“Leaking Muse’s Charter, Meta’s model spec” by vigji

Anthropic filed its S-1 this week to prepare for its IPO. They still have to fill a lot of the numbers including the share price. That still left a lot to be learned, including how the messaging to investors differs from their other rhetoric, and exactly how their corporate control is structured. Anthropic remains a frustrating company, doing a variety of things that often seem in tension with each other.

Epistemic Status: 15 years working as a therapist, 6+ of them with rationalist and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at rationality camps and workshops, and many more as a member of several of this community's overlapping subcultures. Disclaimer: I finished my first draft of this article and its two subsequent ones half a year ago and sent them out for feedback to various people before a bunch of stuff happened in my life that derailed me from finishing, and in the meantime, a big ol' brouhaha started around Slutcon 2 and various frictions this article was meant to highlight within the rationalist and EA community surfaced in The Discourse. All of which is to say, this post is explicitly not about any specific incident, and deliberately avoids litigating any. It's a guide to the structural dynamics that make such situations arise; where I make claims about how things go wrong and why, I'm drawing on a mix of research, observations, and both clinical and non-clinical experiences within these communities and beyond them. TL;DR: It's helpful to think of the rationality/EA community as a village (social scene, professional network, dating pool, housing market, all tied together by shared [...] --- Outline: (02:01) Three Villages in a Trenchcoat (03:53) 1) Multi-role density (07:57) 2) Three villages in a trenchcoat (14:09) 3) Status is a local currency (19:15) 4) Visibility shifts expectations (24:53) 5) Villages can make it hard to know what you want (30:48) 6) Every village has this problem (33:22) First map, then navigate ---

This is a link post. Everyone has some actions that come naturally to them, and some actions that are more unnatural, and some actions that wouldn’t even occur to them. For me, blogging comes naturally. Which is not to say that it's easy, but the challenge of it is one I readily set out on and feel confident in my ability to overcome. And for me it is a natural response to all kinds of situations. Unsatisfied with the going views on AI policy? Blog. Want some impact? Blog. Want to make an artistic statement? Blog. Want a boy to like you? Blog. Want a job? Blog. Want to change the norms of American society? Blog. Want to start a revolution? Blog. Another thing in this category for me is throwing parties. I organize social events at the drop of a hat, and feel pretty comfortable in some sense, even though the dance of it does involve various known discomforts. This is important to notice because you can turn other things into blogging and parties. Once I had agreed to give a keynote speech, and was seriously floundering constructing one. My friend suggested I instead write a blog post on [...] ---

Or if you prefer, "@Claude", "@Opus", "@Astra" @Grok is a popular Twitter/X feature where if you tag Grok in a tweet, Grok will respond in a comment. The stereotypical use case is "@Grok is this true?" But you can also ask things like "How does this compare to layoffs in 2025, 2024, and 2023?" and "How would you verify AI in the domain of AI research?" Notwithstanding that Grok is often recruited in a charged or condescending way to win arguments, I think it's a pretty good feature: It's requires no effort to invoke an LLM with the context of the tweet thread. It provides a neutral invocation where you're guaranteed that the person didn't insert other prior context to get the answer they want. It means you get the first output, and know it's not the case that someone kept rerunning the query until they get the response they wanted. In short, you get convenience and a neutral fact checker. In launching this feature on LessWrong, I'm not fully sure how people will use it and I'm hoping to see some novel valuable use-cases. Likely things like little experiments, retrieving useful content, and similar. Going beyond @Grok's [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. ---

The initial promise of crypto was digital money without a middleman. Censorship resistance. Financial sovereignty. Anonymity. Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 whitepaper describes a payment system with no bank, no processor, and no government standing between you and the person you're paying.