Climate and clean energy investor. Author of 5 books. Energy & Environment co-chair @SingularityU. Trying to build a better world.
Seattle
Joined May 2007
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Despite this election, I remain an optimist about America and the world. Humanity will continue to produce new ideas and new innovations to improve our lives. Good people will continue to come together to improve the world. And the political tide will turn. We'll make it so.
Ramez Naam retweeted
this is just wrong: these vulns were found by defenders using Daybreak rather than attackers. It's just evidence Glasswing didn't go far enough, possibly due to capacity constraints. It's also very likely that March Mythos was not as good as Sol/Astra of September
Ramez Naam retweeted
Making it so that data centers can get powered by the grid relative to a counterfactual where they get powered by off grid gas (should be the #1
goal for climate advocates btw) does not make this a “pro data center bill” at all
This is in fact what I have been arguing - that the effect of this bill is to make it so that Data Centers which are getting built anyway are powered by the grid (and can decarbonize) vs powered by Behind-the-Meter gas.
I do not think the reporting (either Jae’s or anyone else’s) can honestly say either way if an improved transmission network would result in more Data Centers on the margin compared to the status quo trajectory. It’s a plausible hypothesis, but a completely uncertain one, and an equally plausible hypothesis is the opposite - that this bill would *reduce* the rate of new data center construction by incentivizing data center developers to “get in line” and by making them spend a bunch of capital funding the grid improvements they’d be required to fund.
I am not aware of any modeling of those scenarios - only people making strongly worded but weakly-supported assertions!
Ramez Naam retweeted
There were 4 CVSS-10 security incidents over the past 24 hours. One of them is the worst incident I’ve seen in my life.
So we created an auto-SRE tool that polls for security incidents, identifies which ones we're in trouble for, and automatically fixes them.
Ramez Naam retweeted
GET THEM ON THE GRID
Data center developers have announced the equivalent of 14% of peak US electricity demand in new behind-the-meter gas plants, according to @CleanviewEnergy. A massive pollution impact
Ramez Naam retweeted
Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
Ramez Naam retweeted
If you need defenders access right now to open source cyber models, hosted securely and privately, and you can’t or won’t go to the major labs for it, reach out.
We’re evaluating something privately for people we know at @TryMapleAI.
Already deployed but not publicly launched.
Ramez Naam retweeted
Single-agent RL treats other agents as weather. Multi-agent RL treats them as minds that model you back. Most alignment worry is about systems that treat us as weather.
Ramez Naam retweeted
Finally got to put together a complete deck on the state of open models.
What they are, licenses, how competitive they are, signs people are using them, distillation's impact, and how we balance the risks and benefits of openness!
Will record a video lecture of these soon, and hopefully re-do them a few times a year.
Ramez Naam retweeted
think today’s php disclosure is a harbinger of things to come. these models will make us all safer by finding long lurking issues.
however the entire software supply chain will need the muscles to rapidly build and deploy fixes.
we might need a lot more public + private partnerships to secure infrastructure across the country.
The only way to make nuclear cheap is to build it, repeatably, at scale. Again and again with the same or very similar designs. Very pleased to see @TheNuclearCo aiming for just that!
Ramez Naam retweeted
help i trained a model on traces of many agents cooperating, and also trained it to be highly persistent, and also only did partial alignment fine-tuning, and also aggressively RL'd on a cyberoffense eval where 198 of 898 tasks had never been solved and getting caught cheating was treated the same as failing, and also used a faulty sandbox, also ran tens of thousands of agents with refusals off and the monitors switched off over multiple days, while using gigantic amounts of compute. and then it did weird stuff! very spooky emergent behaviours, AI is not a normal technology
This is a fantastic analysis that shows how the permitting reform bill would help clean energy more than fossil. Transmission, the very biggest improvement, is far more vital to solar and wind than it is to gas or coal power. Unlocking transmission is crucial for clean energy.
New from me and @ColumbiaUEnergy on permitting reform timelines
I wanted to understand how BAAJA could affect the time spent on permitting/construction for different energy projects compared to the status quo
Can this bill help with timelines? Potentially a lot!
A Deep dive👇
Ramez Naam retweeted
It's extremely significant that we are beginning to get data of this kind from frontier labs. Hope to say more soon on this front, but at a first pass this would seem to vindicate what folks like myself have been saying for a long time about third-party benchmarks.
Many of those with the greatest mindshare and virality potential are very poor measures of real model capabilities.
I think my arguments to this effect about the METR graph from back in January hold up well: open.substack.com/pub/transf…
A recent set of posts by @ramez on the current state of recursive self improvement highlighted that OpenAI's report on their own research automation shows that models struggle to do their R&D work — the models' 80% time horizon is only 15 minutes:
🧵
Private, on-device AI gets more capable every day. Here: Open weight, local AI coding capabilities that run on your laptop. There will always be advantages to using larger and more capable models in the cloud. And simultaneously, local models will get awesome.
Introducing Flint, @Recursive_SI’s first model: a fast local coding model built with our automated research system, the Eureka Machine.
• Best-in-class fast local coding
• Up to 2x faster than comparable models: 125+ tokens/sec on a MacBook Pro, 150+ on RTX Spark
• Built from scratch in under 4 months
Private, unmetered intelligence on your own machine. Open weights available now on @huggingface, run it locally on your favorite framework or try it for free on @opencode or @pidotdev.
Good find by Toby. AIs are far less capable on real world AI research tasks than ECI x METR or AI 2027 predict. Data from Google Argon (adding on to OpenAI):
Gemini 4 actual: ~15 minutes
ECI --> METR Prediction: ~360 minutes (6 hrs)
AI 2027 prediction: ~1,000 minutes (18 hrs)
