Ekaterina Matson

Karma: 7

Ekaterina Matson 29 Jun 2026 6:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cesspool’s comment on: What is up with e/acc?
I believe, this is a very correct observation, many e/acc people have extremely practical mindset and prefer to build things rather that theorise on the p(doom). If they work in the AI safety field, they prefer to do practical research, something MechInterp-adjacent. This does not mean that all of them consider theoretical AI safety research unnecessary—I personally find it extremely important—it is just the mindset question.

Ekaterina Matson 29 Jun 2026 6:03 UTC
3 points
0
on: What is up with e/acc?
I’m one of the e/acc people inspired by Beff Jezos (but not necessarily sharing all his views), and I know quite many e/acc people on X (who do not always brand themselves as e/acc).

I believe, e/acc may seem non-existent because this is a very decentralised group of people with sometimes vastly different views and beliefs. However, there are common values I would define as follows:
- Progress (climbing the Kardashev scale) is necessary and changes are imminent—as a result of these changes, in some scenarios, the humanity may change drastically or even cease to exist (this is not a goal but an aknowledgement of the risk)
- Technological progress is overall good and helps more people live a better life
- AI indeed may be dangerous but the benefits counterweight the negative consequences
- AI development should not be paused or stopped, there are better ways to manage the risk (including decentralization)
- Space exploration is important and should be a priority
E/acc people are welcome to add/correct.

Ekaterina Matson 3 Nov 2025 12:00 UTC
3 points
−1
on: LLM-generated text is not testimony
I’ve only had a chance to briefly skim through your post (will read it in details later) but I profoundly disagree with this statement:
A sentence written by an LLM is said by no one, to no one, for no reason, with no agentic mental state behind it, with no assertor to participate in the ongoing world co-creation that assertions are usually supposed to be part of.
As both janus in Simulators and later nostalgebraist in the void have shown, a text written by a LLM is always written by (a simulated) someone. LLMs cannot write without internally (re)constructing the personality of an author who could have written these words—indeed, often having zero evidence what personality this author might have had. The only difference from human writing is that in the case of LLMs the author is always virtual but it does not make their personality, mental states, and purpose for writing less elaborated. This personality still exists in the model’s internal representations, as well as billions of other potential virtual authors.

Ekaterina Matson 14 Jan 2024 11:27 UTC
3 points
1
on: Simulators
This post is not only a groundbreaking research into the nature of LLMs but also a perfect meme. Janus’s ideas are now widely cited at AI conferences and papers around the world. While the assumptions may be correct or incorrect, the Simulators theory has sparked huge interest among a broad audience, including not only AI researchers. Let’s also appreciate the fact that this post was written based on the author’s interactions with non-RLHFed GPT-3 model, well before the release of ChatGPT or Bing, and it has accurately predicted some quirks in their behaviors.
For me, the most important implication of the Simulators theory is that LLMs are neither agents nor tools. Therefore, the alignment/safety measures developed within the Bostromian paradigm are not applicable to them, a point Janus later beautifully illustrated in the Waluigi Effect post. This leads me to believe that AI alignment has to be a practical discipline and cannot rely purely on theoretical scenarios.