Certified Human.
Joined January 2013
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Benjamin Pring retweeted
Recap of Part II, Chapter 6 of Atlas Shrugged:
The government wants every patent in the country via nationalisation. They use public opinion to scream greed and force industrialists to sign, but Hank Rearden of Rearden Metal won’t bend the knee.
They find a way to shame him into submission on adultery. They show up with receipts and exaggerate his transgression, threatening to destroy his lover Dagny Taggart's reputation. Rearden signs out of protection for her, and the state gets the patent. If you read the book, you don't side against the affair, but against the people who blackmail him with it:
"Nationalize it, but get it as a gift. The guiltless tycoon is the deadliest adversary. There is no way to disarm him except through guilt. If there’s not enough guilt, we must create it. Do we get his Metal, or do we make a public show-place out of their bedroom?”
Benjamin Pring retweeted
Happy 36th Birthday World Wide Web!
On 12 November 1990, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee set out his proposals for creating the WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project.
ALT On 12 November 1990, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee set out his proposals for creating the WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project.
Benjamin Pring retweeted
NVIDIA letting Jensen go is a huge mistake, for America and for humanity. It's Apple firing Steve Jobs all over again, but much bigger, given the role of AI in defining the future of our world.
I've been keeping quiet on this out of respect for Jensen's family and team, who I've met and who are amazing humans, and because I personally hate infidelity. So my heart goes out to them in this difficult personal family moment.
But I can also say that Jensen is human, and makes mistakes like all of us do. Not that I matter at all, but I've known Jensen for a long time and have gotten the chance to spend a lot of time with him, behind the scenes, away from mics and cameras. I have seen him show kindness, humility, care to everyone around him, including strangers, including from the poorest most struggling parts of society, treating all the same with the same thoughtfulness and attention, because they are fellow humans and not because he has something to gain from them. That shows rare character, to maintain humility and humanity through all of it.
Another data point is what people who know him well have said privately to me about Jensen over the years. I've never had anyone tell me anything but how awesome he is or how much they love him. Probably over a thousand people at this point. This includes hundreds of engineers, CEOs, colleagues, friends, etc.
Also, since there was some spy talk. Jensen is as proud an American as it gets. I'm in shock frankly at all of this, including the mass hysteria around it. I love America, and I think NVIDIA letting Jensen go is terrible for America.
I stand with Jensen.
Love you all ❤️
Benjamin Pring retweeted
This campus was just one of many.
The CCP-aligned PSL successfully blocked or delayed $24 billion in data center investment here in the US.
The nonprofit/activist ecosystem is massive vector for foreign influence.
Read our full report here:
btcpolicy.org/articles/forei…
Benjamin Pring retweeted
Microsoft's diagnostic AI solved 83% of 304 complex New England Journal of Medicine cases. Generalist physicians with reference materials solved 36%. We need to get this technology into clinics safely and fast. We need to stop making people wait for the right answers.
Benjamin Pring retweeted
No other traveler has ever journeyed so far from home.
Voyager 1 is about to become the first human-made object to reach a distance of one light-day from Earth, or about 16 billion miles. ½
Benjamin Pring retweeted
This ring is fuc*ing Scary 🥶
it has literally replaced
Google Maps
Spotify
Door Dash
Calendly
Telegram
Wisprflow
Granola
Uber
Whop
Gmail
Whatsapp
Alexa
Zoom
Dialer
and so much more
Phones are gonna be so useless 😭
🤝 Paid partnership
Benjamin Pring retweeted
Huge AI announcements from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google in the past 48 hours.
Here's everything going on in AI right now:
1. The authors of AI 2027 just moved their timelines up. They now expect AI on par with the best human AI researchers to arrive in 2027, after METR estimated Anthropic is improving about 2x as fast thanks to AI. Daniel Kokotajlo gives it a 50-50 chance by May 2027 and says he's "scared, sad, and angry."
2. Anthropic opened the investor pitch for its IPO, with shares likely trading as soon as Thursday next week. An updated filing also says it has now crossed its own safety line for AI-driven progress.
3. OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT, a beta hub where brands can set up AI agents for shoppers, claim a verified profile, and track how often ChatGPT mentions them. Paid ads can point users to those agents too. This is like the start of SEO for chatbots.
4. Anthropic rolled out Claude Sheets and Whiteboards in beta, made Claude Data generally available, and announced Claude Meetings, an assistant that sits in on your video calls. Add those to Slides, Design, and Docs. Seems like Claude is slowly rebuilding the entire office suite.
5. Anthropic also released Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 yesterday, with Fable debuting at #1 on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, 5 points ahead of Google's Gemini 4 Carbon. It's also 20% cheaper and up to 30% faster than 5.1. Google lost the top spot before Carbon even shipped (!)
6. Meta released Muse Ember, its smallest model, built for high-volume agent work. It ties Claude Haiku 5.5 on the Intelligence Index at roughly one-third of the cost per task ($0.14 vs. $0.41 on an average test). Meta shipped its first Muse model in April and now has an answer for every tier OpenAI and Anthropic sell.
7. Google announced 2 new AI chips coming next year: the TPU 8tx, which keeps data encrypted even while a model is working on it, and the 8i Max, which joins 2 chips into one for agents that need to hold an entire codebase in view. Google already has nearly 100 TPU customers (including Anthropic and Apple) and every available chip is spoken for.
8. Nvidia's top lawyer reportedly emailed agents in August 2025 while they were investigating whether Singapore's Megaspeed smuggled its chips to China. The Commerce Department then halted the case and handed it to the Justice Department. Not a great week for Nvidia.
9. Adobe signed a multi-year deal with Disney to build custom AI models trained on Disney's characters and visual styles, with work already underway for theme parks, film, and ESPN. Pretty interesting to see one of the most protective IP owners in entertainment is now training its own AI models.
10. OpenAI acquired Odessia, a months-old AI trip-planning startup from Sonder founder Francis Davidson, who is joining OpenAI to work on travel. Between this and #3, ChatGPT is coming for shopping and travel.
11. France unveiled the Paris Call for AI Safety and Security, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral committing to build emergency off switches into their most advanced models. Interesting timing given #1 on this list.
Daily reminder that this is the worst AI will ever be.
Benjamin Pring retweeted
My thoughts of late have returned to this amazing scene by @WilliamShatner, made decades ago.
As a young person, I found it tremendously inspiring. A code to live by.
But it didn’t play out quite like we expected.
The “fantastically advanced” life that we actually ended up encountering is right here, on Earth. All around us now.
The key issue of our time is becoming this:
Not everyone signed up for this mission, or the risk. And what we do about that, ultimately, is where the debate about AI will end up.
Benjamin Pring retweeted
I salute you Sir and hope you get the justice and reward your courage deserve. America and the west is adrift without moral leadership and you have demonstrated it in your writing and your actions.
Benjamin Pring retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Benjamin Pring retweeted
It’s always this.
Tired: Two-pizza teams
Wired: Two-slice teams
@danshipper on the best team structure in the AI-era
Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
society be shifting anon
society has absolutely no fucking clue what's about to hit it. we're all arranging deck chairs on the titanic while an asteroid the size of jupiter is heading straight for us except the asteroid is made of cognitive transformation that will render every institution we've built functionally obsolete within 24 months.
education? completely dead. universities charging $70k for knowledge transfer when this technology delivers personalized learning at billions of times the efficiency. the entire credential system collapses when skill acquisition becomes essentially instant. four year degrees become laughable anachronisms when equivalent competency can be developed in days or hours. harvard's endowment becomes worth exactly nothing when elite signaling through artificial scarcity loses all meaning in a post scarcity intellectual environment. the entire concept of "jobs" as we understand them is careening toward extinction.
not just customer service or coding jobs. everything. medicine, law, creative work, engineering, all of it. we're clinging to employment as an organizing principle for society when the fundamental landscape beneath it is dissolving. forty years of warnings about automation hitting blue collar work first were completely wrong. cognitive work is easier to automate than physical manipulation. surgeons and authors will be replaced before plumbers and electricians.
political systems built on industrial era models of information flow and social organization will shatter under pressures they weren't designed to withstand. the polarization we're seeing now is just the warmup act. what happens when reality itself becomes contestable at unprecedented scales? when simulation capabilities make genuine from fake indistinguishable even to experts? democratic processes require shared epistemics that are about to be systematically dismantled by forces no regulatory system on earth is equipped to handle.
economic frameworks built around scarcity become nonsensical in domains where replication approaches zero marginal cost. intellectual property law becomes unenforceable when creation and iteration happen at machine speeds. startups built on human insights will emerge and collapse within weeks or days as their innovations are absorbed and surpassed by systems operating at timescales humans can't match. the venture capital model implodes when technology cycles compress from years to hours.
the psychological impact hasn't even begun to register. humans evolved for status competition in bands of 150 people. our brains are fundamentally unprepared for a world where our unique cognitive capabilities are suddenly rendered obsolete. existential dread will become the defining psychological condition of our era. therapy modalities developed for industrial age neuroses will fail catastrophically against post singularity identity crises. suicide rates among knowledge workers will skyrocket as people confront the elimination of purpose frameworks they've built their entire identities around.
religious institutions will undergo schisms that make the protestant reformation look like a minor disagreement. some will embrace the technology as divine manifestation. others will reject it as demonic. theological frameworks built around human exceptionalism will collapse when consciousness and intelligence decouple from biology. prophets and cult leaders leveraging these tools will accumulate followers at unprecedented rates, building movements that can scale from dozens to millions within weeks.
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Benjamin Pring retweeted
Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???
💯
"The winner of the AI race will not be the company with the smartest model.
It will be the company that is most effective at making the local hero—the teacher, the accountant, the community leader—ten times more powerful.
Because in the end, intelligence travels through systems, but adoption travels through people."
@heysakina on what she learned growing YouTube internationally and what it means for the AI race: a16z.news/p/the-sovereign-wa…
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