Beren's Blog

Epistemic Status: Wildly speculative but having fun with it I have been pondering recently whether meaningful individuality can survive in the post-AGI limit and what this could even mean.

Often I hear justifications for continuing the AI race which are, roughly, that even if there are dangers, there are also massive technological benefits waiting if we race ahead and successfully align AGI.

Epistemic Status: Short note of what are basically shower thoughts.

Author’s note: A follow-up and addendum to my previous The Scaling Laws are in Our Stars’ post.

Author’s note: Short note.

Epistemic status: Obviously speculative but mechanism design is fun.

Epistemic status: A lot of this is vibes and generally trying to express tacit knowledge from ML experience and training models.

Author’s note: This is quite a long post.

so much depends upon a von-neumann probe somewhere in the intergalactic void aimed at eternity

Epistemic Status: Obviously speculative and maybe obvious.

Epistemic Status: A short note which posits a question without necessarily arriving at a definitive answer.

Epistemic status: Interesting as a mechanism and trend, but obviously highly variable over short timescales and ultimately speculative.

Epistemic Status: I really only did a fairly surface level skim of Baudrillard’s actual work mostly cribbed from secondary sources, so I could very well be misrepresenting core things about what he actually said.

Author’s note: More mystical than usual.

Epistemic note: Probably already known or obvious, but this treatment seems clearer to me than the standard treatment in e.g. the FDT paper.

Author’s note: Roughly correct as far as I know but I’m not a physicist so there certainly might be mistakes or things that I have missed.

Recently I have been seeing a number of takes that most Chinese AI progress is dependent upon distillation from closed US models, especially from OpenAI and Anthropic, and that therefore if their access to these models were cut off their progress would ce…

Authors note: I originally wrote this poem in the summer of 2013 where I was very inspired by Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome and thinking deeply about virtue and historiography.

Epistemic Status: Obviously highly speculative.

Author’s Note: Transcript of my talk at the Post-AGI workshop in San Diego on December 3rd, 2025.