codytfenwick.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Again, the richest man in human history personally individually directed this

submitted 13 hours ago • 139 comments

🚨 Come work with me! 🚨 We're hiring a head of people: jobs.ashbyhq.com/openphilant...

submitted 12 hours ago • 0 comments

In light of GPT-4.5's release, I wanted to revisit my June prediction that the next gen of LLMs would disappoint. So in some sense, this prediction definitely came true. GPT-4.5 does not appear to be nearly as big of a leap over GPT-4 as 4 was over 3.5. 🧵 x.com/GarrisonLov...

submitted 13 hours ago • 1 comment

A good rule of thumb is if you’re talking about rising recession risk in February your “0% recession” call in December was bad:

submitted 23 hours ago • 16 comments

Beautiful story from @devex.com on (the country of) Georgia's dramatic progress against lead poisoning — reducing childhood exposure from 80% to 20% in just 5 years — and how @openphil.bsky.social is helping to sustain momentum despite the USAID freeze devex.shorthandstories.com/cracking-th...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

1/ Over the past two days Robert Long and I spoke at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI about the case for taking AI welfare seriously. Great conversations at all three - thanks to everyone who organized and attended!

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

From Anthony McDonnell: Tuberculosis treatment is incredibly effective at saving lives worldwide, and reduces the risk of multidrug resistant TB spreading in the US, which would be a multibillion dollar problem. The US foreign assistance pause threatens all this. www.cgdev.org/blog/tubercu...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

the most surprising and disappointing aspect of becoming a global health philanthropist is the existence of an opposition team

submitted 2 days ago • 114 comments

For vertical farming to work for cereals, energy would need to be insanely cheap. We underestimate how cheap a lot of outdoor farming is. That's good for feeding 9-10 billion people. But bad news for indoor competitors. I ran the numbers here: www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/vertical-f...

submitted 4 days ago • 4 comments

OpenAI now has 400M weekly users. I think the conversations that I still see that AI overall is not useful or just a bubble are not reflecting reality. There is a lot more importance now in discussions of how to steer the use AI to improve things (& mitigate risks) than arguing that it doesn’t work

submitted 8 days ago • 8 comments

Another neat alignment-motivated complexity theory conjecture from ARC! I am excited for more theory folk to work on alignment, and crisply defined conjectures are a great starting point. Some thoughts on how this conjecture relates to the overall problem. 🧵 www.alignment.org/blog/a-compu...

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Survey of PEPFAR contractors Jan 24-28 suggested 36% of organizations had already shut down by that point. As of February 9, most services remained paused. Of 65 PEPFAR partners surveyed, less than 10% had restarted providing any services. www.amfar.org/wp-content/u...

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

The dismantling of USAID continues: “Many programs are being terminated with immediate effect, despite the fact that at least one of these organizations was supposed to be warned of a program termination 30 days in advance.” www.devex.com/news/the-dis...

submitted 15 days ago • 3 comments

In Nigeria toddlers are starving because emergency feeding centers have run out of nutrient-rich paste used to save lives of severely malnourished children Ebola outbreak in Uganda has spread to 3 cities. @nickkristof.bsky.social on consequences of USAID chaos so far www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/o...

submitted 16 days ago • 47 comments

I saw a lot of people report credulously on the lifesaving assistance waiver Rubio announced. Don’t be duped by these kinds of tactics.

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Rubio claims that @USAID lifesaving assistance for health and humanitarian needs will continue. But his team just communicated that the entire agency will be imminently reduced from 14,000 to 294 people. Just 12 in Africa.

submitted 22 days ago • 146 comments

In 2017, Marco Rubio wrote that 'foreign aid is not charity' and is 'less than 1% of the budget & critical to national security.' In 2022, he urged Biden to prioritize USAID funding to 'counter the Chinese Communist Party’s expanding global influence.' In 2025, he wants to scrap it entirely.

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

I'm really pleased to see that the official Audible Audiobook of The Edge of Sentience will be out on 18 February. Thanks to OUP for believing in the book and making this happen!

submitted 24 days ago • 7 comments

It seems quite clear that techniques like this and others will dramatically reduce hallucinations as AI advances. (Meanwhile, humans have many analogous failure modes.) Those who think hallucinations are an inevitable flaw that will doom the current AI paradigm are likely mistaken.

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

One of my party facts is that according to polls, Americans believe foreign aid is about 25% of the federal budget and on average that it should be about 10%. The actual number is less than 1%. Foreign aid has long been a boogey man of the right, so it's not surprising they're vilifying it now.

submitted 26 days ago • 404 comments

There's a small but real (~1.2%) chance that a recently discovered asteroid (2024 YR4) could hit Earth in 2032. It's now at the top of the European Space Agency's "Risk List." How bad could it be?

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

What happens if you put an AI in charge of national defense? In war games, LLMs tend to escalate & do arms races. Base models are more aggressive & unpredictable. The authors speculate that it is because there is lots of training data on escalation, little on de-escalation. arxiv.org/pdf/2401.03408

submitted 27 days ago • 8 comments

Genuinely horrifying. 20 million people receive HIV antiviral treatment from the program annually. Mothers with HIV would transmit it to their infants at birth if not for perinatal antiviral treatment. This should be resumed as soon as possible. Every day of delay means more lives lost.

submitted 32 days ago • 6 comments

Snakebites kill a shocking 100,000 people/year globally: worksinprogress.co/issue/advan... So I was excited to see this super cool work from an Open Phil grantee to use AI tools to develop better antivenoms: www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-...

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

I worry people are not reckoning with what AI can and can't do well. I post about it occasionally, and there are always people who insist that it's just scraping and regurgitating, or even that there's an actual human writing the responses.

submitted 35 days ago • 28 comments

A new completely open reasoning model out of China, Deepseek-R1, is now available. The benchmarks show it at parity with the likes of o1 and Sonnet In some informal tests on non-code problems, it is really good, not o1-pro level but surprisingly capable (and incredibly small & fast!). Big advance.

submitted 39 days ago • 3 comments

Yes, they can hallucinate papers that don't exist, discuss results that seem to be imaginary, and can be confusing and inconsistent. But talking to tenured professors may still be helpful

submitted 45 days ago • 14 comments

I don't think people know that making plausible fake videos is now something that doesn't require a lot of skill or time I made this Veo video of a man trying out a flying skateboard at CES from a text prompt, 2nd try. Notice the shadows, green light, his body shifts for balance

submitted 46 days ago • 16 comments

Why it's okay to use ChatGPT, in 4 graphs

submitted 45 days ago • 8 comments

Wrote a long rambling post about why individual AI use isn't bad for the environment substack.com/home/post/p-...

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

I’m not sure who says we’ll stop liking human made art, but it is indeed a good prediction that AI art will continue to improve in quality and people will enjoy consuming it. The weird hypothesis is to just assume without reason that this is impossible.

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

Our Daily Data Insight today — the world has passed “peak child.”

submitted 47 days ago • 4 comments

US workers under ~30 have never known a world of wage stagnation:

submitted 48 days ago • 8 comments

Robust disease surveillance for novel pathogens isn’t just a matter of public health preparedness, but also national security, and need to guard against deliberate threats. As the tools for engineering dangerous pathogens become more ubiquitous, threats increase My essay in @statnews.com

submitted 48 days ago • 4 comments

On the environmental cost of AI, this by @simonwillison.net w is useful. The models we use today have become orders of magnitude more efficient in the last year, and each prompt likely uses much less energy than many seem to think. But the aggregate impact of ever-larger data centers is very real.

submitted 48 days ago • 5 comments