(2025-01-30) Zvim Ai101 The Shallow End

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #101: The Shallow End. This week we’re going to consider China, DeepSeek and r1 fully split off from everything else, and we’ll cover everything related to DeepSeek, including the policy responses to the situation, tomorrow instead.

This is everything else in AI from the past week.

Table of Contents

• Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Time to think deeply.
• Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Writers shall remain blocked.
• Language Models Don’t Offer You In Particular Mundane Utility. It’s your fault.
• (Don’t) Feel the AGI. I wonder how much of this has changed since I wrote it?
• Huh, Upgrades. Claude gets citations, o1 gets canvas.
• They Took Our Jobs. Will there be enough GPUs to take all our jobs?
• Get Involved. IFP is hiring an AI policy lobbyist.
• Introducing. Two other new Chinese models are not as impressive so far.
• In Other AI News. Great Scott!
• Hype. OpenAI used to be the one with the hype, and perhaps it wasn’t so great.
• We Had a Deal. Final details on what happened FrontierMath.
• Quiet Speculations. What life might look like how fast in Glorious AGI Future.
• The Quest for Sane Regulations. We were signing EOs before everyone panicked.
• The Week in Audio. It’s me, going on Odd Lots, also Dario Amodei.
• Don’t Tread on Me. AGI means rewriting the social contract, no matter what.
• Rhetorical Innovation. Trump opines, and then also there’s a long rant.
• Scott Sumner on Objectivity in Taste, Ethics and AGI. Gesturing at a response.
• The Mask Comes Off (1). There are reasons OpenAI and Elon Musk don’t get along.
• The Mask Comes Off (2). Steven Adler, another OpenAI safety researcher, quits.
• International AI Safety Report. If you want the information, it’s all there.
• One Step at a Time. Myopic optimization with non-myopic approval (technical).
• Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Don’t rely on control.
• Two Attractor States. Sufficiently aligned and capable AI, or the other option.
• You Play to Win the Game. If your plan doesn’t work, it’s not a good plan.
• Six Thoughts on AI Safety. Boaz Barak of OpenAI offers them.
• AI Situational Awareness. It knows what you trained it to do.
• People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Lots of exciting projects ahead?
• Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Lying flat, not dead.
• The Lighter Side. Update directionality depends upon prior knowledge base.

Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

AI tutors beat out active learning classrooms in a Harvard study by a good margin, for classes like physics and economics.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

Kai Cenat’s $70k AI humanoid robot just tried running away from the AMP house because it kept getting kicked and bullied by Kai, Agent & Fanum

Education is where I see the strongest disagreements about AI impact, in the sense that those who generally find AI useful see it as the ultimate tool for learning things that will unleash the world’s knowledge and revolutionize education, and then there are others who see things another way.

Yes, you can use AI to get around your assignments if that’s what you want to do and the system keeps giving you those assignments. Or you can actually try to learn something. If you don’t take that option, I don’t believe you that you would have been learning something before.

Language Models Don’t Offer You In Particular Mundane Utility

Your periodic reminder that the main way to not get utility is to not realize to do so

Even better than realizing you can use ChatGPT, of course, is using a mix of Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, r1, o1, o1 pro and yes, occasionally GPT-4o.

When doing the things we normally do, you largely do them the way you normally do them. People keep asking if I use LLMs for writing, and no, when writing directly I very much don’t and find all the ‘help me write’ functionality useless – but it’s invaluable for many steps of the process that puts me into position to write, or to help develop and evaluate the ideas that the writing is about.

(Don’t) Feel the AGI

Huh, Upgrades