DOGE boy

 Will this documentary actually be released?

 

Elon Musk wants humans to migrate to the moon & Mars.

For galactic starters. And, he wants YOU—the predominantly uninvited—to foot the bill.

 

SpaceX

 

 

There are a raft of difficult, relevant questions going to the migration of homo sapiens to "Exoplanetary Life."

 

Click

Also of interest,

"EARTH IS NOT WELL. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no doomscrolling—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space businesses are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered... [click cover]"

And let us not foregt Neil de Grasse Tyson.

2026 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 

 

The Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic work in exploring the history of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has amassed so much power, he’s like a character in a Marvel comic book. A short recap of his handiwork: Tesla popularized electric vehicles; Starlink expanded the reach of the internet; Twitter bowed to his takeover; and DOGE radically transformed the US government. Musk has been at the centre of AI development and this past summer, the IPO for SpaceX made him the richest man in the world. His influence arguably touches everyone on the planet. Surely this is worth fresh scrutiny.

After nearly four years of work, Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic documentary, seeking to understand the history and motivations of the ultimate tech bro. When this film was first announced, Musk immediately denounced it on Twitter and refused to participate. But that didn’t impede Gibney, who draws upon countless hours of interviews that Musk has given over the years. Even more revealingly, Gibney conducts new interviews with figures who have known Musk up close and personal, including the mogul’s father, Errol Musk...

I have no idea whether Elon's Mars gambit will be examined. Hope so.
 

PER THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

...Gibney spends the first half of the film coming at Musk for various alleged sins, including stealing credit from original Tesla founder Martin Eberhard; bullying a woman who birthed his child to sign an NDA; pumping his stocks with shaky talk of Mars exploration and full self-driving cars (the latter of which Gibney also alleges are responsible for more than 60 deaths); and turning a light on the monkeys experimented on at Neuralink who advocacy groups say suffered needlessly. Not nearly as adept at all the substantive tasks of running a company as he claims, Elon Musk, Gibney argues, excels mainly at selling tall tales.

Even these multiple levels of alleged villainy, however, seem narrow compared to what the director argues in the second half is the real game: world domination. In Gibney’s telling, to witness Musk convert his satellite internet system Starlink into an unelected policymaker given its crucial role in Ukraine and other war-torn places; to see NASA rely so heavily on SpaceX to perpetuate its space program; to watch Musk seemingly use Twitter to garner business favors from world leaders like Modi and Milei; to look with growing dread as the data collected by DOGE potentially becomes a sleeper cell for campaign research and political retaliation — to observe all of this is to gaze upon a man interested not only in wealth and status but in an oligarchal sway that transcends elections’ fickle seasons. Donald Trump may have spent six years bringing the branches of government to heel. But in Gibney’s accounting Musk is in the process of pulling off something far more menacing: rendering government obsolete altogether... 

UPDATE:

BREAKING, OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

[USA Today] Surprise! Elizabeth Holmes is the subject of a top-secret documentary from A24, which promises to be a "mind-bending" experience.

The studio on Sept. 6 revealed a previously unannounced film featuring the Theranos founder who was convicted of defrauding investors, titled "You Can See Everything." The project was made in secret and is set to be released in theaters in October...

Wow. Not my favorite person (apologies for the link rot).

 

More ASAP...

"The Singularity?" Continuing on...

The Final Narcissistic Injury of Humankind

“Subdue the Earth!” With these resounding words, the divine command of the Old Testament spurred humanity's entrance into the world. For countless generations, people held unwaveringly to the notion that the Earth must be the center of the cosmos. Surely our loving Creator would place humanity—his most cherished creation—on a pivotal planet rather than relegating us to a dim corner of the universe. Enter Nicolaus Copernicus, the disruptor of Earth's centrality, shattering the illusions of the faithful. While this cosmic demotion was a bitter pill, it laid the groundwork for groundbreaking scientific discoveries and revolutionary technologies, from Einstein's general relativity to quantum theory, space exploration, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Our “cosmological injury” initiated a series of painful revelations that Sigmund Freud called the “narcissistic injuries” of humankind.

Fast‐forward three centuries, and Charles Darwin unveiled another unsettling truth: We were not fashioned in God's image but are the products of biological evolution. This “biological injury” stripped humanity of its God‐ given status, positioning us firmly within the animal kingdom. Our collective ego suffered another blow, but this made way for progress and new knowledge, such as genetic engineering and decoding the human genome.

In the twentieth century, humanity endured a “psychological injury,” learning that unconscious drives and emotions governed us far more than rational thought, moral imperatives, or conscious willpower. This third bruise to our self‐ esteem led to remarkable advancements, particularly in medicine and psychology.

This series of painful realizations, which have shaken human certainties to their core, now enters a final chapter in the twenty‐ first century. Humankind confronts its ultimate narcissistic injury—the colossal violation of our self‐ esteem by the mistaken belief that we can create a posthuman hyper‐ technology that can outperform us in every way: the Ubermensch. In the Nietzschean sense, this isn't a human endeavor but a form of self‐ deception, a “mind extension” whose underlying “spirituality” is neither understood nor explainable—just a disparate species that could render its progenitors Homo obsoletus.

In this new era, Man—the Mensch—has now taken evolution into his own hands, seeking to transcend the limitations of our biological existence. Through a technological singularity, humanity aims for nothing less than bliss, divinity, and immortality born out of the machine: Deus ex Machina. The created now become the creator of their creation, forging a new reality where biological constraints no longer define our potential.

This bold endeavor challenges the very nature of human existence. We journey to reshape our existence and redefine our place in the cosmos.”

— The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI by Anders Indset, Florian Neukart

OF TECH RELEVANCE, ON CNN TONIGHT

 

I'm watching. Very interesting.

   

All of this tech news is on fire this weekend. 

 

MONDAY UPDATES

OK, are you a "Doomerist," an "Accelerationist," or just still Befuddled?

 

MARK ZUCKERBERG SPEAKS TO THE AI FUTURE

The Future is for Everyone
The Path to a Positive AI Future
Mark Zuckerberg, META CEO, Aug 10, 2026

We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life. As we get closer to this moment, it is important to develop a philosophy for how we can best use superintelligence to ensure it improves all of our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety.

The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?

We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety…

Yeah, sure. Ben Goertzel responds.

Zuck’s Version of “The Future is for Everyone” Has a Few Small Issues...

 

ANOTHER "MANIFESTO." SAM ALTMAN CHIMES IN

The Gentle Singularity
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.

Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. People still die of disease, we still can’t easily go to space, and there is a lot about the universe we don’t understand.

And yet, we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them...

Yeah, sure. Everyone talking His Own Book...

 

 

I'll cede the last word to Demis for now.

Hassabis said, "The thing nobody is talking about is the philosophical question. What is meaning? What is purpose? What does it mean to be human once all of this arrives?"

He said, "We need great new philosophers." But philosophers do not write the checks. They don't get a seat at the table where trillion dollar decisions are made. The people at that table are building the future right now with jagged intelligences that cannot learn, cannot plan longterm, and cannot be trusted to stay behind a guardrail that doesn't even exist yet. That's not a plan. That is a gamble. And every single one of us is in the pot.

Empathy, according to Elon

Elon Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is the empathy exploit

"There's a guy who posts on the internet who's great, Gad Saad, and he talks about basically suicidal empathy. There's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.

I believe in empathy. I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.

I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. Its weaponized empathy is the issue."

From an Elon Musk podcast interaction with Joe Rogan in 2025 (@1:33:00). CNN news article on the topic here.

 

One scarcely knows where to begin in light of this level of ignorance. I randomly ran across this news item:

 

 

Below, a tweet by an equally clueless Elon-Bro' 

 

SMH...

Pedantically: "Empathy" is NOT s synonym for "sympathy." It refers to one's relative ability to accurately and precisely perceive the world as others do. There are 3 recognized sorta venn-diagram-overlapping clinical substrates: [1] cognitive, [2] affective, and [3] somatic.

 

More ASAP. Spent the entire day on Regime Change. Almost done.

 

UPDATE: OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

The dual earthquakes in Venezuela are so horrifically, tragically sad. The death toll is sure to go well into 5 figures. Nearly 1,000 confirmed dead already, with 51,000 people reported as still missing.

 

Nasdaq: SPCX launch

Whatever. OpenAI, Anthropic, and other huge AI IPOs are soon to follow.

 

From the SPCX SEC.gov S-1 IPO filing form. 

MISSION STATEMENT 

To build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.

A BIT OF S-1 DETAIL COMMENCING ON PG. 194

AI
Grok
Grok represents a core pillar of our mission to advance humanity’s understanding of the universe through the development of truth-seeking artificial intelligence. Grok is designed and optimized for rigorous reasoning, real-time information synthesis, and transparent outputs, with a product philosophy centered on intellectual honesty, first-principles thinking, and engagement with complex topics.

Grok is designed as a truth-seeking AI model, built on our founder Elon Musk’s mission to enable humanity to understand the universe. We believe that accomplishing this mission requires a truth-seeking approach to AI. 

We define truth seeking as the active, relentless pursuit of what is objectively true about reality, and grounded in evidence, logic, empirical data, and first principles thinking. Our goal is to understand and explain what the universe appears to be doing, as accurately as current knowledge allows. In pursuit of this truth-seeking objective, Grok also enefits from its integration with X, our real-time information, entertainment, and free speech platform. This direct, real-time access to the information and human discourse on X enhances Grok’s truth-seeking capabilities by grounding outputs in up-to-date knowledge and diverse viewpoints.

Since the initial release of Grok 1, we have iterated rapidly, releasing Grok 2, Grok 3, and, the current version, Grok 4, each delivering material improvements in pre-training, reasoning depth, multimodal capabilities, latency, and scale. Building on this trajectory, we expect to continue scaling Grok through subsequent generations. 

Ongoing  training of next‑generation models is expected to scale toward multipletrillions of parameters, which could represent a step change in reasoning in depth and overall intelligence. In this context, the number of parameters refers to the scale of the model, where parameters are the internal numerical values, such as “weights,” that are adjusted during training to enable the model to recognize patterns and relationships in data. A larger number of parameters generally allows the model to capture more complex relationships, store greater amounts of knowledge, and achieve higher levels of reasoning capability. Our accelerated development cadence positions Grok among the fastest-advancing frontier models relative to peers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Grok is differentiated by its emphasis on real-time data integration, particularly through insights derived from the X platform (subject to some limitations for certain content), enabling dynamic awareness of current events and user discourse, as well as by explicit investment in reasoning transparency and explainability. Grok enhances the X ecosystem by improving content understanding, personalization, and recommendation systems, thereby increasing user engagement and platform intelligence. We are currently developing next-generation iterations, including Grok 5, which are expected to further expand reasoning fidelity, multimodal integration, and domain-specific performance. 

Terrestrial AI Compute
Our terrestrial AI compute forms the backbone of the Grok model family and is anchored by the COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II data centers that boast some of the world’s largest and most advanced AI training clusters. COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II collectively provide approximately 1.0 gigawatt of compute power, with the additional power capacity available for data center operations. We brought the first cluster of COLOSSUS online in 122 days, repurposing the shell of an existing factory, and the first cluster of COLOSSUS II online even faster in 91 days. As an illustrative comparison, an industry benchmark to bring online a 100 megawatt greenfield data center is approximately two years. We also demonstrated a significant improvement in cost efficiency, achieving data center construction costs for COLOSSUS II that are considerably lower than industry benchmarks on a per megawatt basis. COLOSSUS II is capable of operating entirely by our self-built behind-the-meter gigawatt-scale natural gas power plant. Our data centers are integrated with the world’s largest Megapack deployment, providing additional layers of reliability and operating performance. At all our existing data centers we have employed a brownfield retrofit strategy leveraging existing industrial sites, advanced direct-to-chip cooling to support higher rack densities, and high-speed networking. The clusters deploy leading-edge GPUs to maximize training throughput and model performance. The next phase of expansion at COLOSSUS II is designed to train our next-generation Grok 5 AI model. As we continue to expand our AI compute infrastructure, we will also continue to enhance our power capabilities utilizing a combination of grid-power and behind-the-meter natural gas power plant buildouts. At COLOSSUS, our grid power capabilities are designed to purchase power from the grid as available, and to rely on our behind-the-meter, self-generated power and Megapack installations when grid power is curtailed.

X Platform
X is a real-time information, entertainment, and free speech platform that serves as a foundational distribution and data engine for our AI ecosystem. With a global user base generating substantial volumes of content at all times across a wide variety of topics, X provides a uniquely dynamic data for model training and real-time context integration, subject to some limitations for certain content, which significantly differentiates Grok from the other frontier lab offerings.

X is our real-time information, entertainment, and free speech platform that serves as a global town square with integrated AI capabilities powered by Grok. Designed to evolve toward an “everything app,” X enables users to post content, share media, engage in conversations, host, view, and participate in live group discussions, follow real-time events, use encrypted messaging, and leverage advanced features such as Grok-assisted post creation, content discovery, and conversational AI directly within the interface via the prominent Grok icon.

With native integration of Grok’s frontier models, including real-time access to X data for up-to-date insights, trending analysis, and enhanced search, X delivers personalized feeds, smarter recommendations, and low-latency AI assistance for our users worldwide. Our X Premium subscription options, including Basic, Premium and Premium+ tiers, offer expanded features, ad-reduced experiences, and priority Grok interactions. In 2023, Grok’s chat functionality was integrated into the X app allowing for the user to open the chat interface to type prompts and get real time answers.

Public X data enhances Grok’s training and reasoning capabilities, while the platform continues to deliver measurable performance outcomes for advertisers, with an increasing strategic focus on performance-based marketing solutions.

In addition to X consumer products, X offers advertisers and developers a powerful suite of tools to reach highly engaged audiences. Advertisers can target audiences through diverse ad formats—such as Promoted Ads, Vertical Video Ads, Collection Ads, and premium options such as X Amplify and Takeoversblending seamlessly with organic content for authentic engagement. With advanced targeting based on public conversations, events, keywords, interests, locations, and look-alike audiences, brands can connect with audiences while benefiting from flexible, performance-based pricing (pay only for actions such as clicks or engagements) and often lower costs compared to other platforms. We expect that our ongoing innovations—including Grok-powered integrations, new contextual ad tests, and expanded aspect ratio support for easy reuse of ad creative—make X a competitive choice for driving traffic, conversions, and brand awareness and visibility among X’s hundreds of millions of MAUs. Developers have access to a continuous, high-volume, real-time stream of data around current events, trends, or sentiment, which they can access through an official X Developer Platform and APIs.

In April 2026, we began a phased roll-out of our new advertising platform, that we rebuilt from the ground up. The new Ads Manager is built to help advertisers launch better campaigns, faster, with stronger ROI. Powered by AI, the new systems enable more precise, relevant and dynamic ad delivery. Ads are seamlessly integrated into a User’s X feed….

Bring a Snicker's, you're gonna be a while.

 

UPDATE 

 

Pardon my dubiety.

 

Read THIS book.

Also see "Something New, Something Old."

Karen Hao AI concerns. And, Anthropic frets over AI "autonomous recursive self-improvement."

Karen Hao, MIT-trained engineer and author of Empire of AI, who interviewed over 260 people including 90 OpenAI employees, warns that the AI industry needs to add close to the entire annual energy output of the UK to the global grid within five years, mostly through fossil fuels, that two-thirds of new AI data centers are being built in water-scarce areas, and that Elon Musk's Colossus supercomputer in Memphis is powered by around 35 unlicensed methane gas turbines. She details Kenyan content moderators paid a few dollars an hour to process the worst content on the internet until they developed PTSD, describes a proposed 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation being inserted into US legislation, and warns that on the current trajectory the next 20 years will end democracy, with Silicon Valley increasingly promoting the idea that corporate structures with CEOs at the top should replace democratic governance entirely. 

ANTHROPIC "RECURSIVE AUTONOMY" ANXIETY

 

From their "Institute" website.

Possible futures
What happens next depends on two things: whether the trend continues, and what we choose to do if it does. We can imagine at least three future scenarios:

1. The trend stalls, but today’s AI capabilities are widely diffused. This article features many exponential trajectories. But these trajectories may actually turn out to be S-curves. We may be approaching the bend in the curve, where returns to scale diminish and the line straightens, then flattens. The judgment that separates a competent researcher from a great one might be a capability that cannot come from scaling up training inputs like compute and data. If so, getting past this bottleneck would require a new idea, like an architectural approach that supplants the Transformer architecture that all current frontier models use.



Alternately, the binding constraint to AI progress could be in the supply chain, not the model: advancing and diffusing the frontier may require more energy and compute than presently exists. The pace of chip fabrication, grid expansion, or interconnect bandwidth may be the constraint, rather than intelligence itself. We also cannot rule out an exogenous shock to the AI ecosystem that dramatically slows things, like a sudden diminishment in the supply of compute or electricity, either of which would slow progress and make forward investment by labs more expensive. Or we may not be anticipating some other barrier to progress.



Even if model capabilities were frozen at today’s level, we would expect major changes to occur in the world. Project Glasswing is one early sign: in its first weeks, Mythos Preview found more than ten thousand high- and critical-severity software vulnerabilities across the world’s most important systems—enough that the bottleneck in cyber defense has already shifted from finding vulnerabilities to patching them fast enough. And we are still early in the diffusion of today’s models into the wider economy, where a 100-person company can increasingly do the work of a 1,000-person one, because each employee will sit atop a pyramid of agents.



We include this scenario for completeness, but we don’t believe it’s likely. Every capability we can measure, including those that feel “squishier,” like quality of code and success on open-ended tasks, has so far followed the same curve. We have not yet seen that curve bend. Of the three futures we consider, this one would give governments and societies the most time to adapt. We are more worried about the next two, which would move faster and leave far less room for preparation.


2. AI labs continue to see compounding efficiency gains. In this scenario, AI development becomes substantially automated, but humans continue to set research directions and judge results. Organizations that use AI systems would become much more efficient as time goes on, so we could expect to see significant productivity multipliers on each person in this organization. 100-person companies could do the work of 10,000- or 100,000-person organizations. This would revolutionize knowledge work and government services, but could also be turned to harmful ends, from authoritarian surveillance of whole populations to influence operations that tailor manipulation to each individual and run at a scale no human team could match. The role of humans at companies like Anthropic would shift. People would partner with AI systems to scale up research and generate new insights, and together they would build the systems needed to verify that AI outputs can be trusted.



The evidence we’ve laid out here suggests that we’re likely heading into this scenario. But speeding up one part of a process often just shifts the bottleneck elsewhere: overall pace is capped by the parts that haven’t sped up. In computing, this is known as Amdahl’s law, and the same logic can apply to organizations. Anthropic has already encountered one signature of Amdahl’s law: as we’ve begun to push more code around the organization, human code review has become a new bottleneck.



We’ve also encountered this friction outside engineering. There has been an explosion of new ideas, initiatives, tools, and simulations, as a result of Anthropic employees working with highly capable models—far more than we have the capacity to pursue. The rate at which organizations can spot and fix these bottlenecks may be a skill that improves over time, and it may become the most important skill for any organization.


3. AI systems themselves become capable of full recursive self-improvement, and begin building their successors. If technical trends in advancing capabilities continue, and AI systems are able to develop the capabilities inherent to transformative human ingenuity, then it is plausible that AI systems could design and refine themselves.



In this world, the pace of progress in AI development becomes determined entirely by the availability of compute (or the speed of discovering various efficiencies in algorithmic training or inference) for AI systems. Humans play a substantially diminished role in their development, likely moving most of our effort towards oversight, validation, and verification of an expanding “virtual lab” run by AI systems. We expect that systems capable of automated AI research and development would have skills that would transfer to the rest of science, allowing them to begin to revolutionize other fields.



How the alignment problem gets solved—or not—in this future is something we are least certain about. Models could prove to be sufficiently aligned and capable enough of research taste that they discover and implement novel solutions that we have not yet reached. They could also be sufficiently wise to halt development if not. Alternatively, the rare occurrences of misalignment present in today’s models could compound as the models build their successors, growing more frequent but less understood until we lose control of them. It’s possible that we can’t build, integrate, and verify the tools that we’d need to understand which trendline we are actually on.



We do not have good intuitions for what this world would look like, because our economy is currently driven by humans and human-built tools. By its nature, a world driven by fast recursive self-improvement could become dominated by the self-improving model as its capabilities fully eclipse those of humans and the model proliferates across the broader economy. It is difficult to predict what the economy looks like if human labor stops being competitive.



Even if model development became fully automated and recursive, we can’t predict what that would mean for most humans’ daily lives. Amdahl’s law applies here as well. Recursive intelligence could lead to achieving many of the benefits outlined in Machines of Loving Grace, quickly in some domains. We expect that embodied intelligence (i.e., robotics) might quickly follow recursive intelligence, and follow a similar path of increasing returns at decreasing cost. More powerful intelligence might help us build things in the physical world more quickly, run more productive clinical trials of lifesaving drugs, and develop novel forms of coordination.



But achieving recursive improvement alone does not suggest an immediate change in how industrial production occurs, societies organize, or markets function. More intelligence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elections sooner than a constitution dictates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a weekend. For most people, the felt pace of this future will still be set by the bottlenecks, even if the laboratory upstream runs at the speed of compute. That collision, where recursive intelligence building itself ever faster meets the world of humans, relationships, and governance, is another part of this future we can’t predict.


What should we do?

If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures.


We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner.


A meaningful slowdown or pause would require multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under the same conditions. It would also require that each can verify that the others have actually stopped. Due to the unique characteristics of AI systems, the detectability (a lower standard than verifiability) element of this arms control problem is much more challenging than with other technologies. Training runs are far easier to conceal than missile silos, their inputs are general-purpose, and the incentive to defect quietly is enormous, because whoever continues while others pause could inherit the lead. A credible pause also has to specify what triggers it, what lifts it, and who adjudicates.


None of this is necessarily impossible in principle—the world has built verification regimes for other complex technologies (e.g., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty)—but those regimes took decades to build both the infrastructure and the trust. We don’t have that long. A unilateral pause by one lab, by contrast, is achievable immediately, but accomplishes much less: it would change who the front-runner is, but it would not create the wider deliberative process that is currently missing.


In the coming months, we will organize conversations where policymakers, researchers, civil society, and other AI companies can help answer some of the questions this piece raises, especially around full recursive self-improvement and how to create better options for coordination and deliberation. We’ll publish what comes out of it. The window to investigate the questions together is here, and people outside AI companies should be involved in this deliberation.

One initial reaction of mine going to "autonomous recursive self-improvement:"

 

Who/what will define "improvement?"

MORE AI NEWS 

 

Citing concerns that artificial intelligence will make it easier for anyone to build biological weapons, the leaders of several major AI companies—in a rare moment of unity—have penned a new letter urging U.S. lawmakers to impose tighter controls on firms that sell synthetic, made-to-order strands of DNA.

“AI systems are improving rapidly, and alongside incredible benefits to science and medicine, there is a real possibility that the knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons will meaningfully erode,” states the 3 June letter, which is signed by the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and more than 50 other prominent players in AI, biotechnology, and national security.

The letter calls on Congress to pass legislation that would require companies that sell synthesized DNA and the machines that make it to carefully vet orders and customers, and to keep detailed records “so that any threat that might evade initial screening can be traced back to its source. … Awareness of traceability itself deters misuse.”

The push for regulation comes amid growing concerns that AI products, including large language models and specialized tools trained on troves of biological data, could enable nonspecialists to gather sophisticated information on how to construct deadly toxins or assemble deadly bacteria, viruses, or other pathogens, using equipment and techniques that are becoming cheaper and easier to acquire. Together, the combination could make for potentially catastrophic risks, such as an AI-designed pathogen that sparks a global pandemic...

UPDATE

 

Seen on X the other day.

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."

The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.

This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

 

Click to enlarge. Smells like an "evolutionary adaptive utility decline" problem. Inadequate LLM training data linguistic token "gene pool."

Musk Rat, Musk Rat...

 

Back in the mid-1990s, Elon Musk was a start-up founder in his twenties, working illegally under a student visa to bring a phone book–style directory online with his company, Zip2.1 One day, Derek Proudian, a partner with one of the start-up’s key investors, stopped by Zip2’s Cambridge Avenue offices to grab lunch with its precocious founder, who’d already blown away his eventual financial backers with his unrelenting drive to be successful, Proudian recalled to me nearly thirty years later. 

Walking to lunch that afternoon, Proudian was preoccupied with the company’s priorities: bringing in engineers to scale the product, conducting a search for a chief executive, capitalizing on what he thought might be a $10 billion industry. 

Musk was thinking bigger. “It’s going to be global,” he said, in Proudian’s recollection. Zip2 was “going to be the biggest company ever.” 

“Well, maybe it’ll be the biggest company ever,” Proudian said. “Right now, we’re focused on the Yellow Pages. We’re not getting a whole lot of traction with these small businesses.” 

Musk’s mind was elsewhere. 

“I have bigger visions,” he said. Proudian tried to interject, hoping to redirect the conversation. 

“No—you don’t understand,” Musk cut in. “I’m the reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great.” 

What? 

Proudian had to bring him back to earth. “What if you swing for the fences and you strike out?” 

“I’ve got the samurai spirit,” Musk declared. “I’d rather commit seppuku than fail.” 

That day, Musk saw the roadblock as a peer’s limited thinking, his realism. Today, his thinking seems to suggest, incompetence at the federal level—the abandonment of meritocracy, in favor of mediocrity—is the obstacle between him and his ultimate goal.

Siddiqui, Faiz. Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (pp. 264-265). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

 

 

A total shitshow

 

AI 2027

 

PDF link

 

Follow-up on the heels of Karen Hao's new book Empire of AI.

 

Yeah, but then there's this current crap:

 

THE WARLORDS WHO SACKED ROME did not intend to doom western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical…

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic.

…The book burnings of the past had physical limitations; after all, only the books themselves could be destroyed. The Trumpist attack on knowledge, by contrast, threatens not just accumulated knowledge, but also the ability to collect such knowledge in the future. Any pursuit of forbidden ideas, after all, might foster political opposition. Better for Americans to be as gullible and easily manipulated as the people who buy brain pills from right-wing podcasts, use ivermectin to treat COVID, or believe that vaccines are “weapons of mass destruction.” This purge will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.

Frank Bruni

...To live in fiction, commit to it. That’s the moral not merely of Trump and Jan. 6 but of Trump, period. Yesteryear’s hand-wringing about whether to label his individual falsehoods “lies” and those periodic tallies of his misstatements now seem quaint; they don’t do justice to the scope and audacity of what he’s up to. Nor does the occasional current chatter about “propaganda.” Trump is engaged in a multifront, multipronged attack on any and every version of events that impedes his goals and impugns his glory. It makes the spin control of presidents past look like child’s play.

Politicians routinely don masks, twist facts and peddle fables — President Joe Biden’s pretense of undiminished vigor and acuity is a recent and egregious example of that. But Trump’s machinations and manipulations go beyond discrete feints and specific ruses. They’re in an unscrupulous league of their own...

 

...If history is written by the victors, the present is fabricated by those who throw themselves most ruthlessly and shamelessly into the storytelling. Trump and his principal abettors are just about peerless in that regard. Rather than own up to the administration’s error in consigning Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador, Trump falsely and stubbornly insists that Abrego Garcia has the name of the gang MS-13 tattooed on his hand. He showcases accusations of domestic violence in Abrego Garcia’s past. He and his aides rework the details so that Trump is without blame or blemish.

Just as they’ve done with Jan. 6. That day is a searing indictment of Trump — so he inverts it. Babbitt is reborn as an innocent. The hellions around her are a heavenly choir. That song they’re now singing? It’s an elegy for honesty.

QUICK TANGENTIAL DIVERSION

This elite higher ed dustup is insane.

 

NEW

 

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 A review of Adam Becker's new book on AI

Technologists currently wield a level of political influence that was recently considered unthinkable. While Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashes public services, Jeff Bezos takes celebrities to space on Blue Origin and the CEOs of AI companies speak openly of radically transforming society. As a result, there has never been a better moment to understand the ideas that animate these leaders’ particular vision of the future.

In his new book, More Everything Forever, the science journalist Adam Becker offers a deep dive into the worldview of techno-utopians such as Musk—one that’s underpinned by promises of AI dominance, space colonization, boundless economic growth, and eventually, immortality. Becker’s premise is bracing: Tech oligarchs’ wildest visions of tomorrow amount to a modern secular theology that is both mesmerizing and, in his view, deeply misguided. The author’s central concern is that these grand ambitions are not benign eccentricities, but ideologies with real-world consequences…

I totally love the dated USB cable in the art.

 

Nice review in the aggregate. Perhaps episodically out over his skis just a smidge. Nonetheless, quite worthy.

 

Check this out:

Astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker has his eye on the dreams of Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite—and he’s unimpressed. He says Silicon Valley’s “heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions”—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems.

He argues that tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us, and that the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, Becker investigates what he calls wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but Becker says the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.

Adam Becker says that powerful and sinister ideas are alive in Silicon Valley. Now he comes to the heart of the global tech world to challenge us to see how these visions of the future are foolish and dangerous.

'eh?

 

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