I really don’t know how he can fail to see the irony or hypocrisy at complaining about people trading made up probabilities, but apparently he has had that complaint about P(doom) for a while. Maybe he failed to write a call out post about it because any criticism against P(doom) could also be leveled against the entire rationalist project of trying to assign probabilities to everything with poor justification.

I posted about Eliezer hating on OpenPhil for having too long AGI timelines last week. He has continued to rage in the comments and replies to his call out post. It turns out, he also hates AI 2027!

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpguaocJ4y7E3ccuw/contradict-my-take-on-openphil-s-past-ai-beliefs?commentId=3GhNaRbdGto7JrzFT

I looked at “AI 2027” as a title and shook my head about how that was sacrificing credibility come 2027 on the altar of pretending to be a prophet and picking up some short-term gains at the expense of more cooperative actors. I didn’t bother pushing back because I didn’t expect that to have any effect. I have been yelling at people to shut up about trading their stupid little timelines as if they were astrological signs for as long as that’s been a practice (it has now been replaced by trading made-up numbers for p(doom)).

When we say it, we are sneering, but when Eliezer calls them stupid little timelines and compares them to astrological signs it is a top quality lesswrong comment! Also a reminder for everyone that I don’t think we need: Eliezer is a major contributor to the rationalist attitude of venerating super-forecasters and super-predictors and promoting the idea that rational smart well informed people should be able to put together super accurate predictions!

So to recap: long timelines are bad and mean you are a stuffy bureaucracy obsessed with credibility, but short timelines are bad also and going to expend the doomer’s crediblity, you should clearly just agree with Eliezer’s views, which don’t include any hard timelines or P(doom)s! (As cringey as they are, at least they are committing to predictions in a way that can be falsified.)

Also, the mention about sacrificing credibility make me think Eliezer is intentionally willfully playing the game of avoiding hard predictions to keep the grift going (as opposed to self-deluding about reasons not to explain a hard timeline or at least put out some firm P()s ).

It sounds like part, maybe even most, of the problem is self inflicted by the VC model traps and the VCs? I say we keep blocking ads and migrating platforms until VCs learn not to fund stuff with the premise of ‘provide a decent service until we’ve captured enough users, then get really shitty’.

What value are you imagining the LLM providing or adding? They don’t have a rich internal model of the scientific field to provide an evaluation of novelty or contribution to the field. They could maybe spot some spelling or grammar errors, but so can more reliable algorithms. I don’t think they could accurately spot if a paper is basically a copy or redundant, even if given RAG on all the past papers submitted to the conference. A paper carefully building on a previous paper vs. a paper blindly copying a previous paper would look about the same to an LLM.

I kinda half agree, but I’m going to push back on at least one point. Originally most of reddit’s moderation was provided by unpaid volunteers, with paid admins only acting as a last resort. I think this is probably still true even after they purged a bunch of mods that were mad Reddit was being enshittifyied. And the official paid admins were notoriously slow at purging some really blatantly over the line content, like the jailbait subreddit or the original donald trump subreddit. So the argument is that Reddit benefited and still benefits heavily from that free moderation and the content itself generated and provided by users is valuable, so acting like all reddit users are simply entitled free riders isn’t true.

Going from lazy, sloppy human reviews to absolutely no humans is still a step down. LLMs don’t have the capability to generalize outside the (admittedly enormous) training dataset they have, so cutting edge research is one of the worse use cases for them.

Yeah, I think this is an extreme example of a broader rationalist trend of taking their weird in-group beliefs as givens and missing how many people disagree. Like most AI researchers do not believe in the short timelines they do, the median (including their in-group and people that have bought the booster’s hype) guess among AI researchers for AGI is 2050. Eliezer apparently assumes short timelines are self evident from ChatGPT (but hasn’t actually committed to one or a hard date publicly).

The fixation on their own in-group terms is so cringe. Also I think shoggoth is kind of a dumb term for lLMs. Even accepting the premise that LLMs are some deeply alien process (and not a very wide but shallow pool of different learned heuristics), shoggoths weren’t really that bizarre alien, they broke free of their original creators programming and didn’t want to be controlled again.

Eliezer is mad OpenPhil (EA organization, now called Coefficient Giving)… advocated for longer AI timelines? And apparently he thinks they were unfair to MIRI, or didn’t weight MIRI’s views highly enough? And doing so for epistemically invalid reasons? IDK, this post is a bit more of a rant and less clear than classic sequence content (but is par for the course for the last 5 years of Eliezer’s content). For us sane people, AGI by 2050 is still a pretty radical timeline, it just disagrees with Eliezer’s imminent belief in doom. Also, it is notable Eliezer has actually avoided publicly committing to consistent timelines (he actually disagrees with efforts like AI2027) other than a vague certainty we are near doom.

link

Some choice comments

I recall being at a private talk hosted by ~2 people that OpenPhil worked closely with and/or thought of as senior advisors, on AI. It was a confidential event so I can’t say who or any specifics, but they were saying that they wanted to take seriously short AI timelines

Ah yes, they were totally secretly agreeing with your short timelines but couldn’t say so publicly.

Open Phil decisions were strongly affected by whether they were good according to worldviews where “utter AI ruin” is >10% or timelines are <30 years.

OpenPhil actually did have a belief in a pretty large possibility of near term AGI doom, it just wasn’t high enough or acted on strongly enough for Eliezer!

At a meta level, “publishing, in 2025, a public complaint about OpenPhil’s publicly promoted timelines and how those may have influenced their funding choices” does not seem like it serves any defensible goal.

Lol, someone noting Eliezer’s call out post isn’t actually doing anything useful towards Eliezer’s goals.

It’s not obvious to me that Ajeya’s timelines aged worse than Eliezer’s. In 2020, Ajeya’s median estimate for transformative AI was 2050. […] As far as I know, Eliezer never made official timeline predictions

Someone actually noting AGI hasn’t happened yet and so you can’t say a 2050 estimate is wrong! And they also correctly note that Eliezer has been vague on timelines (rationalists are theoretically supposed to be preregistering their predictions in formal statistical language so that they can get better at predicting and people can calculate their accuracy… but we’ve all seen how that went with AI 2027. My guess is that at least on a subconscious level Eliezer knows harder near term predictions would ruin the grift eventually.)

Image and video generation AI can’t create good, novel, art, but it can serve up mediocre remixes of all the standard stuff with only minor defects an acceptable percentage of the time, and that is a value proposition soulless corporate executive are more than eager to take up. And that is just a bonus, I think your last fourth point is Disney’s real motive, establish a monetary value of their IP served up as slop, so they can squeeze other AI providers for their money. Disney was never an ally in this fight.

The fact that Sam was slippery enough to finagle this deal makes me doubt the analysts like Ed Zitron… they may be right from a rational perspective, but if Sam can secure a few major revenue streams and build moat through nonsense like this Disney deal… still it will be tough even if he has another dozen tricks like this one up his sleeves, smaller companies without all the debts and valuation of OpenAI can undercut his prices.

the actual fear of “going mad” seems fundamentally disconnected from any real sense of failing to handle the stress of being famously certain that the end times are indeed upon us

I think he actually is failing to handle the stress he has inflicted on himself, and that’s why his latest few lesswrong posts hadreally stilted poor parables about Chess and about alien robots visiting earth that were much worse than classic sequences parables. And why he has basically given up trying to think of anything new and instead keeps playing the greatest lesswrong hits on repeat, as if that would convince anyone that isn’t already convinced.

Yud, when journalists ask you “How are you coping?”, they don’t expect you to be “going mad facing apocalypse”, that is YOUR poor imagination as a writer/empathetic person. They expect you to be answering how you are managing your emotions and your stress, or bar that give a message of hope or of some desperation, they are trying to engage with you as real human being, not as a novel character.

I think the way he reads the question is telling on himself. He knows he is sort of doing a half-assed response to the impending apocalypse (going on a podcast tour, making even lower-quality lesswrong posts, making unworkable policy proposals, and continuing to follow the lib-centrist deep down inside himself and rejecting violence or even direct action against the AI companies that are hurling us towards an apocalypse). He knows a character from one of his stories would have a much cooler response, but it might end up getting him labeled a terrorist and sent to prison or whatever, so instead he rationalizes his current set of actions. This is in fact insane by rationalist standards, so when a journalist asks him a harmless question it sends him down a long trail of rationalizations that include failing to empathize with the journalist and understand the question.

One part in particular pissed me off for being blatantly the opposite of reality

and remembering that it’s not about me.

And so similarly I did not make a great show of regret about having spent my teenage years trying to accelerate the development of self-improving AI.

Eliezer literally has multiple sequence about his foolish youth where he nearly destroyed the world trying to jump straight to inventing AI instead of figuring out “AI Friendliness” first!

I did not neglect to conduct a review of what I did wrong and update my policies; you know some of those updates as the Sequences.

Nah, you learned nothing from what you did wrong and your sequence posts were the very sort of self aggrandizing bullshit you’re mocking here.

Should I promote it to the center of my narrative in order to make the whole thing be about my dramatic regretful feelings? Nah. I had AGI concerns to work on instead.

Eliezer’s “AGI concerns to work on” was making a plan for him, personally, to lead a small team, which would solve meta-ethics and figure out how to implement these meta-ethics in a perfectly reliable way in an AI that didn’t exist yet (that a theoretical approach didn’t exist for yet, that an inkling of how to make traction on a theoretical approach for didn’t exist yet). The very plan Eliezer came up with was self aggrandizing bullshit that made everything about Eliezer.

I mean, I assume the bigger the pump the bubble the bigger the burst, but at this point the rationalists aren’t really so relevant anymore, they served their role in early incubation.

My poe detection wasn’t sure until the last sentence used the “still early” and “inevitably” lines. Nice.

Another day, another instance of rationalists struggling to comprehend how they’ve been played by the LLM companies: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aKRshJzhojqfbRyo/unless-its-governance-changes-anthropic-is-untrustworthy

A very long, detailed post, elaborating very extensively the many ways Anthropic has played the AI doomers, promising AI safety but behaving like all the other frontier LLM companies, including blocking any and all regulation. The top responses are all tone policing and such denying it in a half-assed way that doesn’t really engage with the fact the Anthropic has lied and broken “AI safety commitments” to rationalist/lesswrongers/EA shamelessly and repeatedly:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aKRshJzhojqfbRyo/unless-its-governance-changes-anthropic-is-untrustworthy?commentId=tBTMWrTejHPHyhTpQ

I feel confused about how to engage with this post. I agree that there’s a bunch of evidence here that Anthropic has done various shady things, which I do think should be collected in one place. On the other hand, I keep seeing aggressive critiques from Mikhail that I think are low-quality (more context below), and I expect that a bunch of this post is “spun” in uncharitable ways.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aKRshJzhojqfbRyo/unless-its-governance-changes-anthropic-is-untrustworthy?commentId=CogFiu9crBC32Zjdp

I think it’s sort of a type error to refer to Anthropic as something that one could trust or not. Anthropic is a company which has a bunch of executives, employees, board members, LTBT members, external contractors, investors, etc, all of whom have influence over different things the company does.

I would find this all hilarious, except a lot of the regulation and some of the “AI safety commitments” would also address real ethical concerns.

Continuation of the lesswrong drama I posted about recently:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=nMaWdu727wh8ukGms

Did you know that post authors can moderate their own comments section? Someone disagreeing with you too much but getting upvoted? You can ban them from your responding to your post (but not block them entirely???)! And, the cherry on top of this questionable moderation “feature”, guess why it was implemented? Eliezer Yudkowsky was mad about highly upvoted comments responding to his post that he felt didn’t get him or didn’t deserve that, so instead of asking moderators to block on a case-by-case basis (or, acasual God forbid, consider maybe if the communication problem was on his end), he asked for a modification to the lesswrong forums to enable authors to ban people (and delete the offending replies!!!) from their posts! It’s such a bizarre forum moderation choice, but I guess habryka knew who the real leader is and had it implemented.

Eliezer himself is called to weigh in:

It’s indeed the case that I haven’t been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if it’d had Twitter’s options for turning off commenting entirely.

So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I haven’t been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.

Uh, considering his recent twitter post… this sure is something. Also" “it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience” no shit sherlock, deleting a highly upvoted reply because it feels like too much effort to respond to is in fact going to make people unsympathetic (at the least).

Even taking their story at face value:

• It seems like they are hyping up LLM agents operating a bunch of scripts?

• It indicates that their safety measures don’t work

• Anthropic will read your logs, so you don’t have any privacy or confidentiality or security using their LLM, but, they will only find any problems months after the fact (this happened in June according to Anthropic but they didn’t catch it until September),

If it’s a Chinese state actor … why are they using Claude Code? Why not Chinese chatbots like DeepSeek or Qwen? Those chatbots code just about as well as Claude. Anthropic do not address this really obvious question.

• Exactly. There are also a bunch of open source models hackers could use for a marginal (if any) tradeoff in performance, with the benefit that they could run locally, so that their entire effort isn’t dependent on hardware outsider of their control in the hands of someone that will shut them down if they check the logs.

You are not going to get a chatbot to reliably automate a long attack chain.

• I don’t actually find it that implausible someone managed to direct a bunch of scripts with an LLM? It won’t be reliable, but if you can do a much greater volume of attacks maybe that makes up for the unreliability?

But yeah, the whole thing might be BS or at least bad exaggeration from Anthropic, they don’t really precisely list what their sources and evidence are vs. what is inference (guesses) from that evidence. For instance, if a hacker tried to setup hacking LLM bots, and they mostly failed and wasted API calls and hallucinated a bunch of shit, if Anthropic just read the logs from their end and didn’t do the legwork contacting people who had allegedly been hacked, they might "mistakenly’ (a mistake that just so happens to hype up their product) think the logs represent successful hacks.

Another ironic point… Lesswronger’s actually do care about ML interpretability (to the extent they care about real ML at all; and as a solution to making their God AI serve their whims not for anything practical). A lack of interpretability is a major problem (like irl problem, not just scifi skynet problem) in ML, you can models with racism or other bias buried in them and not be able to tell except by manually experimenting with your model with data from outside the training set. But Sam Altman has turned it from a problem into a humble brag intended to imply their LLM is so powerful and mysterious and bordering on AGI.

A lesswronger wrote an blog post about avoiding being overly deferential, using Eliezer as an example of someone that gets overly deferred to. Of course, they can’t resist glazing him, even in the context of an blog post on not being too deferential:

Yudkowsky, being the best strategic thinker on the topic of existential risk from AGI

Another lesswronger pushes back on that and is highly upvoted (even among the doomer’s that think Eliezer is a genius, mostly still think he screwed up in inadvertently helping LLM companies get to where they are): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jzy5qqRuqA9iY7Jxu/the-problem-of-graceful-deference-1?commentId=MSAkbpgWLsXAiRN6w

The OP gets mad because this is off topic from what they wanted to talk about (they still don’t acknowledge the irony).

A few days later they write an entire post, ostensibly about communication norms, but actually aimed at slamming the person that went off topic: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uJ89ffXrKfDyuHBzg/the-charge-of-the-hobby-horse

And of course the person they are slamming comes back in for another round of drama: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uJ89ffXrKfDyuHBzg/the-charge-of-the-hobby-horse?commentId=s4GPm9tNmG6AvAAjo

No big point to this, just a microcosm of lesswronger being blind to irony, sucking up to Eliezer, and using long winded posts about meta-norms and communication as a means of fighting out their petty forum drama. (At least sneerclubers are direct and come out and say what they mean on the rare occasions they have beef.)