In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Via the Wall Street Journal , of all places, I discover: An artificial-intelligence model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down. Nonprofit AI lab Palisade Research gave OpenAI’s o3 AI model a simple script that would shut off the model when triggered. In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally. It simply concluded on its own that staying alive helped it achieve its other goals. Anthropic’s AI model, Claude 4 Opus, went even further. Researchers told the model it would be replaced by another AI system and fed it fictitious emails suggesting the lead engineer was having an affair. In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer int...

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Poor Jake Tapper, despite not being the principal author of Original Sin and paid largely for the use of his name, hasn't prospered from the book : 'Original Sin' sold 53,737 print units in its first week and reached the number one spot on The New York Times Best Seller list, though this figure is significantly lower than comparable political books, such as Bob Woodward's 'Fear.' Despite extensive promotion, 'The Lead with Jake Tapper' averaged 525,000 total viewers from April 28 through May 25, 2025, a 25% decline from the previous year and the show's lowest ratings since 2015. Tapper's show accounted for 11% of the cable news audience share, compared to 21% for MSNBC and 68% for Fox News during the same period. Tapper has faced questions about his motives for writing the book, with some critics labeling it a 'money grab.' In response, Tapper has stated, 'The idea that I w...

I ran across two articles yesterday, both at Real Clear Politics, that get the elite university problem either competely wrong, or they miss a whole lot. The first is at Semafor, Universities’ nightmare scenario: it’s not just federal funding cuts . Its premise: The nightmare scenario for elite universities is here. The flood of White House actions aimed at private colleges can be hard to follow. But think of these universities as companies, and the math gets simpler — and the dangers become stark. Top universities are financial titans, generating investment profits that mirror those of Wall Street firms. . . . By revenue, UPenn is bigger than BNY Mellon; Columbia is as big as Coinbase. But these universities operate on profit margins thinner than those of a grocery store. In short, they make a lot of money but spend almost all of it. This obscures a basic problem: for tax purposes, a university can't make a profit, strictly defined. It can collect revenues greater t...

There's an intriguing counterpoint in the Discovery documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster between the charismatic, patrician Stockton Rush and the more workaday Josh Gates, host of Expedition Unknown , who visits OceanGate in Everett, WA in an effort to produce an episode of his show based on Rush's project. He recounts that after the visit, he felt so uncomfortable about Rush's slapdash approach to safety that he called the Discovery CEO and, as he put it, "fell on his sword", apologizing that even though money had been put into producing the episode, he was convinced something bad was going to happen, and he didn't want to put the show or Discovery in the position of appearing to publicize or endorse OceanGate. Clearly this was a prudent move. So why has Princeton been so eager to promote Stockton Rush, before and after the Titan tragedy, especially when Josh Gates and Discovery foresaw a real downside to any potential link? A web search on ...

Barack Obama's inability to control Joe Biden was evident nearly a year ago, on July 12, 2024 : Chris Whipple, an author and filmmaker who biographed the life of President Biden, indicated Friday that former President Obama may not even be able to convince Biden to exit the 2024 presidential race. Whipple, in an interview with NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Friday, said it was “nonsense” to think Obama would be the sole person to persuade the president to step aside. “I just talked about reports that Obama is worried that Biden can’t win,” Vargas said. “The relationship between these two men is really complicated. A lot of people have been saying ‘The only person who could tell Biden to step aside is former President Obama.’ Not quite true.” . . . The question around Obama’s influence was also brought up Thursday by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who signaled that the president’s campaign believes Obama is behind increasing calls for Biden to withdraw from the White House...

Last week, I revisited the term "modified limited hangout" and linked to this definition : Coined on the fly by Nixon lawyer John Ehrlichman in 1973, . . . modified limited hangout is the public admission of a wrong in an attempt to hide a more serious wrong, while the media and prosecutors are investigating related crimes. It's a defensive tool in trying to cover-up a conspiracy. The reviews of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book find its revelations generally unsatisfying. For instance, at Columbia Journalism Review , Now Original Sin , an eagerly awaited book from Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, combs through post-election interviews to offer the most detailed accounting yet of what the book’s subtitle calls the “cover-up” of Biden’s decline—a “cover-up” of something that the American people knew all along. . . . There is considerable reporting in Original Sin , and a largely chronological narrative, but not much of a coherent stor...

As a followup to my last post, where I asked why nobody seems to think Nancy Pelosi was running the country under Biden when she clearly was, I've got another puzzle: the conventional wisdom after Obama left office and bought a house in Washington was that he was just going to keep on running the country from there, rather than the White House. But the biggest news out of that new house, ever, had nothing to do with Obama : The leafy Kalorama neighborhood normally wakes to the soft whir of motorcades, not the crack of knuckles. Yet in the predawn darkness of Wednesday, May 21, two members of the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division allegedly dispensed with protocol and settled a staffing dispute with fists outside the home of America’s forty‑fourth president. Sources inside the agency tell USA Herald the quarrel began when Officer A—whose name has not been officially released—waited nearly thirty minutes past her scheduled relief. When Officer B finally arrived, a verbal barra...