“AI #97: 4” by Zvi

The Rationalist Project was our last best hope for peace.

An epistemic world 50 million words long, serving as neutral territory.

A place of research and philosophy for 30 million unique visitors

A shining beacon on the internet, all alone in the night.

It was the ending of the Age of Mankind.

The year the Great Race came upon us all.

This is the story of the last of the blogosphere.

The year is 2025. The place is Lighthaven.

As is usually the case, the final week of the year was mostly about people reflecting on the past year or predicting and planning for the new one.

Table of Contents

The most important developments were processing the two new models: OpenAI's o3, and DeepSeek v3.

1. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. The obvious, now at your fingertips.

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   Outline:

   (00:45) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

   (07:23) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

   (07:49) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

   (10:54) Fun With Image Generation

   (13:01) They Took Our Jobs

   (14:34) Get Involved

   (16:23) Get Your Safety Papers

   (28:15) Introducing

   (28:32) In Other AI News

   (30:01) The Mask Comes Off

   (40:08) Wanna Bet

   (44:44) The Janus Benchmark

   (48:07) Quiet Speculations

   (59:29) AI Will Have Universal Taste

   (01:01:26) Rhetorical Innovation

   (01:02:22) Nine Boats and a Helicopter

   (01:07:04) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

   (01:13:19) The Lighter Side

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   First published:
   January 2nd, 2025

   Source:
   https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5rDrErovmTyv4duDv/ai-97-4

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   Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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