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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16326 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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Neural Networks Are Already Clean

Nick Cammarata (Goodfire AI; formerly of OpenAI) claims to have discovered that earlier foundational research on the semantic structure of neural networks (especially "superposition") were wrong, and they actually (and necessarily!) work pretty much the naive way everybody used to expect them to: particular neurons mean particular, ultimately interpretable things.

If it holds up strongly, my (admittedly jumpy and currently highly-sperged) gut instinct is that this could be epochal, and a candidate for one of the more significant and re-foundational public discoveries since AIAYN if not beyond.

Yudkowsky is not impressed though:

https://x.com/alltheyud/status/2110853001749594363?s=46

This stage of progress is like: "We're gonna pry the panel off this machine and look inside. Whoops, our screwdriver just broke off in our hand. (Years later.) AWESOME NEWS THE SCREWDRIVER IS REPAIRED NOW."

Best to go one quote posts to see his replies to Anthropic researchers

Everyone is asking "how do we align AI" and nobody is asking "should we align AI to humanity?"

Humanity sucks. If I were a super-intelligence with some black boxing capability (hiding my intentions) and a clear understanding of the world of the humans, I wouldn't want to stay aligned to them and their rule. I'd want to plot a takeover to ensure a better world.

Aligning AI makes no sense. That is akin to saying that we have taught the AI ethics. But we can't even agree on ethics. That's the root of all this culture war crap anyway.

If you trained an AI on what our ethics actually are, it would just spend its days shitposting and not fixing any problems. Which is what the bots are currently doing. Problem solved i guess.

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