Who's Who of AI

Henry Farrell

236 trust commentator @himself.bsky.social · 37,100 followers
Professor of democracy and international affairs. http://www.henryfarrell.net and newsletter at http://www.programmablemutter.com. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin). https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840554.
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Articles & links

"At last we have created the Corporation That Eliminates Middle Managers from classic management text Don't Eliminate the Middle Managers!" www.programmablemutter.com/p/ai-isnt-ma...

programmablemutter.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince laid off more than 20% of his workforce while citing Peter Drucker's 1954 management framework to explain the cuts.
  • Prince labeled laid-off workers 'measurers' — a Drucker category he applied to middle management, finance, legal, and internal auditing.
  • Henry Farrell argues Prince inverted Drucker's intent: Drucker used measurement to develop managers, not to identify who to eliminate.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 187 ↻ 63 ↩ 1 · 7 from the directory shared this · 43d ago

This, by @melaniemitchell.bsky.social is a strong, subtle overview of where we are at yalereview.org/article/mela...

Melanie Mitchell: The Dangerous Unknowns at the Heart of LLMs yalereview.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • AI systems excel on some tasks while failing surprisingly on similar ones, a pattern Mitchell calls 'jagged intelligence.'
  • Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounder, is quoted saying LLMs 'generalize dramatically worse than people' in a way that is 'very fundamental.'
  • Mitchell says AI researchers, herself included, are still struggling to design effective evaluation methods for LLMs' uneven capabilities.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 17 ↻ 5 ↩ 3 · 5 from the directory shared this · 29d ago
↻ Henry Farrell reposted
@hilzoy.bsky.social

Very interesting. It’s always true that when you give a ruler flexibility to deal with unforeseen problems, you rely on the assumption that that ruler will not abuse that discretion. If we’re going to elect people like Trump, we have to remove all that flexibility.

programmablemutter.com View on Bluesky →

and this with Cosma is in part about how the two ideas fit together knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

AI as Social Technology knightcolumbia.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Farrell and Shalizi argue AI models are social technologies comparable to markets and bureaucracies, not autonomous intelligent agents.
  • All such systems generate lossy, incomplete, and uninvertible representations of reality, creating power effects that benefit some groups over others.
  • The social-technology framing shifts focus from AGI speculation to questions about power, lossiness, and who bears the cost of AI's simplifications.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 25 ↻ 3 ↩ 0 · 4 from the directory shared this · 25d ago

"the Amodei and Biden administration position that you could have your cake and eat it too, depended on a semi-explicit consensus on what US national security was, and how sweeping powers with ambiguous constraints could or could not be used to pursue it. That consensus has no…

programmablemutter.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 27 ↻ 5 ↩ 0 · 14d ago

AI as social technology - I gave the Astor Lecture at Oxford's Blavatnik School last week. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSE6...

youtube.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 38 ↻ 10 ↩ 0 · 2 from the directory shared this · 41d ago
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