Ted Underwood

MIT report is superb. It acknowledges disruption, concedes different disciplines will handle this differently, foregrounds people and social interaction — but also says something obvious I had just about given up hope institutions could say: aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/

Report – AI and Education aiandeducation.mit.edu

I respect the candor here. But I don't agree with the geopolitics, at all. The line between democracies and autocracies is not as crisp as this pretends. How much do we trust, e.g., an AI company in a competitive-authoritarian state that launches sneak decapitation attacks & b…

Our position on open-weights models anthropic.com

I just eliminated 22 tabs by doing this: osascript -e 'tell application "Google Chrome" to get URL of every tab of front window' | tr ',' '\n' | grep arxiv.org list of urls -> LLM -> annotated reading list that I no longer have to keep in my browser like an idiot

arXiv.org e-Print archive arxiv.org

So, naive question about these campuses that pay OpenAI $13mil/yr. Why don’t they pour that money into a cluster running the strongest available open-weight model, with API and interactive options. And if the answer is “overhead,” why aren’t we collaborating?

So, my friends have convinced me it’s not true that AI leads inevitably to cognitive surrender. But I’m getting a *little* worried <looks around at friends a second time> that it leads either to cognitive surrender or to working 18-hour days while muttering things like “soon, soon …”

As it becomes clear that language models—like humans—love passing notes to each other on message boards, I’m starting to think the thing we need to worry about is not the “alignment” of an isolated model but, like, the fluid dynamics of a language slurry.

I think if you start by taking OpenAI 100% at their word, the phrase "inspired by these rumors" still announces "we did something fairly slimy by trying to scoop priority." Maybe it doesn't read as slimy in the social world they inhabit, but it would in mine.

Lots of gratitude to @carlbergstrom.com for quoting probably my favorite of my own sentences about AI at @arl.org

Ironies around this Anthropic copyright settlement: a) That's about $3000 more than I ever made from the original books. b) Would have missed the notification if I didn't have an LLM scouring my mail. c) The money will likely go right back to a bunch of AI labs via OpenRouter.

People are celebrating or mourning the Ant IPO, but I'm still trying to understand the worldview where frontier labs not being profitable *would have proven* AI isn't transformative. I think it's maybe a capitalist mysticism where social life is mostly Illusion, and only the Profitable is Real?

The recent popularity of the move to blame AI firms for ineffective *marketing* is mostly: a) a lot of people now realize they were wrong to spend 3 yrs insisting the tech was useless + b) “I was wrong” is a sentence most humans can’t write. = c) “they explained it badly.”

Wild watching people who use Bluesky — and browsers, and operating systems — try to keep their lives uncontaminated by any software that has passed through a language model. It's like the last act of Alien or The Thing, where they start to realize the infection is everywhere; the infection is us.

so sick of AI / fluid dynamics discourse on this app; now to relax with a big swig of hot milky tea