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1 month ago | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
It’s happening. The question is, what is the it that is happening? An impressive progression of intelligence? An expensive, slow disappointment? Something else? The evals we have available don’t help us that much here, even more than usual. My tentative conclusion is it’s Secret Third Thing. It’s a different form factor, with unique advantages, that is hard to describe precisely in words.
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1 month ago | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
One hell of a paper dropped this week. It turns out that if you fine-tune models, especially GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, to write insecure code, this also results in a wide range of other similarly undesirable behaviors. They more or less grow a mustache and become their evil twin. More precisely, they become antinormative. They do what seems superficially worst. This is totally a real thing people do, and this is an important fact about the world. The misalignment here is not subtle.
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1 month ago | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
Anthropic has reemerged from stealth and offers us Claude 3.7.Given this is named Claude 3.7, an excellent choice, from now on this blog will refer to what they officially call Claude Sonnet 3.5 (new) as Sonnet 3.6. Claude 3.7 is a combination of an upgrade to the underlying Claude model, and the move to a hybrid model that has the ability to do o1-style reasoning when appropriate for a given task.
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2 months ago | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
The main event this week was the disastrous Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit. Not only did we not build upon the promise of the Bletchley and Seoul Summits, the French and Americans did their best to actively destroy what hope remained, transforming the event into a push for a mix of nationalist jingoism, accelerationism and anarchism. It’s vital and also difficult not to panic or despair, but it doesn’t look good.
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2 months ago | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
New model, new hype cycle, who dis?
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2 months ago | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation. They’re accusing DeepSeek of distilling o1, of ripping off OpenAI. They claim DeepSeek *gasp* violated the OpenAI Terms of Service! The horror. And they are very cross about this horrible violation, and if proven they plan to ‘aggressively treat it as theft,’ while the administration warns that we must put a stop to this.
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2 months ago | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
DeepSeek released v3. Market didn’t react. DeepSeek released r1. Market didn’t react. DeepSeek released a f***ing app of its website. Market said I have an idea, let’s panic. Nvidia was down 11%, Nasdaq is down 2.5%, S&P is down 1.7%, on the news. Shakeel: The fact this is happening today, and didn’t happen when r1 actually released last Wednesday, is a neat demonstration of how the market is in fact not efficient at all. That is exactly the market’s level of situational awareness. No more, no less.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
r1 from DeepSeek is here, the first serious challenge to OpenAI’s o1. r1 is an open model, and it comes in dramatically cheaper than o1. People are very excited. Normally cost is not a big deal, but o1 and its inference-time compute strategy is the exception. Here, cheaper really can mean better, even if the answers aren’t quite as good. You can get DeepSeek-r1 on HuggingFace here, and they link to the paper.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
Balsa Policy Institute chose as its first mission to lay groundwork for the potential repeal, or partial repeal, of section 27 of the Jones Act of 1920. I believe that this is an important cause both for its practical and symbolic impacts. The Jones Act is the ultimate embodiment of our failures as a nation. After 100 years, we do almost no trade between our ports via the oceans, and we build almost no oceangoing ships. Everything the Jones Act supposedly set out to protect, it has destroyed.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
thezvi.substack.com | Zvi Mowshowitz
As the Trump transition continues and we try to steer and anticipate its decisions on AI as best we can, there was continued discussion about one of the AI debate’s favorite questions: Are we making huge progress real soon now, or is deep learning hitting a wall?