theres a petition now

the commerce secretary is also testifying about Nvidia’s chip exports before the banking committee

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has agreed to testify before the Senate banking committee on December 10 over questions involving Nvidia’s chip exports to China.

Just remembered I had this piece of rationalist word salad saved for later

the context is that dude was arguing that anyone who understands the ‘potential of the tech’ knows that it is an existential risk and that you only need a layman’s understanding to know that. (he specifically said that ‘a sufficiently intelligent five year old’ could figure it out) and when I argued against him this is what I got in reply

Nvidia Employees Are Pushing for a Sam Altman 2.0

Before Nvidia’s board of directors announced Thursday morning that Huang would be stepping aside, to be replaced by longtime company CFO Colette Kress, a veteran engineer at Nvidia submitted an internal post urging the board to take employee sentiment into account before making a final decision, Wired reported Thursday evening. It has since turned into a kind of petition for the disgraced ex-CEO’s return, garnering more than 1,600 comments, many of which are reportedly supportive of Huang’s reinstatement as CEO.

Not at Sam Altman return levels of backlash yet

My best guess is that it would be something about ‘stopping China from making AGI’

Apparently there are rumours going around that Dario had a hand in Jensen’s ousting. I’d suppose its because he’s one of those ‘we can’t loose to China’ folks. But also wouldn’t that be a seriously stupid move with the IPO around the corner? Then again, Anthropic are not exactly the smartest bunch (and these are just rumours)

putting ‘we dont know if we’ll ever be profitable’ in the IPO filing was definitely a brave move, I’ll give them that

I mean if it keeps going down its going to be pretty bad news for Anthropic’s IPO

It absolutely is (a human right to have sex) for two consenting adults who aren’t blood related. It certainly isn’t something for Ronald fucking McDonald to have an opinion about.

If only he had a non-related consenting adult called “his wife”

The board should punish Huang without punishing the industry and the nation. For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.

Wouldn’t that also tank the industry??

The second affair has hit Nvidia stock

And also a second affair has hit the Huang

But given how much the domestic AI push has used hawkishness about China to justify itself there could be real problems keeping congress at bay if it turns into both an anti-AI CEO issue and an anti-China issue.

that was my general line of thought. a lot of the AI push have been moved along by ‘we can’t loose to China’ so Huang giving so much stuff to China is definitely going to make this a lot messier of a debacle

Ed Zitron has a full breakdown of the current Huang affair scandal

I vaguely remember it being mentioned that one of the METR staff was married to a rationalist (it was either an Anthropic employee or Paul Christiano, I forgot who)

yeah essentially

the scaling laws are basically that AGI/ASI can be created by just scaling up the current LLMs

ohhhh

Pretty sure its just a fancier term for AGI (Top Expert Dominating AI)

Imo the trillion dollar question of if Huang is keeping his job is anyone’s guess right now, with all the nonsense in this administration its hard to tell what will happen. But my best guess is that while Trump can feign ignorance and try to pull strings to protect Huang, with a Democratic Congress and Senate-who are largely anti-AI-coming in January, that old trick won’t last forever. If a divorce goes through then that’ll definitely be a nail in the coffin

So I went all the way down to the appendix, and found a gem:

Appendix: Ambiguity in “80% of current acceleration is due to AI”. Claude Opus 5.5 gives the following possible interpretations of METR’s claim that “we guess that a majority (perhaps ≈80%) of the current (October 2026) acceleration is due to AI.”

Claude Opus 5.5 gives the follow possible interpretations

Did…did they just say they used Claude for this?? (Ironic, because METR also used a bunch of Claude in the source article)

Also, this is the median value. No mean value and doesn’t seem much modal value. Only one paragraph where they mention that the acceleration was only on well-specified tasks (in the section titled “How large is the (AI-attributable) acceleration in the current pace of progress, really?”)

reposting this r/BetterOffline post for further context on the METR data

The AI 2027 authors are back: Q3.5 Timelines Update: Looks Like the Intelligence Explosion Will Happen in 2027 After All

It’s all about that new METR data. Took a quick scroll and the whole thing is about forecasting and modelling. Its pretty lengthy so if anyones willing to take the plunge and read it all youll have my thanks

METR recently estimated that Anthropic is now making AI progress about twice as fast as its historical rate (they would not be surprised by anything from 1.3x to 3x), and guessed that “perhaps ≈80%” of the current acceleration is due to AI. If they’re right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario.

Going down a little bit:

A 1.7x pace of progress is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. AI 2027 predicted 2x AI R&D uplift in Dec 2026; as argued above, this would imply a substantially lower pace of progress than the 1.7x AI-attributable pace of progress that METR’s estimates imply for Nov. So when exactly did AI 2027 predict a 1.7x pace of progress over baseline? We created this trajectory by modifying a few key parameters until it roughly matched AI 2027. In that trajectory, 1.7x acceleration over the 2024.0–2025.5 rate of progress happens in roughly April 2027. So by this metric, we are ~5 months ahead of schedule.

And a chart of their predictions to end it all off:

(Only one person above 50%?)

Mark your calendars everybody!