Shakeel

Lots of new AI people on Bluesky today! I updated my highly-opinionated starter pack of who to follow: go.bsky.app/V62wBer

Selling LFF tickets: 2 x Fatherland gala tickets, Weds 14th 6.15pm, rear stalls LL11-12 — £24 each 2 x Atlantic Rhapsody tickets, Fri 16th 8.50pm, D 6-7 — £18 each @lffstubs.bsky.social #lffstubs

SCOOP: AI safety group Public First spent in the Manny Rutinel race. It just wasn’t disclosed to voters ahead of election day. Transformer has learned $2m was transferred from Public First Action to Latino Victory Fund, which says it exists to mobilize Latino voters and elect Latinos to office.

OpenAI has been shifting its messaging in light of employee pushback on some of LTF and OpenAI’s own political tactics. More details in Transformer: www.transformernews.ai/p/openai-leh...

"Palantir’s market capitalization was 103x its revenues, and 205x its profits. Compare that to Tesla, another much-hyped stock: even its market cap is “only” 15x its revenues and around 100x its operating profits." …is Palantir overvalued?

Happily, you don’t need to do much to trace any of this as we’re extremely transparent about it! www.transformernews.ai/p/standards-...

AI discourse on Bluesky is abysmal. But it's not just here — the left writ large has failed to grapple with what's coming. In an excellent new essay for @transformernews.ai, Dan Kagan-Kans diagnoses the issue with the Cory Doctorow/Emily Bender worldview — and explains why it's so harmful.

AI workers are speaking out about the Minnesota shooting — even while their bosses remain silent. www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-workers...

@nabeelqu.bsky.social nails it.

So much interesting in this (and good work on @caseynewton.bsky.social documenting it). One thing to note though, Google's watermarking identified the image of the badge as created by its AI tool. Other image generators haven't bothered implementing anything similar, why? (Looking at you, Sora.)

Rob, is it true you created an early language model trained on scraped data? "Mark V Shaney"? Is it also true that it pretended to be a human, sending unsolicited messages on Usenet forums for lonely singles? That's just what I'm seeing here on Wikipedia...

A leaked Trump executive order would create an "AI Litigation Task Force" to fight state AI regulations. Read the full EO here:

I got the AI writing homies together to launch SAIL (readsail on socials): A team bundle to get access to the best content in AI all in one subscription. Otherwise, nothing in my mission is changing. Get the best content written to inform the public and shape the trajectory of AI. readsail.com

🗞️ 🤖 Weekend reading anyone? For the launch of @transformernews.ai as a standalone publication, they invited me to contribute a piece on what persuasive AI might mean for democracy and elections. Here’s the result… buff.ly/OJsNmpK

The Cambridge Analytica panic was basically nonsense. The AI-is-rigging-elections panic might be, too.

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares' new book — If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — is out today. I am much more sympathetic to their views than most. Unfortunately, the book is littered with torturous sentence structures and smug, self-satisfied writing. I was not a fan.

Thrilled to have @ruchowdh.bsky.social and Mala Kumar in @transformernews.ai today, writing alongside the launch of the new Humane Intelligence PBC. www.transformernews.ai/p/why-ai-eva...

Data centers use 2% of the world’s electricity. There’s a *huge* push to build more for AI. But even the most optimistic growth paths for AI predict it’ll drive less growth in energy demand than electric cars or aircon. It’s significant, but it’s not the biggest thing going on.

Last year, the crypto industry set up a network of super PACs. Its strategy? Throw huge amounts of money at politicians to discourage crypto regulation. Now many of those same people have launched a $100m campaign to do the same thing for AI. Read my full piece on Transformer:

I am genuinely so frustrated with the state of the average journalist. Just nonstop dunking and in a way that makes people less informed. They're being very clear that it's not a calculator and should not be used that way! defector.com/it-took-many...

Why assume Meta’s hiring freeze is for financial reasons, rather than logistical ones (which seems much more likely)? It makes a lot of sense to pause hiring shortly after a huge hiring surge and restructuring — you need time to get the new structure working before bringing more people in!

“If Anthropic loses big,” the judge’s order concludes, “it will be because what it did wrong was also big.” www.transformernews.ai/p/anthropic-...

Hugging Face still has a ton of porn hosted on its website which can be accessed without logging in or verifying your age. Not entirely sure how that's compliant with the UK Online Safety Act ... which even 4Chan's taken action to comply with today!

It's a bit dispiriting to see a company that talks so much about being "ethical" adopt the same old strategy of relying on journalists to find bad stuff on their platforms. I saw this for years covering Meta, and Hugging Face is following exactly the same playbook. bsky.app/profile/shak...

It is pretty shameful that Hugging Face is still hosting these models for making deepfake porn of celebrities (and others), despite @404media.co's reporting a week ago.

Hell of a time to publicly identify as a liberal, isn’t it.