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Charles Foster

@cfoster.bsky.social

878 followers 156 following 58 posts

Twitter: @CFGeek Mastodon: @cfoster0@sigmoid.social When I choose to speak, I speak for myself. 🪄 Tensor-enjoyer 🧪

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Charles Foster @cfoster.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Update for those who’ve left the other app: I’m now on the policy team at Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR). Excited to be “doing AI policy” full-time.

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Charles Foster @cfoster.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Why aren’t our AI evaluations better? AFAICT a key reason is that the incentives around them are kinda bad. In a new post, I explain how the standardized testing industry works and write about lessons it may have for the AI evals ecosystem. open.substack.com/pub/contextw...

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Charles Foster @cfoster.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

You want traders to give you cheap but calibrated estimates for all the claims. The randomization reduces the expected size of payouts they’d receive for their bets, since each market only has a 10% chance of getting audited & resolved, but it preserves the incentive to bet their true probabilities.

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Charles Foster @cfoster.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Neat thing about real-money prediction markets is that you can get paid for doing this.

xkcd comic 386, with back and forth that goes:

“Are you going to bed?”
“I can’t. This is important.”
“What?”
“Someone is WRONG on the internet.”

https://xkcd.com/386/

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Charles Foster @cfoster.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

If you’re driving from Chicago, it can make sense to talk of racing to NYC. But once in NYC, that aim no longer has clear meaning. IMO this “near vs. far” distinction explains why previous AI goals now seem vague even though they seemed clear when farther on the horizon. (4/6)

Maps of NYC zoomed out to the level of seeing the entire Eastern USA, and then zoomed in to an internal section within the city.

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Charles Foster @cfoster.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Still gathering my thoughts on @TheCurveConf, but for now, a short reflection on why I like “the curve” as a way of thinking about the future of AI. (1/6)

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Charles Foster @cfoster.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

“I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health […] but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” - M. Shelley in Frankenstein

Professor Geoffrey Hinton, photo from a NYT article. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html

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