For months, I had the feeling: something is wrong. Some core part of myself had gone missing. I had words and ideas cached, which pointed back to the missing part. There was the story of Benjamin Jesty, a dairy farmer who vaccinat...

(Disclaimer: Post written in a personal capacity. These are personal hot takes and do not in any way represent my employer's views.) TL;DR: I do not think we will produce high reliability methods to evaluate or monitor the safety of super...

It'll take until ~2050 to repeat the level of scaling that pretraining compute is experiencing this decade, as increasing funding can't sustain the current pace beyond ~2029 if AI doesn't deliver a transformative commercial success by then. Natur...

In this blog post, we analyse how the recent AI 2027 forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean has been discussed across Chinese language platforms. We present: Our research methodo...

This is a link post. to follow up my philantropic pledge from 2020, i've updated my philanthropy page with the 2024 results. in 2024 my donations funded $51M worth of endpoint grants (plus $2.0M in admin overhead and philanthropic software...

I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart the people who’ve done the best work at Anthropic. You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the gen...

This is a link post. Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France's fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined startin...

We’ve written a new report on the threat of AI-enabled coups. I think this is a very serious risk – comparable in importance to AI takeover but much more neglected. In fact, AI-enabled coups and AI takeover have pretty similar t...

Back in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents arrived on a KLM fligh...

Subtitle: Bad for loss of control risks, bad for concentration of power risks I’ve had this sitting in my drafts for the last year. I wish I’d been able to release it sooner, but on the bright side, it’ll make a lot more ...

Though, given my doomerism, I think the natsec framing of the AGI race is likely wrongheaded, let me accept the Dario/Leopold/Altman frame that AGI will be aligned to the national interest of a great power. These people seem to take as an axiom t...

Introduction Writing this post puts me in a weird epistemic position. I simultaneously believe that: The reasoning failures that I'll discuss are strong evidence that current LLM- or, more ...

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously,...

Audio note: this article contains 31 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Lewis Smith*, Sen Rajamanoharan*, Arthur Conmy, Callum McDougall, ...

This is a link post. When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching the holes with sand. The goal was just ...

This is part of the MIRI Single Author Series. Pieces in this series represent the beliefs and opinions of their named authors, and do not claim to speak for all of MIRI. Okay, I'm annoyed at people covering AI 2027 burying the lede, so I...

Short AI takeoff timelines seem to leave no time for some lines of alignment research to become impactful. But any research rebalances the mix of currently legible research directions that could be handed off to AI-assisted alignment researchers ...

In this post, we present a replication and extension of an alignment faking model organism: Replication: We replicate the alignment faking (AF) paper and release our code. Classifier Improvements: We signi...

Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapola...

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the street...

In 2021 I wrote what became my most popular blog post: What 2026 Looks Like. I intended to keep writing predictions all the way to AGI and beyond, but chickened out and just published up till 2026. Well, it's finally time. I'm back, and ...

Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happene...

Epistemic status: This post aims at an ambitious target: improving intuitive understanding directly. The model for why this is worth trying is that I believe we are more bottlenecked by people having good intuitions guiding their research than, f...

Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happene...

I'm not writing this to alarm anyone, but it would be irresponsible not to report on something this important. On current trends, every car will be crashed in front of my house within the next week. Here's the data: Until today, only two ...