Astral Codex Ten Podcast

AI Futures Project is the group behind AI 2027 . I've been helping them with their blog . Posts written or co-written by me include: Beyond The Last Horizon - what's behind that METR result showing that AI time horizons double every seven months? And is it really every seven months? Might it be faster? AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism - a look at some of the response to AI 2027, with links to...

[I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] ttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2025

(original post: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does ) … Thanks to everyone who commented on this controversial post. Many people argued that the phrase had some valuable insight, but disagreed on what it was. The most popular meaning was something like "if a system consistently fails at its stated purpose, but people don't change it, consider that the stated purpose is l...

(see Wikipedia: The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does ) Consider the following claims The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients. The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia. The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then...

Here's a list of things I updated on after working on the scenario . Some of these are discussed in more detail in the supplements, including the compute forecast , timelines forecast , takeoff forecast , AI goals forecast , and security forecast . I'm highlighting these because it seems like a lot of people missed their existence, and they're what transforms the scenario from cool story to resear...

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like. 1 It's informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes. https://ai-2027.com/   (A condensed two-hour version with foot...

Or maybe 2028, it's complicated In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called " What 2026 Looks Like ", where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years. The world delights in thwarting would-be prophets. The sea of possibilities is too vast for anyone to ever really chart a course. At best, we vaguely gesture at broad categories of outcome,...

In Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary: Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colours of her coat Were better than good news. Why the colors of her coat? The medievals took their dyes very seriously. This was before modern chemistry, so you had to try hard if you wanted good colors. Try hard they did; they famously used literal go...

Asterisk invited me to participate in their "Weird" themed issue, so I wrote five thousand words on evil Atlantean cave dwarves. As always, I thought of the perfect framing just after I'd sent it out. The perfect framing is - where did Scientology come from? How did a 1940s sci-fi writer found a religion? Part of the answer is that 1940s sci-fi fandom was a really fertile place, where all of these...

People love trying to find holes in the drowning child thought experiment. This is natural: it's obvious you should save the child in the scenario, but much less obvious that you should give lots of charity to poor people (as it seems to imply). So there must be some distinction between the two scenarios. But most people's cursory and uninspired attempts to find these fail. https://www.astralcodex...

Jake Eaton has a great article on misophonia in Asterisk. Misophonia is a condition in which people can't tolerate certain noises (classically chewing). Nobody loves chewing noises, but misophoniacs go above and beyond, sometimes ending relationships, shutting themselves indoors, or even deliberately trying to deafen themselves in an attempt to escape. So it's a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Ma...

Last month, I put out a request for experts to help me understand the details of OpenAI's forprofit buyout. The following comes from someone who has looked into the situation in depth but is not an insider. Mistakes are mine alone. Why Was OpenAI A Nonprofit In The First Place? In the early 2010s, the AI companies hadn't yet discovered scaling laws, and so underestimated the amount of compute (and...

Sorry, you can only get drugs when there's a drug shortage. Three GLP-1 drugs are approved for weight loss in the United States: Semaglutide (Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Rybelsus®) Tirzepatide (Mounjaro®, Zepbound®) Liraglutide (Victoza®, Saxenda®) …but liraglutide is noticeably worse than the others, and most people prefer either semaglutide or tirzepatide. These cost about $1000/month and are rarely cove...

Most headlines have said something like New NAEP Scores Dash Hope Of Post-COVID Learning Recovery , which seems like a fair assessment. I feel bad about this, because during lockdowns I argued that kids' educational outcomes don't suffer long-term from missing a year or two of school . Re-reading the post, I still think my arguments make sense. So how did I get it so wrong? When I consider this qu...

Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain. Different animals' intelligence levels track the number of neurons in their cerebral cortices (cerebellum etc don't count). Neuron number predicts animal intelligence better than most other variables like brain size, brain size divided by body size, " encephalization quotient ", etc. This is most obvious in certain bird spe...

I enjoy the yearly book review contest, but it feels like last year's contest is barely done, and I want to give you a break so you can read more books before we start over. So this year, let's do something different. Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book. You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But...

[I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-february-2025

Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn't because one side doesn't understand economics. It's because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are rac...

[Original thread here: Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God's Existence. ] 1: Comments On Specific Technical Points 2: Comments From Bentham's Bulldog's Response 3: Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fights https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-tegmarks

St. Felix publicly declared that he believed with 79% probability that COVID had a natural origin. He was brought before the Emperor, who threatened him with execution unless he updated to 100%. When St. Felix refused, the Emperor was impressed with his integrity, and said he would release him if he merely updated to 90%. St. Felix refused again, and the Emperor, fearing revolt, promised to releas...

It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are debating the proofs for the existence of God . I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis , and this doesn't seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I'll put it out there. Tegmark's hypothesis says: all possible mathematical objects exist. Consider a mathematical object like a cellular...

From the Commerce Department : U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advance...

In the past day, Zvi has written about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has updated their spec . This article was written before either of these and doesn't account for them, sorry. I. OpenAI has bad luck with its alignment teams. The first team quit en masse to found Anthropic, now a major competitor. The second team quit en masse to protest the company reneging on safety commitments. The third...

As RFK Jr. fights to be confirmed in Congress, the rest of Trump's health team is already taking shape. 1DaySooner is an ACX grantee organization that advocates for innovative health policies. They've helped me write a list of who some of these people are, and some of the policies they could consider. For practical reasons, we focus on upside only, so consider these the Venn-diagram-union of the i...

I. PEPFAR - a Bush initiative to send cheap AIDS drugs to Africa - has saved millions of lives and is among the most successful foreign aid programs ever . A Trump decision briefly put it "on pause", although this seems to have been walked back; its current status is unclear but hopeful. In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help fo...