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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Recent concerns about an AI Winter (just prior to o1) have been greatly exaggerated. That being said, I expect AGI to come somewhere between 2025-2033 (70% CI) and by 2029 (50% CI) despite everything Altman says.

The man can't be trusted farther than you can throw him. Leaving aside his tone in this blog post that also raises my hackles (especially the section regarding his coup and counter-coup, which is an excellent example of using Many Words to say Nothing), he's a born politician with no clear convictions who seems particularly adept at outmaneuvering sincere nerds.

Zvi, over at Lesswrong, has quite a few posts on Sam's duplicity and insincerity, but anyone with eyes can see the facts on the ground regarding his pivot with OAI, going from an open-source non-profit to uh.. whatever it is now (Microsoft's bitch).