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Joined July 2026
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Von Neumann's essay "Can We Survive Technology" should be revisited. He was speaking on technological development and automation more generally despite this being in the context of nuclear warfare. Such topics are deeply relevant to current concerns, and I trust his epistemics more than any living figure of influence.
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Why are many orgs aggressively hiring/scaling up, yet it's extremely hard to find a full time position?
Why are there calls to expand the number of people doing research in AI safety, yet our academic institutions are crumbling under the weight of the sheer number of papers and outputs?
Why are we exhorted to do research slowly and deeply, yet sped along on crunch time, with the hope that scale will clarify our confusions?
In this new blogpost (done in my personal time), I argue that these are rooted in a tension between a frame of "war mode" and "civilisation mode". This tension, in my view, creates uneasiness and despair, as well as makes it difficult to see clearly.
Check it out on LW: lesswrong.com/posts/7e38jwHh…
or on Substack: davidafrica.substack.com/p/n…
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Brute force computation is not enough for intelligence. Clever new methods are needed. The science of AI is far from finished. IMHO
It is actually baffling how wrong and naive one of the most respected people in alignment's views were as recently as 10 months ago.
I would like for Jan Leike to revisit his jan 2026 "alignment is on track to being solved" post. Human-level alignment research is the given baseline, but humans have shown no indication that they're capable of solving "alignment." This baseline is wrong.
aligned.substack.com/p/align…
I would like for Jan Leike to revisit his jan 2026 "alignment is on track to being solved" post. Human-level alignment research is the given baseline, but humans have shown no indication that they're capable of solving "alignment." This baseline is wrong.
aligned.substack.com/p/align…
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OpenAI has updated their model spec around five core values:
- faithfulness to human intent
- harm minimization
- honesty and transparency
- human agency
- care.
'The Assistant,' which has been around for a very long time, has been replaced with 'GPT.'
We’ve updated the Model Spec, our public description of how we want our models to behave. This revision makes clearer what we want from models as they take on more autonomous work in the world and become capable of helping us in new ways. 🧵
openai.com/index/updated-mod…
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honestly degrading the idea of “existential safety” — the biggest problem humanity has ever faced — by lumping it together with things like spam, “toxicity”, political unwanted content, deepfakes etc has been a huge disaster for ai safety and polarized a lot of people
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So tl;dr
1. OpenAI is power-seeking, and pretty transparent about this
2. Anthropic is power-seeking but tries to appear as if they are good
This "overt" and "covert" misalignment is reflected in GPT and Claude respectively lesswrong.com/posts/nLaQmJf4…
The establishment of an index for genetic selection (Holstein index) in the livestock industry is an interesting case study for thinking about and selecting for variance amongst emergent AI systems.
The concept of variance was introduced in 1918 by Ronald Fisher in an effort to reconcile Mendel's work with continuous traits such as height. I would have thought that a rigorous definition of variance had been established long before this.
What it means to do science is actually not very clear-cut.
Some related questions: how to robustly progress knowledge; how we acquire and retain knowledge, etc.
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This paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.04413 (Bronson also posted).
But the topic is under-explored. E.g. It's plausible there'll now be swarms of abliterated SOTA models told to hack things. How misaligned will these models be and what would they actually do? Unclear.
