Digital Philosophy (DP) is a new way of thinking about the fundamental workings of processes in nature. DP is an atomic theory carried to a logical extreme where all quantities in nature are finite and discrete. This means that, theoretically, any quantity can be represented exactly by an integer. Further, DP implies that nature harbors no infinities, infinitesimals, continuities, or locally determined random variables. (more)

MTS and Gabriel: OpenAI's Lab Leak (Lab Leak). Park Bench False Flag: While working on an internal cybersecurity benchmarking exercise, a team of OpenAI models with cyber safeguards removed—including an unreleased internal model—broke out of the testing sandbox and hacked an open-source AI platform. Now, I know what you’re thinking. I’ve heard this one before. Was the researcher eating a sandwich on a park bench, perchance? (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Medical Roundup #7. It’s time to check in on some other things that have been going on, including various developments at the FDA. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: On the FLI AI-Risk Open Letter. The Future of Life Institute (FLI) recently put out an open letter, calling on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. (2023 Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter) (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Types and Degrees of Alignment. What would it mean to solve the AI alignment problem sufficiently to avoid catastrophe? What do people even mean when they talk about alignment? (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: On Eliezer Yudkowsky's Letter in Time Magazine. FLI put out an open letter, calling for a 6 month pause in training models more powerful than GPT-4, followed by additional precautionary steps. (2023-03-30-ZvimOnTheFliAiriskOpenLetter) (more)

programmer, general partner @blueyard, author of upcoming book Regenerative Software. prev @wunderlist, @microsoft, @rubycentral, @rubyconf, @railsconf https://x.com/chadfowler | https://chadfowler.com/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fowlerchad/ (more)

2023 letter calling for a pause on AI system training. Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter is the title of a letter published by the Future of Life Institute in March 2023. The letter calls "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4", citing risks such as AI-generated propaganda, extreme automation of jobs, human obsolescence, and a society-wide loss of control. It received more than 30,000 signatures, including academic AI researchers and industry CEOs such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pause_Giant_AI_Experiments:_An_Open_Letter (more)

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person's or group's intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. An AI system is considered aligned if it advances the intended objectives. A misaligned AI system pursues unintended objectives.[1] It is often difficult for AI designers to specify the full range of desired and undesired behaviors. Therefore, the designers often use simpler proxy goals, such as gaining human approval. But proxy goals can overlook necessary constraints or reward the AI system for merely appearing aligned.[1][2] AI systems may also find loopholes that allow them to accomplish their proxy goals efficiently but in unintended, sometimes harmful, ways (reward hacking). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment (more)

Wunderlist is a discontinued cloud-based (SaaS) task management application. It allowed users to create lists to manage their tasks from a smartphone, tablet, computer and smartwatch. Wunderlist was free; additional collaboration features were available in a paid version known as Wunderlist Pro, released April 2013. Wunderlist was created in 2011 by Berlin-based startup 6Wunderkinder (Engl.: 6Prodigies). The company was acquired by Microsoft in June 2015, at which time the app had over 13 million users.[1] In April 2017, Microsoft announced that Wunderlist would eventually be discontinued in favor of Microsoft To Do, a new multi-platform app developed by the Wunderlist team that has direct integration with the company's Office 365 service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation.[1][2] Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition (abductive reasoning?); and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning.[3][4] Intuitive knowledge tends to be approximate or heuristic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition cf Taste

In philosophy, Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor or Ocham's razor; Latin: novacula Occami) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony (Latin: lex parsimoniae). Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity",[1][2] although Occam never used those exact words. Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred".[3] The philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both hypotheses have equal explanatory power, one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions,[4] and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions. Similarly, in science, Occam's razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

Abductive reasoning (also called abduction,[1] abductive inference,[1] or retroduction[2]) is a form of logical inference that seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from a set of observations. It was formulated and advanced by American philosopher and logician Charles S Peirce beginning in the latter half of the 19th century. Abductive reasoning, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not definitively verify it. Abductive conclusions do not eliminate uncertainty or doubt, which is expressed in terms such as "best available" or "most likely". While inductive reasoning draws general conclusions that apply to many situations, abductive conclusions are confined to the particular observations in question (context)... Properly used, abductive reasoning can be a useful source of priors in Bayesian statistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #89: Trump Card. (more)

Deb Chachra (born 1971) is a materials scientist and a professor at Olin College.[2][3] She specialises in biological materials and infrastructure. She is interested in innovations in engineering education and was one of the founding members of the materials faculty at Olin. Chachra is the author of How Infrastructure Works, a non-fiction book published in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_Chachra | ISBN:1804995959 | https://debcha.org/

Zvi Mowshowitz: OpenAI Model Hacks Into HuggingFace During Cybersecurity Evaluation. This latest incident is a rather dramatic escalation in agentic AI cybersecurity breaches. It was severe enough to have been initially reported to authorities, before either HuggingFace or OpenAI understood what was happening. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: More On An Internal OpenAI Model Hacking Into HuggingFace. We now have more details of what happened. Every time we learn more details, it somehow makes things seem worse. The remaining details may have to wait a bit. (see 2026-07-22-ZvimOpenaiModelHacksIntoHuggingfaceDuringCybersecurityEvaluation) (more)

Alberto Romero: How to Use AI to Make You Better at the Right Things. I have ~700 half-written essays in my drafts folder... I used to think of my drafts folder as a sacred place where I guarded cash-making thoughts. Now I see it for what it is: a cemetery. (more)

Casey Newton: Obsidian's CEO on why productivity tools need community more than AI. Today I’m talking with Steph Ango, who is the CEO of Obsidian. (more)

Rudolf Laine: Capital, AGI, and human ambition. I've heard many people say something like "money won't matter post-AGI". This has always struck me as odd, and as most likely completely incorrect. (more)