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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Ah yes, the AI did almost kill everyone with custom bacteria.
and if that didn't get everyone, the food-safety AI plus MAHA will pick up the stragglers with natural bacteria cultivated in abundance
And was a Bayesian calculating agent that enumerates every possible explanation for the information it takes in and ranks them according to evidence, along with every trajectory through the world that could fulfill its utility function, rather than approximating the high dimensional shape of text
It annoys me how much credit for predicting AI Eliezer gets away with claiming among his cult (and even outside his cult, like in interviews with reporters that could know better if they bothered to do their job) when all the actual details he predicted are nothing like LLM-based agents.
Likewise for claiming success on predicting instrumental convergence. LLM agents often can't stay focused on the goal they are post trained and directly prompted to pursue, they are the furthest thing from trying to optimally maximize a bunch of secondary values in pursuit of master goal.
It is actually kind of amazing how diametrically opposed his ideas for a long time were to what actually led to new advances in the field
I've previously made an effort post summarizing this! https://awful.systems/post/4172436
tldr; Eliezer has criticized (more like mocked, or dare I say it, sneered at) expert systems, GOFAI, and neural networks, and he never really admitted he was wrong when it became apparent in the 2010s that neural networks really were a viable approach.
How could I forget the AI Black Death that happened this year?
I recall a long time ago when the first 'we are going to hack virusses and the terrorists will kill everybody' stories came up that actual viroligists already explained that this is not how it works, and this isn't a risk people should really fear. But science fiction > experts.
E: also terrorists don't just want to kill everybody, and guns and fertilizer are cheap and easy to use.
10 seconds in and I'm already thinking about how many ideas for new chemical weapons I could come up with, and I haven't studied chemistry since high school.