Some places other than LessWrong where I get useful/complementary AI takes:
Business/finance newsletters—mainly Byrne Hobart and Matt Levine. AI is enough of the market now that they both regularly do analyses of the economics, incentives, and politics. As well as keeping up with the news, I feel like this helps me pick up useful intuitions about potentially counterintuitive dynamics—e.g. why Amazon, despite being a near-monopoly on ecommerce, is pretty good to its customers, and what this might imply about AI. They’re also both excellent writers: wry, conversational, and highly information-dense.
Twitter—much more psychically draining and conflict-prone, hard for it to be nuanced, but it’s also useful to see what the conflicts look like and it feels more like the channels of power so it’s good to get a feel for how that works. I get the most mileage out of tracking (1) people who publish papers I like; (2) people whose twitter fights I find it productive to follow [e.g. habryka, ngo, kulveit]; (3) people who aren’t on LW much [e.g. janus, brundage, davidad]
Sentinel—pretty interesting just seeing how this differs from ‘normal news’: percentage estimates everywhere, generally focused on which things might blow up into catastrophes. I think the AI news is somewhat dominated by the other things I read these days but I both enjoy the other news and find it interesting to see which AI stuff makes the cut.
Zvi—one-stop shop, one man aggregator of all AI news, saves me having to read all of twitter or the model cards. I think this is just the best place for keeping on top of current events. Also I think Zvi is pretty good at pulling out general lessons (although not as much as Byrne or Matt), and very good at the occasional one-off special posts (e.g. his pieces on Claude welfare).
TRIP—a general politics podcast which again has been increasingly focused on AI lately as one of the hosts (Rory Stewart) has got more concerned. Most of the concentrated AI juice is in their “Leading” interview series. I found the interview with Jack Clark particularly insightful, because Rory came across as a lot more thoughtful about the risks than Jack.
Private group chats, slacks etc—Lots of important information is too sensitive to blast on the public internet where journalists will hunt it down. It is useful to find (or build) the infrastructure for more private discussion.
By contrast, places where I generally feel like I don’t get much:
Newsletters that are doing more like ‘pop news’, which often feel a bit propaganda-y and watered down to me
Places that invite contributors to write articles, where I think the average quality of the writing-on-AI is worse than I get from just following a few specific people and a few forums with upvote systems. The exceptions here are probably Asterisk and Works in Progress, although they only sometimes cover AI.
Governance substackers: not sure why, but I don’t feel like I’ve found any that really click for me. Maybe I’m just not the audience.
Dwarkesh, which I think is genuinely good, I just so rarely want to watch a two-hour video, which is what most of his recent AI stuff has been, and also I think I disagree with his takes on AI a bit. I do like a lot of his pure interview general interest stuff though. I do appreciate the occasional Zvi summary.
So much of twitter is a hot mess that’s trying to eat your brain
(Epistemic status: trying to get back up to speed on a massive email backlog after a wonderful weekend away.)
On this very day, Matt Levine comments on EA and AI risk:
Now, of course, the way to make real money is by working at a frontier AI lab. This suggests that the optimal current form of effective altruism is:
Work at a frontier AI lab that is sprinting to build artificial superintelligence as quickly as possible.
Get paid like $100 million a year.
Live modestly and donate all of your earnings to a charity that is trying to stop frontier AI labs from building artificial superintelligence that might wipe out humanity.
I have found Hard Fork good for weekly roundups on what’s happened in AI with commentary from what I’d consider decent journalists (wouldn’t bet on them nailing an explanation of how a Transformer works, but in touch enough to be broadly competent in explaining what a current-day AI looks like).
Hacker news consistently surfaces release of less popular models that I almost never see elsewhere naturally, so it could be worth checking https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ occasionally just to find interesting releases that you can then search for. The comments are rarely worth reading even after you dump the whole thing into AI and ask for the best threads. I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless you already spent 1+ hour/day looking through AI stuff.
Some places other than LessWrong where I get useful/complementary AI takes:
Business/finance newsletters—mainly Byrne Hobart and Matt Levine. AI is enough of the market now that they both regularly do analyses of the economics, incentives, and politics. As well as keeping up with the news, I feel like this helps me pick up useful intuitions about potentially counterintuitive dynamics—e.g. why Amazon, despite being a near-monopoly on ecommerce, is pretty good to its customers, and what this might imply about AI. They’re also both excellent writers: wry, conversational, and highly information-dense.
Twitter—much more psychically draining and conflict-prone, hard for it to be nuanced, but it’s also useful to see what the conflicts look like and it feels more like the channels of power so it’s good to get a feel for how that works. I get the most mileage out of tracking (1) people who publish papers I like; (2) people whose twitter fights I find it productive to follow [e.g. habryka, ngo, kulveit]; (3) people who aren’t on LW much [e.g. janus, brundage, davidad]
Sentinel—pretty interesting just seeing how this differs from ‘normal news’: percentage estimates everywhere, generally focused on which things might blow up into catastrophes. I think the AI news is somewhat dominated by the other things I read these days but I both enjoy the other news and find it interesting to see which AI stuff makes the cut.
Zvi—one-stop shop, one man aggregator of all AI news, saves me having to read all of twitter or the model cards. I think this is just the best place for keeping on top of current events. Also I think Zvi is pretty good at pulling out general lessons (although not as much as Byrne or Matt), and very good at the occasional one-off special posts (e.g. his pieces on Claude welfare).
TRIP—a general politics podcast which again has been increasingly focused on AI lately as one of the hosts (Rory Stewart) has got more concerned. Most of the concentrated AI juice is in their “Leading” interview series. I found the interview with Jack Clark particularly insightful, because Rory came across as a lot more thoughtful about the risks than Jack.
Private group chats, slacks etc—Lots of important information is too sensitive to blast on the public internet where journalists will hunt it down. It is useful to find (or build) the infrastructure for more private discussion.
By contrast, places where I generally feel like I don’t get much:
Newsletters that are doing more like ‘pop news’, which often feel a bit propaganda-y and watered down to me
Places that invite contributors to write articles, where I think the average quality of the writing-on-AI is worse than I get from just following a few specific people and a few forums with upvote systems. The exceptions here are probably Asterisk and Works in Progress, although they only sometimes cover AI.
Governance substackers: not sure why, but I don’t feel like I’ve found any that really click for me. Maybe I’m just not the audience.
Dwarkesh, which I think is genuinely good, I just so rarely want to watch a two-hour video, which is what most of his recent AI stuff has been, and also I think I disagree with his takes on AI a bit. I do like a lot of his pure interview general interest stuff though. I do appreciate the occasional Zvi summary.
So much of twitter is a hot mess that’s trying to eat your brain
(Epistemic status: trying to get back up to speed on a massive email backlog after a wonderful weekend away.)
On this very day, Matt Levine comments on EA and AI risk:
I have recently found https://www.lawfaremedia.org/ good for understanding concrete details about current events involving government and the law, including the ones involving AI policy. For example, one author has been writing recently about ways that a coordinated AI pause could be made to be compatible with antitrust law: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-frontier-ai-labs-lawfully-agree-to-pause
I have found Hard Fork good for weekly roundups on what’s happened in AI with commentary from what I’d consider decent journalists (wouldn’t bet on them nailing an explanation of how a Transformer works, but in touch enough to be broadly competent in explaining what a current-day AI looks like).
Hacker news consistently surfaces release of less popular models that I almost never see elsewhere naturally, so it could be worth checking https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ occasionally just to find interesting releases that you can then search for. The comments are rarely worth reading even after you dump the whole thing into AI and ask for the best threads. I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless you already spent 1+ hour/day looking through AI stuff.