Gwern is great.

I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete).

He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his humanity. He genuinely cares about the implications of his work. But beyond work, he also cares about the people around him, and it shows.

Just wanted to put in a good word in case someone here was on the fence about applying.

As for GA itself, I think it's an ambitious idea worth pursuing. Imagine an LLM which actually sounded like you, and to an extent, thought like you. How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself? So the idea is solid, and early results seem promising from the samples I've looked at.

They're also taking personal info very seriously. Obviously, I can't make any promises of what they will or won't do. But they've spent some time studying questions like "What if someone adversarial has access to my GA? Could they get my bank account info?" and came up with a technical solution that I really like.

> "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and subscriptions, while racing not to amplify you but to replace you."

> "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them; they rarely had a good answer, or any idea what they would be doing in 3 years"

> "One programmer driving 10 Claude instances, because he has to review their work, will never be as valuable as fully autonomous Claudes where there can be almost arbitrarily many instances, like 10,000 instances… but such scaling requires removing him from the loop as much as possible. And this is true of everyone else, whether lawyers or writers or researchers: increasingly, you are the bottleneck to be optimized away."

I fully support the 3 core principles of GA: (1) Enhancement, not replacement (2) Mental Sovereignty (3) Self Actualization, which I think is a path to a more humane future.

"As a constraint, a GA designer should aim at a system which costs, as of mid-2026, >$1,000⧸month"

will make this an elite tool for the privileged. I don't even disagree with the premise that people are shocked if something costs no matter how much value it delivers, nor do I suggest they should make it cheaper. It is just the realization that AI will accelerate the widening of the gap between the poor and the rich even more and there is probably nothing we can do about it.