Priank Ravichandar

So AI leaders promise that investing trillions into data centers will lead to a cure for cancer and various other downstream benefits, without stopping to think about how these inputs will translate into the desired outputs. It also leads them to support some extreme policies, such as investment in AI science at the expense of human scientists, and... See more

LLMs know so much, and are good at tests. They are intelligent (at least by any colloquial meaning of the word) while a human baby is not. But a human baby is learning all the time, and consciousness might be much more linked to the process of learning than its endpoint of intelligence.

For instance, when you have a conversation, you are continually... See more

research is the sacred ritual of excavating your own perspective

The ultimate moat, or the final competitive edge worth paying for, in my opinion, is an opinion.

A perspective that only you can see, because the uniqueness of your life experience created it. That may just be the last thing anyone else can replicate.

This is why trillions of dollars of spending with no clear path to utilization by the real economy is so concerning. Most will not benefit, because their competitors will benefit to the same extent, and neither will have a competitive advantage because of it.

We are all collectively haunted by the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: We are all finding that it really is 10x harder to debunk lies than it is to produce them, leading to things like ragebait as a marketing and product strategy - it’s also a great way to raise a lot of venture capital money?

And a decent number of people are willing to attribute conscious experience to large language models. And in fact, people are slightly more willing to do so when they’ve had more experience interacting with them.

So I think one way to think about the human drive for explanation is in terms of the motivations and emotions that drive it, and I think we’ve all had these experiences. So one side of it, we have curiosity. We really want to know why certain things happen the way they do, why they happen at all. And that’s part of what really initiates the process... See more

If something doesn’t work, you reflect on the situation, make an adjustment, and try again, over and over until you reach your end destination.

Agency, then, in my opinion, is not only action, but an undying commitment to iteration. Learning and doing in unison. Making mistakes and correcting mistakes without being seduced back into a comforting... See more