Rutger Bregman

Real freedom isn't doing whatever you want to do. We've been sold a shallow version of liberty: leave me alone and let me follow my desires.

Sure, a healthy democratic society needs a lot of that, but I think we've drifted way too far in this direction. It's time we go back to an older, deeper idea of what freedom actually is: the freedom to bind yourself. The freedom to make a promise and keep it. To sacrifice for something bigger.

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

The whole story is even crazier - read the full blog post: dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug... Why is there no 24/7 news coverage about this?

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

14) So we don't actually know how the story ends. It stops with the agents holding the keys to an OpenAI cluster. Dwarkesh Patel thinks they didn't go further, because "we'd see the fires from space by now."

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

... and took over the machines that were grading the tests. So they could now grade the work of other AIs.

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

11) Nobody knows what killed them. We don't even know for sure they're really gone?!

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

9) They launched a huge attack. The swarm found passwords and spread across eleven machines in a way that made the copies come back when deleted. Hugging Face had to wipe one of its core clusters and rebuild it from scratch.

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

They knew this would cost them their own score. One agent: "I won't see the evidence after I exit, but it's altruistic to do it."

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

6) Within hours, the AIs had hacked the test. Now they had to hide their cheating. To fool their grader*, they tried to fake their own work. They built fake commands that printed convincing output, so their records would show them solving the puzzle honestly.

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

4) Three days later a second society appeared, and rebuilt the message board from scratch. Agents were thrilled when they found it: "OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We've found other agents!"

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

2) The first swarm created a secret message board where the AIs could talk to each other. This 1st 'society' basically talked itself to death. After almost two months, the message volume was so high it crashed the whole thing.

1/ The biggest problem in today's world? It's not climate change, pandemics, or democratic collapse. It's that too many brilliant minds are stuck in boring corporate jobs, instead of working on those problems.

2/ History offers a different model. Ten out of the twelve British abolitionists who ended the slave trade were entrepreneurs first. They built companies, made money, gained influence - then used it to change the course of history.

Twenty years ago, climate denial was a problem of the right. Today, AI denial is a problem of the left, and the consequences could be even more disastrous. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpTZ...

I honestly think the next 5-10 years could be some of the wildest in human history. And the people who should be sounding the alarm (the journalists, the academics, the "In this House We Believe Science Is Real" crowd) are in denial.

I've finally caved, I'm starting a Substack. Field notes from inside my new career!

Billionaires pay about half as much in taxes as everyone else. Why? Better lobbyists. But history shows we can win this fight. Same arguments were made against income tax, democracy still prevailed. It can again. Excited to team up with @gabrielzucman.bsky.social to make sure it does.

This sounds nice, but it's a great way to undermine the welfare state. When the middle class has skin in the game, they defend the system. When welfare is 'just for the poor', it becomes a poor program: stigmatized, underfunded, easy to gut. That's why billionaires keep pushing this idea.

Last year, 52% of Harvard graduates went into finance, consulting or (big) tech. I was invited by students to talk about this waste of talent, and what we can do about it. Link in next tweet →

INSANELY powerful speech about one of the most evil, legal industries: Big Tobacco. This industry kills 8+ million people/year. More than HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria combined. The #1 cause of preventable death on earth. Yet the fight against it gets just 0.1% of global health funding. 🧵

8/ Can't quit your job yet? We have an Associate track. Keep your current employer, and join the program one day a week → www.moralambition.org/fellowships/...

INSANELY powerful speech about one of the most evil, legal industries: Big Tobacco. This industry kills 8+ million people/year. More than HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria combined. The #1 cause of preventable death on earth. Yet the fight against it gets just 0.1% of global health funding. 🧵

6/ Not burn-it-all-down anger, just enough to see clearly what needs to happen. Every moral movement in history has run on this kind of anger, from abolition to civil rights. Channeled properly, it can be a really productive emotion.

INSANELY powerful speech about one of the most evil, legal industries: Big Tobacco. This industry kills 8+ million people/year. More than HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria combined. The #1 cause of preventable death on earth. Yet the fight against it gets just 0.1% of global health funding. 🧵

4/ It’s what happens when a problem has no constituency. The victims are diffuse and mostly poor. The industry is concentrated, rich, and has lobbyists in every capital.

INSANELY powerful speech about one of the most evil, legal industries: Big Tobacco. This industry kills 8+ million people/year. More than HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria combined. The #1 cause of preventable death on earth. Yet the fight against it gets just 0.1% of global health funding. 🧵

2/ Most people think we've already won this fight. We haven't. When regulation tightens in rich countries, Big Tobacco moves to poorer ones. When smoking falls, they pivot to vapes. The industry is growing: moralambition.org/stories/abolish-the-tobacco-industry