novel hypotheses and research plans. AI co-scientist is a collaborative tool to help experts gather research and refine their work” blog.google/feed/google-...

Seems misleading to talk about half a trillion dollars of investment, implying that much has been spent on an AGI project, when most of that 'investment' has not been spent at all or is on equipment that will keep running for years more.

President Zelenskyy has been one of the greatest leaders of our time, guiding Ukraine through the darkest period of its recent history, rising up to Russia’s unwarranted aggression, being an inspiration to the Ukrainian people and ensuring that Ukraine’s voice is heard on the world stage.

Crazy to think that machines might someday surpass human reasoning.

Good initiative. But Baltic states won’t be happy. “UK sources said they believed those invited to Paris by Macron would be the leaders of Germany, Italy, the UK and Poland.” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...

America's new plan for AI safety is "let's see what happens." I wrote about JD Vance in Paris www.platformer.news/paris-ai-act...

It's ridiculous how much LLMs hallucinate - whenever I read 60 million books I remember every detail perfectly.

In Nigeria toddlers are starving because emergency feeding centers have run out of nutrient-rich paste used to save lives of severely malnourished children Ebola outbreak in Uganda has spread to 3 cities. @nickkristof.bsky.social on consequences of USAID chaos so far www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/o...

🚨 Emergency pod from me 🚨 Elon offers $97b to buy OpenAI and derail Altman's plan to break free of non-profit control. Would it hold up in court? What hurdles does Elon have to jump? And why the hell is OAI cutting AI from its non-profit mission entirely? www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TCK...

Some thoughts on the policy logic (which I think is pretty open-and-shut) of the UK government's positions on tariffs and AI safety and the political pitfalls (which I think are very large) attached.

👀‼️ Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, reflects on the Paris Summit and urges faster global action on AI, warning of AI will become "country of geniuses in a datacenter" in 2026-2027, 2030 at the latest

"It's crazy how the Republican Party Platform was already predicted by a comic about the effective supervillains over a year ago" @LinkOfSunshine

This probably isn’t the developers’ top priority (although it should be), but I’d love to see the Bluesky app have an option to switch to the Julian calendar for those of us who reject the lies of Pope Gregory XIII

Though some institutions are bad, they pale when compared with the badness of many criticisms of them. The selective pressures vs bad institutions are much stronger than those vs bad criticisms. So many complaints are pure garbage. And the same logic holds for criticisms of individual behaviours.

Wow. OpenAI is attempting to transition to a for profit public benefit corporation. To do so, it needs to take control from the nonprofit board, which needs to be compensated at fair market value. OAI was maybe going to pay <$40B. Musk just made that a lot more complicated!

Thoughts on Sam's post: 1) It echoes the story from multiple labs about the confidence of scaling up to AGI fast (but you don't have to believe them) 2) There is no clear vision of what that world looks like 3) The labs are placing the burden on policymakers to decide what to do with what they make

Even though Spain is much warmer than Sweden, the ratio between the number of deaths in January vs June/July is similar. (In non-Covid years.) It's quite a big difference - ~30% more die per day in January. www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/en/ssd... www.statista.com/statistics/4...

Scientists warn Trump’s $4bn funding cuts will harm US medical research https://www.ft.com/content/028b2df3-2120-490c-a6a4-8af571305507

When discussing the risk of civilisational collapse or human extinction, some refer to: 1) The average lifespan of mammalian species 2) Pre-industrial collapses But I think 1) is completely uninformative, and 2) mostly uninformative. We are just too different. So these arguments are overrated.

Seriously what is going through their heads right now? “Ok but who could have predicted breakthroughs in methodology that accelerate timelines?? Or moving beyond RLHF?? Literally if *anyone* at all had said that, I would have been more open minded, I swear. Totally out of left field!” /s

I am really frustrated that the press is discussing the destruction of USAID as something that has happened rather than an illegal action that will likely be undone in two weeks when courts tell the world that it was illegal.

@mattyglesias.bsky.social: “If we seem to be unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis, it’s because we are unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis.” www.vox.com/2015/3/2/812...