November 30, 2022

November 2022 Updates: links, friends, miscellaneous

Links

• ppl underappreciate Sam Altman's blog: https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people (What are your favorite posts?).
• Lena: "MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary."
• Ukraine war
  • Kherson liberated.
    • https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1592103969413025792
    • https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1591114773281656832
  • KUPIANSK OFFENSIVE OPERATION
  • If you'd like to significantly contribute to Ukraine's defense, please reach out. Otherwise, donate to one of these orgs: https://standforukraine.com/.

From friends

• Skejeton is an extraordinarily talented 18-year old living in Kazakhstan and is prolific in C, C++, JS, and Rust. He's looking for coding gigs. I can provide reference.
  • CV: https://gist.github.com/skejeton/2371cd61ae505abd616ce4742b406cc5
  • Email: ishidex2@gmail.com
• Metaphor: "We're building a new search engine from scratch, using the same ideas behind DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. It understands language — in the form of prompts — so you can say what you're looking for in all the expressive and creative ways you can think of."
  • From the incredibly talented Alex Gajewski.
• Everyprompt: "Everyprompt is a pretty good playground for large language models like GPT-3"
  • From the incredibly talented Evan Conrad.
• The incredible Isaak Freeman has started a group house in Berkeley (with good culture, not Berkeley culture). I'm going to be visiting it in January and potentially afterwards. Strongly consider dropping by or staying over if you're visiting the Bay Area.
• The incredible Milan Cvitkovic from Convergent Research is looking for "ambitious, neurotech-interested people (any experience level)" for:
  • A case study of all the neurotech-related DARPA programs.
  • A case study on Medtronic's Activa system.
  • Expansion of Neurotechnology Numbers Worth Knowing.
  • Other incredibly exciting neurotech projects.

I know saying "incredible" so many times sounds kind of stupid but it's all true.

Miscellaneous

• Continuing to think about all of the stuff in the recent posts & essays.
• Continuing to tinker with the GPT-3 interface to amplify the human capacity for thought & action.
• ETA to brain uploading? Fundamental constraints on human abilities due to our physiology?
• Did you seriously think about AI timelines from first-principles and ended at outside of 5-20 years or about AI alignment and ended outside of 10^-2 to 1 - 10^-2?
• Please reach out if anything above seems interesting and you might want to get involved. Or let me know who I should talk to. Open to hiring people to build/investigate these.
• Starting with Athena soon. If you have experience with Executive Assistants (either in-person or remote) and/or running organizations of >50 people, please reach out.
• In New Orleans for NeurIPS this week.
• I'm going to be experimenting with this list and probably sending more posts as they come out, as it's a bit silly to be splitting the update in this way. Let me know if you'd rather not have more frequent updates.

Have a great December!!!

Stay frosty,
Alexey