“AI #99: Farewell to Biden” by Zvi

The fun, as it were, is presumably about to begin.

And the break was fun while it lasted.

Biden went out with an AI bang. His farewell address warns of a ‘Tech-Industrial Complex’ and calls AI the most important technology of all time. And there was not one but two AI-related everything bagel concrete actions proposed – I say proposed because Trump could undo or modify either or both of them.

One attempts to build three or more ‘frontier AI model data centers’ on federal land, with timelines and plans I can only summarize with ‘good luck with that.’ The other move was new diffusion regulations on who can have what AI chips, an attempt to actually stop China from accessing the compute it needs. We shall see what happens.

Table of Contents

1. Table of Contents.
2. Language Models Offer [...]

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Outline:

(00:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(06:45) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(10:40) What AI Skepticism Often Looks Like

(13:59) A Very Expensive Chatbot

(16:07) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(21:51) Fun With Image Generation

(22:15) They Took Our Jobs

(27:53) The Blame Game

(31:25) Copyright Confrontation

(31:44) The Six Million Dollar Model

(34:51) Get Involved

(35:15) Introducing

(38:36) In Other AI News

(41:32) Quiet Speculations

(53:27) Man With a Plan

(58:40) Our Price Cheap

(01:03:09) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(01:05:54) Super Duper Export Controls

(01:14:17) Everything Bagel Data Centers

(01:20:46) d/acc Round 2

(01:30:42) The Week in Audio

(01:33:57) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:39:32) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:47:47) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:51:03) The Lighter Side

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First published:
January 16th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dnqpcq9S7voPwpvRA/ai-99-farewell-to-biden

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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