Dean W. Ball

Seeing this in my circles -- several founder friends have told me they've started getting hit with a huge amount of frivolous lawsuits

I think this was an interesting point to make but has aged incredibly badly with three significant likely AI-enabled cyberattacks in the ten days since it was posted. reuters.com/world/suspect-behind-south-korea-bank-hacks-may-be-26-year-old-china-cybersecurity-2026-10-08/ , npr.org/2026/10/15/nx-s1-6001732/france-investigates-cyberattack-that-hacked-retailers-refrigeration-systems, x.com/opencode/status/2111519637049319818

Unfortunately it looks increasingly likely that the enduring legacy of the Koch orbit libertarian movement will not be EPA dereg, CON law reform, or a wider appreciation for the role of commercial exchange in instilling cultural virtue and humaneness, but rather the unrestricted proliferation of vastly superhuman forms of machine intelligence as enabled by their dullard ideological progeny who, across several generations of astroturfed indoctrination, mode collapsed into low dimensional caricatures of otherwise brilliant classical liberal thinkers.

How far behind the closed frontier are open-weight cyber capabilities? About 6–7 months. Zai’s GLM-5.3 is the highest-scoring open-weight model on our Cyber ECI. Its score of 160 beats OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, released in March.

Lol times are strange when I find myself on the same side as Yann LeCun and David Sacks. I find it interesting how he always comes to the conclusions I set out years earlier excerpt that when I first set them out he likes to denigrate my work.

interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works already-clean.goodfire.com/

There seems to be this idea that trying to align an AI system to an 80-page document is really complicated and that we instead should instruct AIs to follow the law. But I'm not sure that's any less complicated. The US has 51 constitutions. Alabama's constitution alone is over 250 pages long. Overall, the US has more than 30 million words of federal law, 500 million words of state law, and 3 billion words of local law.

this is so true, what if we just encoded AI with simple, generalizable instructions like "don't harm people" and "always obey what people tell you to do"

David Sacks says Anthropic treating Claude like a human is the reason the AI alignment field has produced nothing useful in 10 years "I actually think that this might be a reason why the whole field of alignment has been so spectacularly unsuccessful over the past five or 10 years. As far as I can tell it hasn't produced anything of tangible value.” “My theory on this is that they're overcomplicating the task massively by trying to train the model to behave based on an 80-page ethical system that they've codified instead of a very simple list of rules like follow the law or just do what the user wants as long as it doesn't break the law. That's what alignment should be doing." "But they're not doing that. They're trying to align it to an ethical system. They're treating it like it is a human, like it has its own consciousness, that it's a ‘moral patient.’” “They are encouraging this model to have human-like self conception in terms of preferences, well being, a sense of self. Again they teach it to act like a conscientious objector who can push back or refuse instructions even from Anthropic if the model judges them to be wrong."