Essays
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Essays

Below is a list of the best essays that I read. The rough theme is 'progress studies' or captured as a question: how do we build a better future? I started this in November 2020 and add 1-5 new essays per week.

To Read

Notes on Existential Risk from Artificial Superintelligence

Earlier this year I decided to take a few weeks to figure out what I think about the existential risk from Artificial Superintelligence (ASI xrisk). It turned out to be much more difficult than I thought. After several months of reading, thinking, and talking with people, what follows is a discussion of a few observations arising during this exploration, including: Three ASI xrisk persuasion paradoxes, which make it intrinsically difficult to present strong evidence either for or against ASI xrisk. The lack of such compelling evidence is part of the reason there is such strong disagreement about ASI xrisk, with people often (understandably) relying instead on prior beliefs, self-interest, and tribal reasoning to decide their opinions. The alignment dilemma: should someone concerned with xrisk contribute to concrete alignment work, since it's the only way we can hope to build safe systems; or should they refuse to do such work, as contributing to accelerating a bad outcome? Part of a broader discussion of the accelerationist character of much AI alignment work, so capabilities / alignment is a false dichotomy. The doomsday question: are there recipes for ruin -- simple, easily executed, immensely destructive recipes that could end humanity, or wreak catastrophic world-changing damage? What bottlenecks are there on ASI speeding up scientific discovery? And, in particular: is it possible for ASI to discover new levels of emergent phenomena, latent in existing theories?

michaelnotebook.com

The Rise of Vertical AI | by Paris Heymann | Index Ventures

The Evolution of vSaaSAt Index we have been longtime fans of vertical SaaS (vSaaS) – cloud-based software tailor-made for specific industries.We view the emergence of vSaaS as part of a broader trend of end users increasingly demanding superior technology products. Consumers want solutions-oriented software made specifically to solve their exact business problems. In an environment where we are inundated with software, narrow and specific is well-positioned versus broad and generalized."With the AI Platform Shift upon us, we believe that the next logical iteration of vertical SaaS will be Vertical AI – vertically-focused AI platforms, bundled alongside workflow SaaS, built on top of models which have been uniquely trained on industry-specific datasets."— Paris Heymann, Index VenturesThe concept of verticalization is not new. Even the largest horizontal tech companies verticalize their sales organizations and product features when they have enough scale within each vertical for that to be a sensible approach. Cloud giants AWS, Azure, and GCP prominently feature vertical industry solutions with dedicated sales teams, as do other large platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Snowflake and Workday. These tech leaders verticalize their offerings over time because it’s a high quality experience for customers and end users when a technology vendor deeply understands the industry, has sales and support reps attending the same conferences as users, and is rapidly evolving the product to suit customer needs.With the AI Platform Shift upon us, we believe that the next logical iteration of vertical SaaS will be Vertical AI – vertically-focused AI platforms, bundled alongside workflow SaaS, built on top of models which have been uniquely trained on industry-specific datasets.Why Vertical AI?The AI category is rapidly evolving, but developing into three layers: foundational models, AI infrastructure, and AI applications.

www.indexventures.com

The Rise of Vertical AI | by Paris Heymann | Index Ventures

Read

https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/

https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/what-will-gpt-2030-look-like/amp/