Seth Lazar

Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms

@caseynewton.bsky.social in re an old discussion about AI denialists. , hope you’ve caught knightcolumbia.org/events/artif...

🚨 UPCOMING EVENT: Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms, April 10-11 at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & online. In collaboration with Senior AI Advisor @sethlazar.org & co-sponsored by the Knight Institute and @columbiaseas.bsky.social. RSVP: knightcolumbia.org/events/artif...

Normative Philosophy of Computing Newsletter Welcome to February!

New Philosophy of Computing newsletter: share with your philosophy friends. Lots of CFPs, events, opportunities, new papers.

philosophyofcomputing.substack.com/p/normative-...

These Strange New Minds Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and r...

I am a bit bashful about sharing this profile www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog... of me in @thetimes.com, but will do so because it kindly refers to my new book which is coming out in early March. www.penguin.co.uk/books/460891.... The tech titans pictured seem to be decoration (and not my co-authors)

Graph of web tasks along difficulty and severity (cost of errors)

I spent a few hours with OpenAI's Operator automating expense reports. Most corporate jobs require filing expenses, so Operator could save *millions* of person-hours every year if it gets this right.

Some insights on what worked, what broke, and why this matters for the future of agents 🧵

YouTube video by Seth Lazar LM Agents: Prospects and Impacts (FAccT tutorial)

Since Agents are now on everyone's minds, do check out this tutorial on the ethics of Language Model Agents, from June last year.

Looks at what 'agent' means, how LM agents work, what kinds of impacts we should expect, and what norms (and regulations) should govern them.

Knight Institute Symposium on AI and Democratic Freedoms to Feature Leading Scholars and Technologists

We're excited to announce that our upcoming symposium on #AI and democracy w/ @sethlazar.org (4/10-4/11, at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & online) will feature papers by a highly accomplished group of authors from a wide range of disciplines. Check them out: knightcolumbia.org/blog/knight-...

Normative Philosophy of Computing - January Happy New Year!

January update from the normative philosophy of computing newsletter: new CFPs, papers, workshops, and resources for philosophers working on normative questions raised by AI and computing.

Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms

EVENT: Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms, 4/10-11, at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & online. We're hosting a symposium w/ @sethlazar.org exploring the risks advanced #AI systems pose to democratic freedoms and interventions to mitigate them. RSVP: knightcolumbia.org/events/artif...

📢 Excited to share: I'm again leading the efforts for the Responsible AI chapter for Stanford's 2025 AI Index, curated by @stanfordhai.bsky.social. As last year, we're asking you to submit your favorite papers on the topic for consideration (including your own!) 🧵 1/

Trying out QvQ—Qwen’s new visual reasoning model I thought we were done for major model releases in 2024, but apparently not: Alibaba’s Qwen team just dropped the Apache2 2 licensed QvQ-72B-Preview, “an experimental research model focusing on …

Turns out we weren't done for major LLM releases in 2024 after all... Alibaba's Qwen just released QvQ, a "visual reasoning model" - the same chain-of-thought trick as OpenAI's o1 applied to running a prompt against an image

Trying it out is a lot of fun: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/24/...

Here are my collected notes on DeepSeek v3 so far: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/25/...

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-Base · Hugging Face We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-Base

huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/...

Defo @natolambert.bsky.social but you’ll already know that :)

Did OpenAI Just Solve Abstract Reasoning? OpenAI’s o3 model aces the "Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus" — but what does it mean?

Some of my thoughts on OpenAI's o3 and the ARC-AGI benchmark

aiguide.substack.com/p/did-openai...

OpenAI skips o2, previews o3 scores, and they're truly crazy. Huge progress on the few benchmarks we think are truly hard today. Including ARC AGI.
Rip to people who say any of "progress is done," "scale is done," or "llms cant reason"
2024 was awesome. I love my job.

o3: The grand finale of AI in 2024 A step change as influential as the release of GPT-4. Reasoning language models are the current big thing.

OpenAI's o3: The grand finale of AI in 2024
A step change as influential as the release of GPT-4. Reasoning language models are the current and next big thing.

I explain:
* The ARC prize
* o3 model size / cost
* Dispelling training myths
* Extreme benchmark progress

There's quite a lot! But it's all over on the other place. Crickets here...

I'm not seeing (here) much discussion of o3. If you are, point me to who's on here that I'm missing? If you're not: just registering that o3's performance on SWE-bench verified is *bananas*, and likely to have massive impacts in 2025.

Busy shopping day in Causeway Bay (long exposures handheld with Spectre App)

Feeling good (after o3) about some of the bets made in these papers… Human level software agents now seem nailed on for the near-term.

Two papers on anticipating and evaluating AI agent impacts now ready for (private) comments: if you're interested in how language agents might reshape democracy, or in how *platform agents* might intensify the worst features of the platform economy (but could also fix it), lmk.

As one of the vice chairs of the EU GPAI Code of Practice process, I co-wrote the second draft which just went online – feedback is open until mid-January, please let me know your thoughts, especially on the internal governance section!

digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/s...

🤔

Title card: Alignment Faking in Large Language Models by Greenblatt et al.

New work from my team at Anthropic in collaboration with Redwood Research. I think this is plausibly the most important AGI safety result of the year. Cross-posting the thread below:

We're working hard behind the scenes to finalize the dates and venue for #FAccT2025! While final confirmation is still pending, our tentative conference dates are June 23-26. Expect more updates soon!