Awakening, deep research, Qureshi principles, AI for animals, Kendrick at the Super Bowl
nytimes profile (a) on how Psymposia contributed to tanking MAPS' FDA application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
"Mental tension, a subtle form of internal violence faster than thought, is at the root of all your problems."
The Seven Factors of Awakening sound sorta woo but are in fact essentially just common sense.
"The four sights are four events described in the legendary account of Gautama Buddha's life which led to his realization of the impermanence and the ultimate dissatisfaction of conditioned existence." Senescence, disease, death, asceticism!
Job opportunity: work with Matthew Sacchet and Brian Toomey to wake everybody up (and understand what "waking up" means)!
o1 pro with deep research is the biggest step-up in consumer-accessible AI capability since Claude Sonnet 3.6 (and perhaps since ChatGPT itself). Don’t be complacent! If the price tag feels too steep, try having it earn $200/month for you via independent income streams; worth it for just the learning value alone.
Editorial note: a couple issues ago, I made a wrong-way error regarding this piece: The Short Case for Nvidia Stock, suggesting that it was a bull case when it is in fact a bear case. (A casualty of moving through content too fast... embarrassing!) I currently follow Max Novendstern and Albert Wenger in thinking that over the long term, the relatively scarce thing is (high-quality) human attention and that more value will accrue to the brokers of human attention than to the AI infrastructure providers.
The "AI Action Summit" is occurring this weekend in Paris; Shakeel of Transformer released a purported draft of a statement intended to be published as an outcome of the Summit; he is unimpressed.
In January [2025], a group of researchers launched a new benchmark to test the quality of AI models. Named "Humanity's Last Test," it consists of around 3,000 challenges on a hundred topics. The challenges range from solving math and computer science problems to deciphering ancient Roman inscriptions and recalling details from Greek mythology.
In January, OpenAI's latest GPT-4o model managed to solve Humanity's Last Test with 3.3% accuracy, while comparable models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Google Gemini Thinking achieved 4.3% and 6.2%, respectively. DeepSeek-R1, the Chinese model that made waves last week, achieved 9.4%. Now, the new OpenAI deep research model has managed to achieve 26.6% on the test.
Tyler Cowen offers thoughts on how to earn a livelihood in the age of advanced AI.
Tanner Greer intersects Dario’s Machines of Loving Grace with some realpolitik.
Nabeel S. Qureshi (not to be confused with Nabeel Qureshi) offers some life principles. #1, #2, #3, #4, and #34 are all fire, with much wisdom distributed across the others as well! I would personally benefit from more reps on #54.
An EA throwback (from before the FTX implosion: Bad omens in current community building
Ezra Klein on Trump's blitzkrieg strategy (a).
Confessions of the world’s most elite sober coach (a):
Tony is a sober coach, or sober companion, or just “coach”. He has soft, mineral-blue eyes and loose black curls he keeps held back with an Alice band. He helps people with drug and alcohol problems to get or stay sober. Sometimes that means a one-hour “check-in” via Zoom. Sometimes it means becoming a live-in best friend, butler, nanny, therapist and yoga instructor for weeks, or months, or years at a time. If you book him directly, his undivided attention costs between $1,000 and $1,500 a day. He is accustomed to flying halfway around the world to rescue someone from the most degraded, reckless moment of their life.
Twelve hours after the phone call, Tony landed in Europe in the dark and drove to the rural hotel where the star was staying. The actor was lodged under a pseudonym, but Tony talked his way past the front desk and into a hotel room littered with beer bottles. The star was asleep. Taking care not to wake him, Tony checked his pulse and settled in on the floor. He opened his laptop, dimming the brightness. Alcohol withdrawal can be fatal, and he wanted to find a private doctor who would make a house call. The actor’s wife had forbidden Tony from using public hospitals or waiting rooms, where he might be recognised and filmed. A public incident could destroy his career.
I agree with Tyler that his rates seem low. (Price-setting in power-law environments is unintuitive!)
"Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to a lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that an irreversible change in information stored in a computer, such as merging two computational paths, dissipates a minimum amount of heat to its surroundings."
Mauritius "is the only country in Africa where Hinduism is the most practised religion." 1.2 million people; 48% Hindu, 32% Christian, 18% Muslim, 2% everything else.
This lab studying insect welfare at Indiana University seems quite dynamic.
I will be at the AI for Animals conference on March 1st and 2nd in Berkeley; hit me up if you want to nerd out about animal consciousness and digital sentience.
A list of internships & side quests for adults.
Scott Alexander reviews recent goings-on at charter cities around the world. Things at NEOM are looking a bit grim.
Researchers confirm the existence of an exoplanet in the habitable zone.
Model this: "If you want to see stuff flying in the sky, you need to channel a loving energy. That's just the way it works."
"A Christian Reflection on the New Age refers to a six-year study by the Roman Catholic Church on the New Age movement. The study... is highly critical of the New Age movement."
Whenever you find yourself wondering why one of your niche-but-obviously-correct theories doesn’t have more more mainstream uptake, consider that from the outside it is probably indistinguishable from stuff like the Time Cube.
"After the documentary was filmed, the Mamos returned to their work in isolation and asked outsiders not to come to their land.”
There is now a wikipedia page on the Kendrick/Drake beef. And I trust you all will be tuning in to witness Kendrick's halftime show at the Super Bowl tomorrow!