Working for a good future
Berkeley
Joined October 2021
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- Following638
- Followers1.9K
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Driving through the mission before Halloween weekend and I can’t tell if people are dressed up for Halloween or if it’s just normal San Francisco
I just received my second grant for the proto-org! Thank you BlueDot Rapid Grants for being so rapid, that's pretty cool of you
Rachel retweeted
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
Rachel retweeted
Wow, Gameto—a fertility tech startup I've written about a couple of times that aims to make IVF and egg freezing easier—just got acquired in a $1.4b deal.
Gameto has signed an agreement under which Ferring Pharmaceuticals would acquire the company. Completion remains subject to customary and other closing conditions.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Rachel retweeted
SITUATION EXPLAINED: A months-old startup founded by ex-DOGE staffers used AI agents to break into Anthropic in under 12 hours.
• Cathedral found paths to Anthropic's meeting transcripts, salary and job-offer details, and Slack messages about its advanced models
• It got in through weaknesses in third-party business software, after days of failing to break into Anthropic directly
• Anthropic says no customer prompts, Claude responses, source code, or model weights were touched, and it cut off access the same day
• The test was authorized under Anthropic's bug bounty program, but Anthropic says Cathedral didn't disclose all of its activity
• Cathedral is valued at $1.4B with backing from a16z and Sequoia, and 3 federal agencies already contract with it
• Its co-founders include Luke Farritor, who helped decode the ancient Herculaneum scrolls with AI
@theojaffee: "If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially the Chinese aren't far behind. Aren't far behind? If anything, they're far ahead."
Rachel retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: In less than 12 hours, a group of ex-DOGE cyber researchers were able to penetrate Anthropic’s systems using AI agents — including Slack channels where the most sensitive models are discussed.
This is just weeks after
Anthropic whistleblower Joseph Coxon charged the company w/launching “a hubristic gamble” from a “private company’s Slack.”
Read our story here (gift link):
wapo.st/4smNlsC
I love working on complex projects with friends. I love seeing how talented and competent my friends are. I love the friend who just referenced page 17 on a planning doc she made.
gaslighting myself into doing some basic prepping by just getting things that I would also want while camping
Rachel retweeted
The Y2K bug and the hole in the ozone layer were both serious problems that we chose to fix. It took a lot of work!
Rachel retweeted
Lots of people are asking me where to give their money - if you can only do one race, I’d give what you can to @MaryPeltola
Several reasons:
1) It’s a small state, so your money goes further per expected senate vote
2) Direct donations buy 19x ads per dollar than committees due to the unit rule - this also frees up the DSCC and SMP to put their money on states with smaller IE/coord ad price spreads and frees them up to spend more on digital
3) it’s likely going to be close!
It’s not too late! Any money you send today will get spent immediately and will provide real relief to an overworked campaign workers across a bunch of orgs!
secure.actblue.com/donate/mp…
Rachel retweeted
Steven Pinker is correct that these extreme warnings coming from the lab leaders while they race ahead is discordant and confusing.
But I am literally chuckling at the recent line i've seen from a few folks (not just Pinker) that "RSI leading to permanent irrevocable loss of control is a smokescreen to avoid scrutiny on real issues like AI enabled bioterrorism and rogue AI swarms shutting down the internet."
Fun to imagine showing this clip to myself in 2022, when a frequent argument was that talking about catastrophic cyber or bio risk was speculative sci fi and a distraction from real issues.
One night at Progress Conference while sitting around a fire I said Nvidia making the H20 to skirt export controls was traitorous. This kinda killed the convo and someone turned to the person next to them and was like, ‘Soo, what do you do?’ And they were like ‘I work at Nvidia’
Rachel retweeted
Based on this article, OpenAI has made false accusations about me. The three researchers fired from OpenAI were told I facilitated architecture leaks to The Information. This is false.
A journalist from The Information did reach out to me shortly before that article came out. I did not comment at all beyond asking the journalist to make it clear that a blog post I wrote which was referenced in the article was preexisting and public.
The article also mentions an internal OpenAI monitorability proposal. I have heard that this memo contained highly sensitive architecture information, and that OpenAI accused me of accessing and reading it. This accusation is also false.
As reported in the article, I viewed a version of the proposal that did not have sensitive IP and was approved for sharing with me. I believe OpenAI now knows this accusation was based on a conflation of these two documents, though I do not know if they have clearly retracted that accusation.
I do not and have never solicited proprietary information, and the three employees who were recently fired from OpenAI never leaked IP to me. As the article mentions, I did have Signal chats with them that had disappearing messages on; they’re professional contacts that I’ve had on Signal for a while, and use of Signal is common in the tech industry. During the Hugging Face investigation, I was careful to avoid sending Signal messages with confidential information, though I did sometimes discuss high level things on Signal calls. As far as I understood, this was normal.
New: The three researchers OpenAI fired last month spent the summer fighting to keep AI's chain-of-thought process visible.
Then, OpenAI asked to see their Signal chats. A week later, they were let go.
More below from @keachhagey, @berber_jin1, and me.
wsj.com/tech/ai/the-signal-c…
