I signed this statement opposing unaccountable AI kill-decisions in the military. I think autonomous weapons have a place if done right. Right now's "all lawful use" is not "done right", in practice. www.accessnow.org/press-releas...
Who's Who of AI
Alex Turner
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Researcher with public evidence across AI research, Models & releases.
- AI signals
- 6 past 30d
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- 2d ago
Research scientist at Google DeepMind. All opinions are my own. Vegan, 10% of my income pledged to effective charities (GWWC)
https://turntrout.com
What they're sharing
Access Now - Joint statement on AI in warfare accessnow.org
Why I Left Google DeepMind turntrout.com
A Red Line and Oversight Framework for Government AI Contracts turntrout.com
Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) on X x.com
Transformer | Substack transformernews.ai
View on Bluesky →
I tried to stop Google DeepMind's Pentagon deal. Then I quit. transformernews.ai
View on Bluesky →
How Robust Are Natural Language Autoencoders to Initialization? turntrout.com
NEWS: Schiff Introduces Comprehensive Legislation to Enact Commonsense Guardrails for Defense Department’s Use of AI schiff.senate.gov
Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes Self-Fulfilling (Mis)alignment alignmentpretraining.ai
Articles & links
I think many hope that when things get bad enough, someone powerful will say "no." I tested that for months. Anthropic defended its red lines, Google did not. Pledges of conscience often vaporize on contact with power. My full account: turntrout.com/why-i-left-g...
To prepare, I wrote a principled alternative for Google: 25 pages of contract language & oversight mechanisms, praised by a leading military-law expert. turntrout.com/red-line-fra...
Jeff was outspoken against government abuse of AI: x.com/JeffDean/sta... I thought that if Jeff told Google he'd leave on an unethical deal, he could force ethics restrictions or stop the deal. He's that important.
Alex Turner reposted
When @turntrout.bsky.social discovered that Google DeepMind had U-turned on its promise not to let its AI be used in weapons, he fought his employer – then quit Read his op-ed on transformernews.ai 👉 www.transformernews.ai/p/i-tried-to...
Alex Turner reposted
When @turntrout.bsky.social discovered that Google DeepMind had U-turned on its promise not to let its AI be used in weapons, he fought his employer – then quit Read his op-ed on transformernews.ai 👉 www.transformernews.ai/p/i-tried-to...
Caveats: we used a small model (Qwen2.5-7B) on a small dataset (1/5 of what the Anthropic paper had). Read: turntrout.com/natural-lang...
I read Senator Schiff's HALO act and it seems like a good step. www.schiff.senate.gov/news/press-r...
alignmentpretraining.ai did something like this
Their own posts
Recent commentary
I resigned from Google DeepMind bc it broke its founding promise by selling AI to the military without restrictions against killer robots or mass spying. For months, I worked to stop this but watched powerful ethicists and institutions choose silence. Here's what happened. 🧵
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