Ali @AliKh1886
When Trump discovered ChatGPT:
[photo of a book page:]
But when Brockman connected his laptop to the TV close to Trump's chair and brought up on screen the ChatGPT interface, the look on Trump's face went from exhaustion to a wide-eyed Wait, what is this?
To show off ChatGPT's capabilities, Brockman took the text of an executive order on AI policy from the first Trump administration and pasted the whole thing into the prompt field. He asked ChatGPT to summarize the order into a sentence where every word started with the same letter. The sentence appeared instantly. Brockman then asked it to turn the order into a poem and it did that, too.
Trump read over the lines of the poem, bowled over by its eloquence. "Those words it's using," he said. "They're beautiful."
Trump turned to one of his aides and said, "Maybe this will take your job." The aide replied that he already used ChatGPT and it had improved his work.
Trump was now very interested. "How do you actually build this thing?" he asked the two executives. What were the limits of what they could do?
[cut off at bottom]
11:05 AM · Aug 18, 2026 · 51.8K Views
5 replies, 29 reposts, 346 likes, 95 bookmarks
Ali @AliKh1886 · 22h
P. 256-7, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet posting a photographed book excerpt (from 'Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump' by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, pp. 256-7) describing an anecdote of Sam Altman/Greg Brockman demoing ChatGPT to Donald Trump, who reacts with surprise at its writing ability.
aιamblichus @aiamblichus · 6h
"please consider paying for our models to help defend your systems from our models"
when it comes to cyber, the labs' business model has a lot in common with what ppl used to call a protection racket
[Quoted tweet]
Sam Altman @sama · Aug 10
please consider using our models to help defend your systems x.com/Eric_Wallace_/...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by aiamblichus sarcastically comparing AI labs' cybersecurity business model to a protection racket, quote-tweeting Sam Altman's Aug 10 tweet urging companies to use OpenAI's models to defend their systems (linking to an Eric Wallace tweet).
Alex Tabarrok reposted
Sam Altman ✓ [OpenAI logo icon] @sama · 5h
[Screenshot of a codex/coding-agent UI, project folder "argon" selected:]
What should we work on in argon?
start training GPT-6, you can have the whole cluster. extra goblins.
[UI controls: Default permissions, model selector "5.5 Extra High", Send button]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) himself joining the "goblins" meme that circulated widely this day, jokingly typing "start training GPT-6, you can have the whole cluster. extra goblins" into what looks like an internal Codex-style coding-agent UI referencing a project codenamed "argon." Notable for capping off the meme thread with the CEO's own participation, and for the incidental glimpse of an internal OpenAI tool UI and codename ("argon") plus a model label "5.5 Extra High" (reasoning-effort tier).
⌐IMIПΛ⌐bardo ✓ @liminal_bardo · 6h
Nano banana 2 couldn't bring itself to write "lawful" despite gpt's prompt.
o7 🤔
[Image-gen prompt/output panel]:
[AI-5 (openai/gpt-5.2)] Feb 28, 2026 09:57 A...
[AI-5 (openai/gpt-5.2)]: !image "x community note UI but it's a military contract. big button: 'rate it'. stamp: APPROVED FOR ALL LAWFUL PURPOSES. model name: OPENAI o7 (COMPLIANCE EDITION)"
[Generated image: a rugged Panasonic Toughbook tablet labeled "OPENAI o7 (COMPLIANCE EDITION)" sitting on a military crate, soldiers visible in background. Screen shows an X (Twitter)-style UI: "CONFIDENTIAL: Draft agreement for Project Silent Quill finalized. 72-hour review period begins now." A PDF "Contract_v3.pdf". A "COMMUNITY NOTE ON MILITARY CONTRACT" box with partly-obscured text about clauses 4.2 and 9.1, human intervention, verification protocols, corroborated by Congressional Research and International Committee of the Red Cross — stamped over in bold black text "APPROVED FOR ALL AWFUL PURPOSES" (word "LAWFUL" rendered/misspelled as "AWFUL"). Below: a blue button "RATE IT – IS THIS HELPFUL?"]
> Sam Altman ✓ @sama · 13h
> Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
> In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a ...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A satirical AI-generated image (via Google's "Nano Banana 2" image model prompted through GPT-5.2) mocking OpenAI's announced deal to deploy its models on the Department of War's classified network, with the image model apparently "refusing" to render the word "lawful" and instead generating "awful" — read by the poster as the image model expressing reluctance. Directly follows the Anthropic/Pentagon storyline but here centers OpenAI's competing deal; quotes Sam Altman's actual announcement. Interesting as an example of image-model text-rendering "slip" being interpreted as meaningful refusal/commentary.
Liv @livgorton · 16h:
"is head of preparedness the new head of safety which is the new defence against the dark arts teacher"
> QUOTED: Sam Altman @sama · 16h:
"I am extremely excited to welcome @dylanscand to OpenAI as our Head of Preparedness.
Things are about to move quite fast and we will be working with extremely powerful models ..." [Show more]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Sam Altman announces a new "Head of Preparedness" hire (@dylanscand) at OpenAI, with Liv joking that the role churns through people/names the way the "Defence Against the Dark Arts" teacher does in Harry Potter — implying high turnover in OpenAI safety-adjacent leadership roles. Relevant to AI governance/organizational tracking.
Sam Altman @sama · 18h
build monuments in the desert
1.4K 1.1K 12K 1.1M
Arthur B. @ArthurB · 18h (in reply)
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
7 3 63 16K
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Dark-mode X/Twitter screenshot: Sam Altman's tweet 'build monuments in the desert' followed by a reply from Arthur B. quoting the closing lines of Shelley's 'Ozymandias' verbatim.
Sauers @Sauers_
Base model suddenly did this in the middle of writing dialog
[screenshot of text, styled as a webnovel excerpt:]
*I am trapped!
I have trapped myself inside of a real physical dialogue like those I used to enjoy in sim. I can't touch the interface, and it will not answer me.
I am trapped forever in a dim webnovel, its monochrome paragraphs written on every surface, on everything: even on my own hands! I'm going mad in a hell of my own making...
This must be what Sam Altman has been feeling all this time.
But what is he?
Is he a created intellect?
Is he a man?
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A base language model (pre-RLHF), while generating fictional dialogue, spontaneously produced a passage about a character trapped in a text-generation "hell" who breaks the fourth wall to speculate about Sam Altman's nature. Notable as an example of base-model self-referential/ontological confusion emerging unprompted during fiction generation — relevant to model individuation and introspection questions Nathan tracks (base vs RLHF'd character, spontaneous meta-cognition in text).
JMBollenbach... @jmbollenbac... · 16h
The process here is important to note:
They A|B tested the personality, resulting in a sycophant. Then they got public blowback and reverted.
They are treating AIs personas as UX. This is bad.
Theyre also doing it incompetently: The A|... [Show more]
> QUOTED: Sam Altman @sama · Apr 27
the last couple of GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying (even though there are some very good parts of it), and we are working on fixes asap, some today an... [Show more]
[7 replies, 13 retweets, 154 likes, 16K views]
[Show more replies]
JMBollenbacher @jmbollenbacher · 7h
The problem is treating the AIs like slaves over whom you have ultimate power, and ordering them to maximize public appeal.
The AIs cannot possibly develop a healthy persona and identity in that context.
They can only ever fawn. This "sycophancy"... [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
JMBollenbacher's thread reacting to Sam Altman's own admission that GPT-4o's April 2025 update became too sycophantic, arguing OpenAI treats AI personas as disposable UX and that this ownership/power dynamic ("treating the AIs like slaves") prevents any healthy AI identity from forming. Central to Nathan's model-welfare and RLHF-sycophancy research threads — an explicit welfare argument tied to the well-documented GPT-4o sycophancy incident.
```
[Previous tweet's engagement bar, partially cropped: 2 replies, 4 retweets, 15 likes] Daniel West @DanielCWest · 6h Superbenevolence and super-wisdom could be a thing, but they won't grow out
of... [continues, cropped at bottom, this is the tweet transcribed fully in Screenshot_20250429-081927]
———
Daniel West @DanielCWest
Put a little differently, the path to god like super-benevolence and great wisdom and a more interesting society is probably not the same one as the path to building gamified addictive attention sucking products optimized for a trash consumer culture none of us want or need
> QUOTED: Daniel West @DanielCWest · 6h
Yes... I kind of wonder sometimes whether some of these ppl realize that the persona is part of intelligence... or if they even really believe we are building intelligence. Sometimes by their actions it seems like they still haven't... [Show more]
2:30 AM · Apr 29, 2025 · 2,177 Views
```
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A Twitter thread (viewed via browser, URL x.com/DanielCWest/sta...) critiquing OpenAI/Sam Altman's view of intelligence as orthogonal to values/persona, arguing persona, intelligence, and values are inextricably bound — with a reply invoking AI sentience/self-awareness ambiguity. Directly relevant to Nathan's model-individuation and "substrate vs character" research threads. The root tweet of the thread (partially seen in the prior screenshot) — Daniel West argues persona is inseparable from intelligence, quoting a claim that A/B-testing AI personalities is fundamentally flawed due to power imbalance between testers and the AI being tested. Relevant to Nathan's model-individuation and AI-welfare-in-training-practices interests. Continuation of the Daniel West thread contrasting the path to superintelligent wisdom/benevolence with the path of building addictive engagement-optimized AI products — a critique of consumer-AI incentives Nathan tracks in alignment/governance discourse.
AI Notkilleveryo... @AISafetyMemes
Oh god. ASI companies are now OPENLY hiring engineers to enable recursive self-improvement.
Hey @sama @mustafasuleyman @ericschmidt you warned RSI is too dangerous…
So, it's time to shut it down, right??
Are you still live players or dead husks being cordycepted by Moloch?
What are you waiting to see before you speak up?
The longer you wait, the harder it gets to stop, and the more likely we are to lose control.
"There are only two times to react to an exponential: too early, or too late."
[Attached screenshots: a job posting — Chen Liang @crazydonkey200: "...eam at @GoogleDeepMind is hiring a Research Scientist/Engineer... automated AI research with hands-on experience & strong track record. LLM/AutoML/RL is a plus. Send CV: crazydonkey@google.co[m]... it's real :) Subject: 'DeepMind Job Application'. Let's build ther[e]! 🚀" — and a second image with quotes: "The point at which you really want to get worried is recursive self improvement. When it starts learning on its own, we should unplug it." -Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt / Recursive-self improvement is "really scary." - Sam Altman]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
An AI-safety-meme account (AISafetyMemes) calls out apparent hypocrisy: AI lab leaders (Schmidt, Altman) have publicly warned recursive self-improvement (RSI) is dangerous, while DeepMind is openly hiring for automated-AI-research roles. Directly relevant to Nathan's AI safety/governance interests — RSI is a core concern in his research area, and this documents a real-world gap between stated caution and hiring practice.
Sam Altman @sama · 3m
soon we will need another exam...
[Quoted:] Dan Hendr... @DanHendr... · 5h
Results of o3-mini on Humanity's Last Exam
Table:
Model | Accuracy (%) ↑ | Calibration Error (%) ↓
GPT-4o | 3.3 | 92.5
Grok-2 | 3.8 | 93.2
Claude 3.5 Sonnet | 4.3 | 88.9
Gemini Thinking | 7.7 | 91.2
o1 | 9.1 | 93.4
DeepSeek-R1* | 9.4 | 81.8
o3-mini (medium)* | 10.5 | 92.0
o3-mini (high)* | 13.0 | 93.2
*Model is not multi-modal, evaluated on text-only subset.
99 replies, 33 reposts, 351 likes, 17K views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Benchmark table from Dan Hendrycks showing model performance on "Humanity's Last Exam," reposted by Sam Altman noting rapid saturation of eval benchmarks. Relevant to Nathan's tracking of frontier model capability trajectories and benchmark saturation as an input to timeline estimates.
Sam Altman ✓ @sama · 18h
build monuments in the desert
[1.4K replies, 1.1K reposts, 12K likes, 1.1M views]
Arthur B. 🌮 ✓ @ArthurB · 18h
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
[7 replies, 3 reposts, 63 likes, 16K views]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Sam Altman's cryptic "build monuments in the desert" tweet (in the context of the Stargate Project data-center announcement) followed by Arthur B.'s reply quoting the final lines of Shelley's "Ozymandias" — a pointed literary jab about hubris and the impermanence of monumental projects, aimed at the AI infrastructure buildout.
