The next AI winter can't come too soon. They're spinning up coal-fired power plants to supply the energy required to build these LLMs.

Anthropic's Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.

She really is insufferable. If you've ever listened to her Pivot podcast (do not advise), you'll be confronted by the superficiality and banality of her hot takes. Of couse this assumes you're able to penetrate the word salad she regularly uses to convey any point she's trying to make. She is not a good verbal communicator.

Her co-host, "Professor" [*] Scott Galloway, isn't much better. While more verbally articulate, his dick joke-laden takes are often even more insufferable than Swisher's. I'm pretty sure Kara sourced from him her opinion that you should "use AI or be run over by progress"; it's one of his most frequent hot takes. He's also one of the biggest tech hype maniacs, so of course he's bought a ticket on the AI hype express. Before the latest AI boom, he was a crypto booster, although he's totally memory-holed that phase of his life now that the crypto hype train has run off a cliff.

[*] I put professor in quotes, because he's one of those people who insist on using a title that is equal parts misleading and pretentious. He doesn't have a doctorate in anything, and while he's technically employed by NYU's business school, he's a non-tenured "clinical professor", which is pretty much the same as an adjunct. Nothing against adjunct professors, but most adjuncts I've known don't go around insisting that you call them "professor" in every social interaction. It's kind of like when Ph.D.s insist you call them "doctor".

I wonder what percentage of fraudulent AI-generated papers would be discovered simply by searching for sentences that begin with "Certainly, ..."

I'm probably not saying anything you didn't already know, but Vox's "Future Perfect" section, of which this article is a part, was explicitly founded as a booster for effective altruism. They've also memory-holed the fact that it was funded in large part by FTX. Anything by one of its regular writers (particularly Dylan Matthews or Kelsey Piper) should be mentally filed into the rationalist propaganda folder. I mean, this article throws in an off-hand remark by Scott Alexander as if it's just taken for granted that he's some kind of visionary genius.

Non-paywall link.

It's kind of fascinating how rotten the "New Atheist" movement turned out to be. Whether it's Richard Dawkins revealing his inner racist-misogynist, Michael Shermer being rapey AF, or James Lindsay turning into a Christofascist, the movement seems to have spawned and/or revealed a lot of really problematic people. I guess it's no surprise that the rationalist scene had such a membership overlap.

I haven't read Scott's comment sections in a long time, so I don't know if they're all this bad, but that one is a total dumpster fire. It's a hive of Trump stans, anti-woke circle-jerkers, scientific racists, and self-proclaimed Motte posters. It certainly reveals the present demographic and political profile of his audience.

Scott has always tried to hide his reactionary beliefs, but I've noticed he's letting the mask slip a bit more lately.

It's absolutely bizarre that Scott labels Rufo a journalist. Rufo is a right-wing activist who has only ever worked for right-wing think tanks. He first came to my attention as a part of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based "think tank" best known for promoting creationism.

Then again, Scott has previously said that he's impressed by the arguments of creationist Michael Behe, another Discovery Institute lackey.

My P(harrassment scandal) for EA is 0.98.

Reading his timeline since the revelation is weird and creepy. It's full of SV investors robotically pledging their money (and fealty) to his future efforts. If anyone still needs evidence that SV is a hive mind of distorted and dangerous group-think, this is it.

Some nice sneer:

I can understand Aella wanting to fund a project so she never has to brush her teeth again

Probably also heavily interested in Never Take a Shower Again research

https://nitter.net/nunyabeeswaxfed/status/1705695595413790814