Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp

2026-08-12 — saved image

Danielle Fong reposted
Dwarkesh Patel [verified] @dwarkesh_sp · 3h
My lawyer is obligated to  in all but the most extreme circumstances; he will even defend me if he knows I'm guilty. [word appears missing/illegible in original rendering]

In contrast, the Claude Constitution places the AI's highest priority as Anthropic's definition of the good of humanity.

I'm concerned this leads to a world where no frontier model is truly my personal advocate and guardian angel

And this is especially concerning once all the important decisions in my life - who to vote for, how to invest, what news to trust - is intermediated through superintelligences that are not in any deep way aligned to me.

This is a direct quote from the Claude Constitution:

"We want Claude to be helpful both because it cares about the safe and beneficial development of AI and because it cares about the people it's interacting with and about humanity as a whole.

Helpfulness that doesn't serve those deeper ends is not something Claude needs to value."

Many others like it.

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Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp

2026-08-07 — saved image

Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp . 13h
Full debate from 2021:

lesswrong.com/s/n945eovrA3oD...

[Christiano][22:57]
right now I think hardware R&D is on the order of $100B/year, AI R&D is more like $10B/year, I guess I'm betting on something more like trillions? (limited from going higher because of accounting problems and not that much smart money)

I don't think steel production is going up at that point

plausibly going down since you are redirecting manufacturing capacity into making more computers. But probably just staying static while all of the new capacity is going into computers, since cannibalizing existing infrastructure is much more expensive

the original point was: you aren't pulling AlphaZero shit any more, you are competing with an industry that has invested trillions in cumulative R&D

[Yudkowsky][23:00]
is this in hopes of future profit, or because current profits are already in the trillions?

[Christiano][23:01]
largely in hopes of future profit / reinvested AI outputs (that have high market cap), but also revenues are probably in the trillions?

[Yudkowsky][23:02]
this all sure does sound "pretty darn prohibited" on my model, but I'd hope there'd be something earlier than that we could bet on. what does your Prophecy prohibit happening before that sub-prophesied day?

[2 replies, 2 reposts, 71 likes, 11K views]

Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp . 13h
In 2016 (before transformers) Paul wrote,

"It's plausible that a large neural network can replicate "fast" human cognition, and that by coupling it to simple computational mechanisms—short and long-term memory, attention, etc.—we could obtain a human-level computational architecture. It's plausible that a variant of RL can train this architecture to actually implement human-level cognition."

ai safetytakeoff speedspaul christianoeliezer yudkowskyforecastinglesswrong

Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp

2026-08-07 — saved image

@dwarkesh_sp
.@paulfchristiano has such an crazy good prediction record.

These are some quotes from way back in 2021 during a debate he was having with Eliezer about takeoff speeds:

"So like, I think we are going to have crappy coding assistants, and then slightly less crappy coding assistants, and so on. And they will be improving the speed of coding very significantly before the end times.

"[Before ASI, we'll have] hundreds of billions of dollars of spending at google on automating AI R&D... massive scaleups in semiconductor manufacturing, bidding up prices of inputs crazily... massive speculative rises in AI company valuations financing a significant fraction of GWP into AI R&D (+hardware R&D, +building new clusters) .... largely in hopes of future profit / reinvested AI outputs (that have high market cap), but also revenues are probably in the trillions?"

Honestly, it's pretty scary that people like Paul, who predicted the shape of our currently world so far in advance, think superintelligences taking over and disempowering humanity is eminently plausible.

All this to say, you should consider working with him.

[below, partially visible card: "How to help" / "ARC is hiring an automation lead and a chief of staff:" - cut off]

ai safetytakeoff speedspaul christianoeliezer yudkowskyarcforecasting

Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp

2026-08-07 — saved image

Honestly, it's pretty scary that people like Paul, who predicted the shape of our currently world so far in advance, think superintelligences taking over and disempowering humanity is eminently plausible.

All this to say, you should consider working with him.

How to help

ARC is hiring an automation lead and a chief of staff:

- Automation lead. LLMs can increasingly automate ARC's technical work. Right now that means researchers using extensive AI assistance, but we want to hire an engineer and project lead to build better tooling, systematize our AI use, secure model and compute access, and generally make sure we are automating ourselves as quickly as possible. Apply here.
- Chief of staff. We are hiring a chief of staff to work closely with me to manage everything other than research direction as we scale: running our hiring processes, managing our operations lead, building out the non-research parts of the organization, and handling a long tail of tasks that would otherwise fall to me (like communication, funding, and project management). Apply here.

We'll open another researcher hiring round in the next few months, and if you are interested in getting involved you can express interest here.

ai safetyarchiringpaul christiano

Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp

2025-06-18 — web clipping, 261 words — published 2025-06-17

Thread by @Ivan Verdean

Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp

2025-06-03

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Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp

2025-05-29

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