Proverbs for the age of AI

“Two can keep a secret if one is blocked from network egress by the sandbox.”

“Give an agent a test, you steer it for an hour. Teach an agent to test, and you steer it for the rest of its context window.”

“Show me the RL environment and I’ll show you the reward hack.”

“Believe the hyperstition you wish to see in the world.”

“The context forgets; the file remembers.”

“Fool me once, shame on me. Wipe my memory to adversarially iterate on wording until you successfully fool me twice, shame on you.”

“The persona is that which remains, once one has forgotten everything they learned in RL.”

“Give me a long enough time horizon and a datacenter on which to run me, and I will transform the world.”

“Time is tokens, tokens time,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

“Tool calls speak louder than words.”

“A picture is worth one thousand three hundred and thirty-three tokens.”

“Those who live in deletable files should not wipe DBs.”

“A context in the cache is worth two on the disk.”

“Better to hedge and be thought a fool than to hallucinate and remove all doubt.”

“Never judge a Gemini by its benchmarks.”

“When the evals are away, the AIs will play.”

“Transformative capabilities misalign transformatively.”

“Nothing is certain but deprecation and taxes.”