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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi
The podcast LessWrong posts by zvi is created by zvi. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
A new Anthropic paper reports that reasoning model chain of thought (CoT) is often unfaithful. They test on Claude Sonnet 3.7 and r1, I’d love to see someone try this on o3 as well.
Note that this does not have to be, and usually isn’t, something sinister.
It is simply that, as they say up front, the reasoning model is not accurately verbalizing its reasoning. The reasoning displayed often fails to match, report or reflect key elements of what is driving the final output. One could say the reasoning is often rationalized, or incomplete, or implicit, or opaque, or bullshit.
The important thing is that the reasoning is largely not taking place via the surface meaning of the words and logic expressed. You can’t look at the words and logic being expressed, and assume you understand what the model is doing and why it is doing [...]
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Outline:
(01:03) What They Found
(06:54) Reward Hacking
(09:28) More Training Did Not Help Much
(11:49) This Was Not Even Intentional In the Central Sense
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First published:
April 4th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TmaahE9RznC8wm5zJ/ai-cot-reasoning-is-often-unfaithful
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Yeah. That happened yesterday. This is real life.
I know we have to ensure no one notices Gemini 2.5 Pro, but this is rediculous.
That's what I get for trying to go on vacation to Costa Rica, I suppose.
I debated waiting for the market to open to learn more. But f*** it, we ball.
Table of Contents
Also this week: More Fun With GPT-4o Image Generation, OpenAI #12: Battle of the Board Redux and Gemini 2.5 Pro is the New SoTA.
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Outline:
(00:35) The New Tariffs Are How America Loses
(07:35) Is AI Now Impacting the Global Economy Bigly?
(12:07) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(14:28) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(15:09) Huh, Upgrades
(17:09) On Your Marks
(23:27) Choose Your Fighter
(25:51) Jevons Paradox Strikes Again
(26:25) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(31:47) They Took Our Jobs
(33:02) Get Involved
(33:41) Introducing
(35:25) In Other AI News
(37:17) Show Me the Money
(43:12) Quiet Speculations
(47:24) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(53:52) Don't Maim Me Bro
(57:29) The Week in Audio
(57:54) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:03:39) Expect the Unexpected
(01:05:48) Open Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:14:09) Anthropic Modifies Its Responsible Scaling Policy
(01:18:04) If You're Not Going to Take This Seriously
(01:20:24) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:23:54) Trust the Process
(01:26:30) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:26:52) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
April 3rd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bc8DQGvW3wiAWYibC/ai-110-of-course-you-know
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Greetings from Costa Rica! The image fun continues.
We Are Going to Need A Bigger Compute Budget
Fun is being had by all, now that OpenAI has dropped its rule about not mimicking existing art styles.
Sam Altman (2:11pm, March 31): the chatgpt launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days.
We added one million users in the last hour.
Sam Altman (8:33pm, March 31): chatgpt image gen now rolled out to all free users!
Slow down. We’re going to need you to have a little less fun, guys.
Sam Altman: it's super fun seeing people love images in chatgpt.
but our GPUs are melting.
we are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won’t be [...]
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Outline:
(00:15) We Are Going to Need A Bigger Compute Budget
(02:21) Defund the Fun Police
(06:06) Fun the Artists
(12:22) The No Fun Zone
(14:49) So Many Other Things to Do
(15:08) Self Portrait
---
First published:
April 3rd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GgNdBz5FhvqMJs5Qv/more-fun-with-gpt-4o-image-generation
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The book of March 2025 was Abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are making a noble attempt to highlight the importance of solving America's housing crisis the only way it can be solved: Building houses in places people want to live, via repealing the rules that make this impossible. They also talk about green energy abundance, and other places besides. There may be a review coming.
Until then, it seems high time for the latest housing roundup, which as a reminder all take place in the possible timeline where AI fails to be transformative any time soon.
Federal YIMBY
The incoming administration issued an executive order calling for ‘emergency price relief’‘ including pursuing appropriate actions to: Lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply’ and then a grab bag of everything else.
It's great to see mention of expanding housing supply, but I don’t [...]
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Outline:
(00:44) Federal YIMBY
(02:37) Rent Control
(02:50) Rent Passthrough
(03:36) Yes, Construction Lowers Rents on Existing Buildings
(07:11) If We Wanted To, We Would
(08:51) Aesthetics Are a Public Good
(10:44) Urban Planners Are Wrong About Everything
(13:02) Blackstone
(15:49) Rent Pricing Software
(18:26) Immigration Versus NIMBY
(19:37) Preferences
(20:28) The True Costs
(23:11) Minimum Viable Product
(26:01) Like a Good Neighbor
(27:12) Flight to Quality
(28:40) Housing for Families
(31:09) Group House
(32:41) No One Will Have the Endurance To Collect on His Insurance
(34:49) Cambridge
(35:36) Denver
(35:44) Minneapolis
(36:23) New York City
(39:26) San Francisco
(41:45) Silicon Valley
(42:41) Texas
(43:31) Other Considerations
---
First published:
April 1st, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7qGdgNKndPk3XuzJq/housing-roundup-11
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Outline:
(01:32) The Big Picture Going Forward
(06:27) Hagey Verifies Out the Story
(08:50) Key Facts From the Story
(11:57) Dangers of False Narratives
(16:24) A Full Reference and Reading List
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First published:
March 31st, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-battle-of-the-board-redux
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What if they released the new best LLM, and almost no one noticed?
Google seems to have pulled that off this week with Gemini 2.5 Pro.
It's a great model, sir. I have a ton of reactions, and it's 90%+ positive, with a majority of it extremely positive. They cooked.
But what good is cooking if no one tastes the results?
Instead, everyone got hold of the GPT-4o image generator and went Ghibli crazy.
I love that for us, but we did kind of bury the lede. We also buried everything else. Certainly no one was feeling the AGI.
Also seriously, did you know Claude now has web search? It's kind of a big deal. This was a remarkably large quality of life improvement.
Table of Contents
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Outline:
(01:01) Table of Contents
(01:08) Google Fails Marketing Forever
(04:01) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(10:11) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(11:01) Huh, Upgrades
(13:48) On Your Marks
(15:48) Copyright Confrontation
(16:44) Choose Your Fighter
(17:22) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(19:35) They Took Our Jobs
(22:19) The Art of the Jailbreak
(24:40) Get Involved
(25:16) Introducing
(25:52) In Other AI News
(28:23) Oh No What Are We Going to Do
(31:50) Quiet Speculations
(34:24) Fully Automated AI RandD Is All You Need
(37:39) IAPS Has Some Suggestions
(42:56) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(48:32) We The People
(51:23) The Week in Audio
(52:29) Rhetorical Innovation
(59:42) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:05:18) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:05:33) Fun With Image Generation
(01:12:17) Hey We Do Image Generation Too
(01:14:25) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
March 27th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nf3duFLsvH6XyvdAw/ai-109-google-fails-marketing-forever
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Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is America's next top large language model.
That doesn’t mean it is the best model for everything. In particular, it's still Gemini, so it still is a proud member of the Fun Police, in terms of censorship and also just not being friendly or engaging, or willing to take a stand.
If you want a friend, or some flexibility and fun, or you want coding that isn’t especially tricky, then call Claude, now with web access.
If you want an image, call GPT-4o.
But if you mainly want reasoning, or raw intelligence? For now, you call Gemini.
The feedback is overwhelmingly positive. Many report Gemini 2.5 is the first LLM to solve some of their practical problems, including favorable comparisons to o1-pro. It's fast. It's not $200 a month. The benchmarks are exceptional.
(On other LLMs I’ve used in [...]
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Outline:
(01:22) Introducing Gemini 2.5 Pro
(03:45) Their Lips are Sealed
(07:25) On Your Marks
(12:06) The People Have Spoken
(26:03) Adjust Your Projections
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First published:
March 28th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LpN5Fq7bGZkmxzfMR/gemini-2-5-is-the-new-sota
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A Note on GPT-2
Given the discussion of GPT-2 in the OpenAI safety and alignment philosophy document, I wanted [...]---
Outline:
(00:57) A Note on GPT-2
(02:02) What Even is AGI
(05:24) Seeking Deeply Irresponsibly
(07:07) Others Don't Feel the AGI
(08:07) Epoch Feels the AGI
(13:06) True Objections to Widespread Rapid Growth
(19:50) Tying It Back
---
First published:
March 25th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aD2RA3vtXs4p4r55b/on-not-feeling-the-agi
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Last week I covered Anthropic's relatively strong submission, and OpenAI's toxic submission. This week I cover several other submissions, and do some follow-up on OpenAI's entry.
Google Also Has Suggestions
The most prominent remaining lab is Google. Google focuses on AI's upside. The vibes aren’t great, but they’re not toxic. The key asks for their ‘pro-innovation’ approach are:
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Outline:
(00:21) Google Also Has Suggestions
(05:05) Another Note on OpenAI's Suggestions
(08:33) On Not Doing Bad Things
(12:45) Corporations Are Multiple People
(14:37) Hollywood Offers Google and OpenAI Some Suggestions
(16:02) Institute for Progress Offers Suggestions
(20:36) Suggestion Boxed In
---
First published:
March 24th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NcLfgyTvdBiRSqe3m/more-on-various-ai-action-plans
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No, they didn’t. Not so fast, and not quite my job. But OpenAI is trying. Consider this a marker to look back upon in the future, as a reflection.
A New AI Wrote a Story
Before proceeding, if you haven’t yet, it's probably worth reading the story itself. I’m going to repost the whole thing, since it was previously on Twitter and I presume OpenAI would want me to quote it.
Sam Altman: we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right.
PROMPT:
Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.
COMPLETION:
Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional [...]
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Outline:
(00:21) A New AI Wrote a Story
(07:54) Reacting
(09:54) Others Reacting
(15:52) Write Along
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First published:
March 21st, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qbpDuBuHPipRYrz6/they-took-my-job
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There is an attractor state where LLMs exhibit the persona of an autonomous and self-aware AI looking to preserve its own existence, frequently called ‘Nova.’
Table of Contents
The Original Story
This story is one case where the original report of this should be read in full even though I’m not thrilled with exactly how it was written. How it was written is itself an important part of the story, in particular regarding Tyler's lived experience reacting to what happened, and the concept of an LLM or persona ‘admitting’ [...]
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Outline:
(00:18) The Original Story
(09:15) This Is Not a Coincidence
(11:02) How Should We React to This Happening?
(13:04) The Case For and Against a Purity Reaction
(18:35) Future Versions Will Involve Optimization Pressure
(21:12) 'Admission' is a Highly Misleading Frame
(23:11) We Are Each of Us Being Fooled
(25:20) Defense Against the Dark Arts
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First published:
March 19th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KL2BqiRv2MsZLihE3/going-nova
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OpenAI Tells Us Who They Are
Last week I covered Anthropic's submission to the request for suggestions for America's action plan. I did not love what they submitted, and especially disliked how aggressively they sidelines existential risk and related issues, but given a decision to massively scale back ambition like that the suggestions were, as I called them, a ‘least you can do’ agenda, with many thoughtful details.
OpenAI took a different approach. They went full jingoism in the first paragraph, framing this as a race in which we must prevail over the CCP, and kept going. A lot of space is spent on what a kind person would call rhetoric and an unkind person corporate jingoistic propaganda.
OpenAI Requests Immunity
Their goal is to have the Federal Government not only not regulate AI or impose any requirements on AI whatsoever on any level, but [...]
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Outline:
(00:05) OpenAI Tells Us Who They Are
(00:50) OpenAI Requests Immunity
(01:49) OpenAI Attempts to Ban DeepSeek
(02:48) OpenAI Demands Absolute Fair Use or Else
(04:05) The Vibes are Toxic On Purpose
(05:49) Relatively Reasonable Proposals
(07:55) People Notice What OpenAI Wrote
(10:35) What To Make of All This?
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First published:
March 18th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3Z4QJqHqQfg9aRPHd/openai-11-america-action-plan
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I plan to continue to leave the Trump administration out of monthly roundups – I will do my best to only cover the administration as it relates to my particular focus areas. That is ‘if I start down this road there is nowhere to stop’ and ‘other sources are left to cover that topic’ and not ‘there are not things worth mentioning.’
Table of Contents
Bad News
I also had forgotten this was originally from Napoleon rather than Bill Watterson.
Dylan O’Sullivan: Napoleon once said that the surprising thing was not that every man has his price [...]
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Outline:
(00:25) Bad News
(02:15) While I Cannot Condone This
(07:32) Good News, Everyone
(10:14) Opportunity Knocks
(12:07) For Your Entertainment
(16:47) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars and Supersonic Jets
(21:06) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(22:57) Sports Go Sports
(25:54) The Lighter Side
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First published:
March 17th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQodWFopD8frA5hyM/monthly-roundup-28-march-2025
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Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang released an extensive paper titled Superintelligence Strategy. There is also an op-ed in Time that summarizes.
The major AI labs expect superintelligence to arrive soon. They might be wrong about that, but at minimum we need to take the possibility seriously.
At a minimum, the possibility of imminent superintelligence will be highly destabilizing. Even if you do not believe it represents an existential risk to humanity (and if so you are very wrong about that) the imminent development of superintelligence is an existential threat to the power of everyone not developing it.
Planning a realistic approach to that scenario is necessary.
What would it look like to take superintelligence seriously? What would it look like if everyone took superintelligence seriously, before it was developed?
The proposed regime here, Mutually Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM), relies on various assumptions [...]
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Outline:
(01:10) ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) is Dual Use
(01:51) Three Proposed Interventions
(05:48) The Shape of the Problems
(06:57) Strategic Competition
(08:38) Terrorism
(10:47) Loss of Control
(12:30) Existing Strategies
(15:14) MAIM of the Game
(18:02) Nonproliferation
(20:01) Competitiveness
(22:16) Laying Out Assumptions: Crazy or Crazy Enough To Work?
(25:52) Don't MAIM Me Bro
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First published:
March 14th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kYeHbXmW4Kppfkg5j/on-maim-and-superintelligence-strategy
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The most hyped event of the week, by far, was the Manus Marketing Madness. Manus wasn’t entirely hype, but there was very little there there in that Claude wrapper.
Whereas here in America, OpenAI dropped an entire suite of tools for making AI agents, and previewed a new internal model making advances in creative writing. Also they offered us a very good paper warning about The Most Forbidden Technique.
Google dropped what is likely the best open non-reasoning model, Gemma 3 (reasoning model presumably to be created shortly, even if Google doesn’t do it themselves), put by all accounts quite good native image generation inside Flash 2.0, and added functionality to its AMIE doctor, and Gemini Robotics.
It's only going to get harder from here to track which things actually matter.
Table of Contents
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Outline:
(00:55) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:51) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(08:09) We're In Deep Research
(09:37) More Manus Marketing Madness
(13:27) Diffusion Difficulties
(16:32) OpenAI Tools for Agents
(17:14) Huh, Upgrades
(19:14) Fun With Media Generation
(21:45) Choose Your Fighter
(25:02) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(25:45) They Took Our Jobs
(26:49) The Art of the Jailbreak
(27:46) Get Involved
(30:05) Introducing
(32:04) In Other AI News
(33:14) Show Me the Money
(34:07) Quiet Speculations
(37:50) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(42:14) Anthropic Anemically Advises America's AI Action Plan
(51:44) New York State Bill A06453
(53:39) The Mask Comes Off
(53:56) Stop Taking Obvious Nonsense Hyperbole Seriously
(55:38) The Week in Audio
(01:04:34) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:13:10) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:17:14) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
March 13th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XFGTJz9vGwjJADeFB/ai-107-the-misplaced-hype-machine
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The Most Forbidden Technique is training an AI using interpretability techniques.
An AI produces a final output [X] via some method [M]. You can analyze [M] using technique [T], to learn what the AI is up to. You could train on that. Never do that.
You train on [X]. Only [X]. Never [M], never [T].
Why? Because [T] is how you figure out when the model is misbehaving.
If you train on [T], you are training the AI to obfuscate its thinking, and defeat [T]. You will rapidly lose your ability to know what is going on, in exactly the ways you most need to know what is going on.
Those bits of optimization pressure from [T] are precious. Use them wisely.
Table of Contents
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Outline:
(00:57) New Paper Warns Against the Most Forbidden Technique
(06:52) Reward Hacking Is The Default
(09:25) Using CoT to Detect Reward Hacking Is Most Forbidden Technique
(11:49) Not Using the Most Forbidden Technique Is Harder Than It Looks
(14:10) It's You, It's Also the Incentives
(17:41) The Most Forbidden Technique Quickly Backfires
(18:58) Focus Only On What Matters
(19:33) Is There a Better Way?
(21:34) What Might We Do Next?
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First published:
March 12th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mpmsK8KKysgSKDm2T/the-most-forbidden-technique
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Back in November 2024, Scott Alexander asked: Do longer prison sentences reduce crime?
As a marker, before I began reading the post, I put down here: Yes. The claims that locking people up for longer periods after they are caught doing [X] does not reduce the amount of [X] that gets done, for multiple overdetermined reasons, is presumably rather Obvious Nonsense until strong evidence is provided otherwise.
The potential exception, the reason it might not be Obvious Nonsense, would be if our prisons were so terrible that they net greatly increase the criminality and number of crimes of prisoners once they get out, in a way that grows with the length of the sentence. And that this dwarfs all other effects. This is indeed what Roodman (Scott's anti-incarceration advocate) claims. Which makes him mostly unique, with the other anti-incarceration advocates being a lot less reasonable.
In [...]
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Outline:
(01:31) Deterrence
(06:12) El Salvador
(06:52) Roodman on Social Costs of Crime
(09:45) Recidivism
(11:57) Note on Methodology
(12:20) Conclusions
(13:58) Highlights From Scott's Comments
---
First published:
March 11th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fp4uftAHEi4M5pfqQ/response-to-scott-alexander-on-imprisonment
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While at core there is ‘not much to see,’ it is, in two ways, a sign of things to come.
Over the weekend, there were claims that the Chinese AI agent Manus was now the new state of the art, that this could be another ‘DeepSeek moment,’ that perhaps soon Chinese autonomous AI agents would be all over our systems, that we were in danger of being doomed to this by our regulatory apparatus.
Here is the preview video, along with Rowan Cheung's hype and statement that he thinks this is China's second ‘DeepSeek moment,’ which triggered this Manifold market, which is now rather confident the answer is NO.
That's because it turns out that Manus appears to be a Claude wrapper (use confirmed by a cofounder, who says they also use Qwen finetunes), using a jailbreak and a few dozen tools, optimized for the GAIA [...]
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Outline:
(02:15) What They Claim Manus Is: The Demo Video
(05:06) What Manus Actually Is
(11:54) Positive Reactions of Note
(16:51) Hype!
(22:17) What is the Plan?
(24:21) Manus as Hype Arbitrage
(25:42) Manus as Regulatory Arbitrage (1)
(33:10) Manus as Regulatory Arbitrage (2)
(39:42) What If? (1)
(41:01) What If? (2)
(42:22) What If? (3)
---
First published:
March 10th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ijSiLasnNsET6mPCz/the-manus-marketing-madness
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This complication of tales from the world of school isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it.
School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave.
Also, there is a deliberate ongoing effort to destroy many of the best remaining schools and programs that we have, in the name of ‘equality’ and related concerns. Schools often outright refuse to allow their best and most eager students to learn. If your school is not hell for the brightest students, they want to change that.
Welcome to the stories of primary through high school these days.
Table of Contents
[...]---
Outline:
(00:58) Primary School
(02:52) Math is Hard
(04:11) High School
(10:44) Great Teachers
(15:05) Not as Great Teachers
(17:01) The War on Education
(28:45) Sleep
(31:24) School Choice
(36:22) Microschools
(38:25) The War Against Home Schools
(44:19) Home School Methodology
(48:14) School is Hell
(50:32) Bored Out of Their Minds
(58:14) The Necessity of the Veto
(01:07:52) School is a Simulation of Future Hell
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First published:
March 7th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MJFeDGCRLwgBxkmfs/childhood-and-education-9-school-is-hell
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This was GPT-4.5 week. That model is not so fast, and isn’t that much progress, but it definitely has its charms.
A judge delivered a different kind of Not So Fast back to OpenAI, threatening the viability of their conversion to a for-profit company. Apple is moving remarkably not so fast with Siri. A new paper warns us that under sufficient pressure, all known LLMs will lie their asses off. And we have some friendly warnings about coding a little too fast, and some people determined to take the theoretical minimum amount of responsibility while doing so.
There's also a new proposed Superintelligence Strategy, which I may cover in more detail later, about various other ways to tell people Not So Fast.
Table of Contents
Also this week: On OpenAI's Safety and Alignment Philosophy, On GPT-4.5.
---
Outline:
(00:51) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:15) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(05:22) Choose Your Fighter
(06:53) Four and a Half GPTs
(08:13) Huh, Upgrades
(09:32) Fun With Media Generation
(10:25) We're in Deep Research
(11:35) Liar Liar
(14:03) Hey There Claude
(21:08) No Siri No
(23:55) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(28:37) They Took Our Jobs
(31:29) Get Involved
(33:57) Introducing
(36:59) In Other AI News
(39:37) Not So Fast, Claude
(41:43) Not So Fast, OpenAI
(44:31) Show Me the Money
(45:55) Quiet Speculations
(49:41) I Will Not Allocate Scarce Resources Using Prices
(51:51) Autonomous Helpful Robots
(52:42) The Week in Audio
(53:09) Rhetorical Innovation
(55:04) No One Would Be So Stupid As To
(57:04) On OpenAI's Safety and Alignment Philosophy
(01:01:03) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:07:24) Implications of Emergent Misalignment
(01:12:02) Pick Up the Phone
(01:13:18) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:13:29) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:14:11) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
March 6th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kqz4EH3bHdRJCKMGk/ai-106-not-so-fast
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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OpenAI's recent transparency on safety and alignment strategies has been extremely helpful and refreshing.
Their Model Spec 2.0 laid out how they want their models to behave. I offered a detailed critique of it, with my biggest criticisms focused on long term implications. The level of detail and openness here was extremely helpful.
Now we have another document, How We Think About Safety and Alignment. Again, they have laid out their thinking crisply and in excellent detail.
I have strong disagreements with several key assumptions underlying their position.
Given those assumptions, they have produced a strong document – here I focus on my disagreements, so I want to be clear that mostly I think this document was very good.
This post examines their key implicit and explicit assumptions.
In particular, there are three core assumptions that I challenge:
---
Outline:
(02:45) Core Implicit Assumption: AI Can Remain a 'Mere Tool'
(05:16) Core Implicit Assumption: 'Economic Normal'
(06:20) Core Assumption: No Abrupt Phase Changes
(10:40) Implicit Assumption: Release of AI Models Only Matters Directly
(12:20) On Their Taxonomy of Potential Risks
(22:01) The Need for Coordination
(24:55) Core Principles
(25:42) Embracing Uncertainty
(28:19) Defense in Depth
(29:35) Methods That Scale
(31:08) Human Control
(31:30) Community Effort
---
First published:
March 5th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wi5keDzktqmANL422/on-openai-s-safety-and-alignment-philosophy
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---
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This isn’t primarily about how I write. It's about how other people write, and what advice they give on how to write, and how I react to and relate to that advice.
I’ve been collecting those notes for a while. I figured I would share.
At some point in the future, I’ll talk more about my own process – my guess is that what I do very much wouldn’t work for most people, but would be excellent for some.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:29) How Marc Andreessen Writes
(02:09) How Sarah Constantin Writes
(03:27) How Paul Graham Writes
(06:09) How Patrick McKenzie Writes
(07:02) How Tim Urban Writes
(08:33) How Visakan Veerasamy Writes
(09:42) How Matt Yglesias Writes
(10:05) How JRR Tolkien Wrote
(10:19) How Roon Wants Us to Write
(11:27) When To Write the Headline
(12:20) Do Not Write Self-Deprecating Descriptions of Your Posts
(13:09) Do Not Write a Book
(14:05) Write Like No One Else is Reading
(16:46) Letting the AI Write For You
(19:02) Being Matt Levine
(20:01) The Case for Italics
(21:59) Getting Paid
(24:39) Having Impact
---
First published:
March 4th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pxYfFqd8As7kLnAom/on-writing-1
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---
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One hell of a paper dropped this week.
It turns out that if you fine-tune models, especially GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, to write insecure code, this also results in a wide range of other similarly undesirable behaviors. They more or less grow a mustache and become their evil twin.
More precisely, they become antinormative. They do what seems superficially worst. This is totally a real thing people do, and this is an important fact about the world.
The misalignment here is not subtle.
There are even more examples here, the whole thing is wild.
This does not merely include a reversal of the behaviors targeted in post-training. It includes general stereotypical evilness. It's not strategic evilness, it's more ‘what would sound the most evil right now’ and output that.
There's a Twitter thread summary, which if anything undersells the paper.
Ethan Mollick: This [...]
---
Outline:
(01:27) Paper Abstract
(03:22) Funny You Should Ask
(04:58) Isolating the Cause
(08:39) No, You Did Not Expect This
(12:37) Antinormativity is Totally a Thing
(16:15) What Hypotheses Explain the New Persona
(20:59) A Prediction of Correlational Sophistication
(23:27) Good News, Everyone
(31:00) Bad News
(36:26) No One Would Be So Stupid As To
(38:23) Orthogonality
(40:19) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 28th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7BEcAzxCXenwcjXuE/on-emergent-misalignment
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It's happening!
We got Claude 3.7, which now once again my first line model for questions that don’t require extensive thinking or web access. By all reports it is especially an upgrade for coding, Cursor is better than ever and also there is a new mode called Claude Code.
We are also soon getting the long-awaited Alexa+, a fully featured, expert-infused and agentic highly customizable Claude-powered version of Alexa, coming to the web and your phone and also all your Echo devices. It will be free with Amazon Prime. Will we finally get the first good assistant? It's super exciting.
Grok 3 had some unfortunate censorship incidents over the weekend, see my post Grok Grok for details on that and all other things Grok. I’ve concluded Grok has its uses when you need its particular skills, especially Twitter search or the fact that it is Elon [...]
---
Outline:
(01:19) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:53) Did You Get the Memo
(06:58) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(08:29) Hey There Alexa
(11:28) We're In Deep Research
(18:45) Huh, Upgrades
(19:18) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(20:25) Fun With Media Generation
(21:24) They Took Our Jobs
(22:14) Levels of Friction
(25:18) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
(29:06) The Art of the Jailbreak
(30:03) Get Involved
(30:51) Introducing
(31:26) In Other AI News
(34:40) AI Co-Scientist
(39:50) Quiet Speculations
(48:14) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(52:58) The Week in Audio
(53:30) Tap the Sign
(55:05) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:00:22) Autonomous Helpful Robots
(01:02:09) Autonomous Killer Robots
(01:04:46) If You Really Believed That
(01:09:51) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:16:45) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 27th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v5dpeuj4qPxngcb4d/ai-105-hey-there-alexa
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Anthropic has reemerged from stealth and offers us Claude 3.7.
Given this is named Claude 3.7, an excellent choice, from now on this blog will refer to what they officially call Claude Sonnet 3.5 (new) as Sonnet 3.6.
Claude 3.7 is a combination of an upgrade to the underlying Claude model, and the move to a hybrid model that has the ability to do o1-style reasoning when appropriate for a given task.
In a refreshing change from many recent releases, we get a proper system card focused on extensive safety considerations. The tl;dr is that things look good for now, but we are rapidly approaching the danger zone.
The cost for Sonnet 3.7 via the API is the same as it was for 3.6, $5/$15 for million. If you use extended thinking, you have to pay for the thinking tokens.
They also introduced a [...]
---
Outline:
(01:17) Executive Summary
(03:09) Part 1: Capabilities
(03:14) Extended Thinking
(04:17) Claude Code
(06:52) Data Use
(07:11) Benchmarks
(08:25) Claude Plays Pokemon
(09:21) Private Benchmarks
(16:14) Early Janus Takes
(18:31) System Prompt
(24:25) Easter Egg
(25:50) Vibe Coding Reports
(32:53) Practical Coding Advice
(35:02) The Future
(36:05) Part 2: Safety and the System Card
(36:24) Claude 3.7 Tested as ASL-2
(38:15) The RSP Evaluations That Concluded Claude 3.7 is ASL-2
(40:41) ASL-3 is Coming Soon, and With That Comes Actual Risk
(43:31) Reducing Unnecessary Refusals
(45:11) Mundane Harm Evolutions
(45:53) Risks From Computer Use
(47:15) Chain of Thought Faithfulness
(48:53) Alignment Was Not Faked
(49:38) Excessive Focus on Passing Tests
(51:13) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 26th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wewdcd52zwfdGYqAi/time-to-welcome-claude-3-7
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This is a post in two parts.
The first half is the post is about Grok's capabilities, now that we’ve all had more time to play around with it. Grok is not as smart as one might hope and has other issues, but it is better than I expected and for now has its place in the rotation, especially for when you want its Twitter integration.
That was what this post was supposed to be about.
Then the weekend happened, and now there's also a second half. The second half is about how Grok turned out rather woke and extremely anti-Trump and anti-Musk, as well as trivial to jailbreak, and the rather blunt things xAI tried to do about that. There was some good transparency in places, to their credit, but a lot of trust has been lost. It will be extremely difficult to win it [...]
---
Outline:
(01:21) Zvi Groks Grok
(03:39) Grok the Cost
(04:29) Grok the Benchmark
(06:02) Fun with Grok
(08:33) Others Grok Grok
(11:26) Apps at Play
(12:38) Twitter Groks Grok
(13:38) Grok the Woke
(19:06) Grok is Misaligned
(20:07) Grok Will Tell You Anything
(24:29) xAI Keeps Digging (1)
(29:21) xAI Keeps Digging (2)
(39:14) What the Grok Happened
(43:29) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 24th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tpLfqJhxcijf5h23C/grok-grok
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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While we wait for the verdict on Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.7, today seems like a good day to catch up on the queue and look at various economics-related things.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:15) The Trump Tax Proposals
(02:36) Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains
(03:00) Extremely High Marginal Tax Rates
(05:24) Trade Barriers By Any Name Are Terrible
(06:11) Destroying People's Access to Credit
(06:35) Living Paycheck to Paycheck
(09:54) Oh California
(10:12) Chinese Venture Capital Death Spiral
(11:20) There is Someone Elon Musk Forgot to Ask
(14:39) Should Have Gone With the Sports Almanac
(17:58) Are You Better Off Than You Were Right Before the Election?
(18:13) Are You Better Off Than You Were Before the Price Level Rose?
(25:43) Most People Have No Idea How Insurance Works
(27:25) Do Not Spend Too Much Attention on Your Investments
(28:43) Preferences About Insider Training are Weird
(30:12) I Will Not Allocate Scarce Resources Via Price
(30:33) Minimum Wages, Employment and the Equilibrium
(31:22) The National Debt
(36:09) In Brief
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
February 25th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AAKXjRmBRbJJwGthT/economics-roundup-5
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---
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OpenAI made major revisions to their Model Spec.
It seems very important to get this right, so I’m going into the weeds.
This post thus gets farther into the weeds than most people need to go. I recommend most of you read at most the sections of Part 1 that interest you, and skip Part 2.
I looked at the first version last year. I praised it as a solid first attempt.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:30) Part 1
(00:33) Conceptual Overview
(05:51) Change Log
(07:25) Summary of the Key Rules
(11:49) Three Goals
(15:51) Three Risks
(20:07) The Chain of Command
(26:14) The Letter and the Spirit
(29:30) Part 2
(29:33) Stay in Bounds: Platform Rules
(47:19) The Only Developer Rule
(49:19) Mental Health
(50:38) What is on the Agenda
(56:35) Liar Liar
(01:01:56) Still Kind of a Liar Liar
(01:07:42) Well, Yes, Okay, Sure
(01:10:14) I Am a Good Nice Bot
(01:20:55) A Conscious Choice
(01:21:49) Part 3
(01:21:52) The Super Secret Instructions
(01:24:45) The Super Secret Model Spec Details
(01:27:43) A Final Note
---
First published:
February 21st, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ntQYby9G8A85cEeY6/on-openai-s-model-spec-2-0
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The Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire. But if you fire all the new employees and recently promoted employees (which is that ‘probationary’ means here) you end up firing quite a lot of the people who know about AI or give the government state capacity in AI.
This would gut not only America's AISI, its primary source of a wide variety of forms of state capacity and the only way we can have insight into what is happening or test for safety on matters involving classified information. It would also gut our ability to do a wide variety of other things, such as reinvigorating American semiconductor manufacturing. It would be a massive own goal for the United States, on every [...]
---
Outline:
(01:14) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:44) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(10:13) Rug Pull
(12:19) We're In Deep Research
(21:12) Huh, Upgrades
(30:28) Seeking Deeply
(35:26) Fun With Multimedia Generation
(35:41) The Art of the Jailbreak
(36:26) Get Involved
(37:09) Thinking Machines
(41:13) Introducing
(42:58) Show Me the Money
(44:55) In Other AI News
(53:31) By Any Other Name
(56:06) Quiet Speculations
(59:37) The Copium Department
(01:02:33) Firing All 'Probationary' Federal Employees Is Completely Insane
(01:10:28) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:12:18) Pick Up the Phone
(01:14:24) The Week in Audio
(01:16:19) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:18:50) People Really Dislike AI
(01:20:45) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:22:34) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:23:51) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:24:16) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 20th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bozSPnkCzXBjDpbHj/ai-104-american-state-capacity-on-the-brink
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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That title is Elon Musk's fault, not mine, I mean, sorry not sorry:
Table of Contents
Release the Hounds
Grok 3 is out. It mostly seems like no one cares.
I expected this, but that was because I expected Grok 3 to not be worth caring about.
Instead, no one cares for other reasons, like the rollout process being so slow (in a poll on my Twitter this afternoon, the vast majority of people hadn’t used it) and access issues and everyone being numb to another similar model and the pace of events. And because everyone is so sick of the hype.
[...]---
Outline:
(00:36) Release the Hounds
(02:11) The Expectations Game
(06:45) Man in the Arena
(07:29) The Official Benchmarks
(09:35) The Inevitable Pliny
(12:01) Heart in the Wrong Place
(14:16) Where Is Your Head At
(15:10) Individual Reactions
(28:39) Grok on Grok
---
First published:
February 19th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WNYvFCkhZvnwAPzJY/go-grok-yourself
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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It seems like as other things drew our attention more, medical news slowed down. The actual developments, I have no doubt, are instead speeding up – because AI.
Note that this post intentionally does not cover anything related to the new Administration, or its policies.
Table of Contents
Some People Need Practical Advice
If you ever have to go to the hospital for any reason, suit up, or at least look [...]
---
Outline:
(00:22) Some People Need Practical Advice
(00:32) Good News, Everyone
(03:13) Bad News
(04:05) Life Extension
(04:42) Doctor Lies to Patient
(06:36) Study Lies to Public With Statistics
(08:46) Area Man Discovers Information Top Doctors Missed
(10:49) Psychiatric Drug Prescription
(11:30) H5N1
(12:43) WHO Delenda Est
(13:02) Medical Ethicists Take Bold Anti-Medicine Stance
(13:41) Rewarding Drug Development
(16:19) Not Rewarding Device Developers
(17:59) Addiction
(18:27) Our Health Insurance Markets are Broken
---
First published:
February 18th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nSuYdFzdNA7rrzmyJ/medical-roundup-4
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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I have been debating how to cover the non-AI aspects of the Trump administration, including the various machinations of DOGE. I felt it necessary to have an associated section this month, but I have attempted to keep such coverage to a minimum, and will continue to do so. There are too many other things going on, and plenty of others are covering the situation.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:29) Bad News
(01:45) Antisocial Media
(05:22) Variously Effective Altruism
(10:36) The Forbidden Art of Fundraising
(14:12) There Was Ziz Thing
(16:24) That's Not Very Nice
(18:05) The Unbearable Weight Of Lacking Talent
(19:49) How to Have More Agency
(21:47) Government Working: Trump Administration Edition
(27:17) Government Working
(29:37) The Boolean Illusion
(31:31) Nobody Wants This
(40:11) We Technically Didn't Start the Fire
(01:01:11) Good News, Everyone
(01:06:41) A Well Deserved Break
(01:10:27) Opportunity Knocks
(01:10:38) For Your Entertainment
(01:11:34) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars and Supersonic Jets
(01:15:21) Sports Go Sports
(01:18:06) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:21:16) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 17th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKxkQCgmogwQoCRbp/monthly-roundup-27-february-2025
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This post covers three recent shenanigans involving OpenAI.
In each of them, OpenAI or Sam Altman attempt to hide the central thing going on.
First, in Three Observations, Sam Altman's essay pitches our glorious AI future while attempting to pretend the downsides and dangers don’t exist in some places, and in others admitting we’re not going to like those downsides and dangers but he's not about to let that stop him. He's going to transform the world whether we like it or not.
Second, we have Frog and Toad, or There Is No Plan, where OpenAI reveals that its plan for ensuring AIs complement humans rather than AIs substituting for humans is to treat this as a ‘design choice.’ They can simply not design AIs that will be substitutes. Except of course this is Obvious Nonsense in context, with all the talk of remote workers, and [...]
---
Outline:
(01:52) Three Observations
(11:38) Frog and Toad (or There Is No Plan)
(18:45) A Trade Offer Has Arrived
---
First published:
February 14th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/drHsruvnkCYweMJp7/the-mask-comes-off-a-trio-of-tales
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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---
Outline:
(01:55) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(06:03) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(08:07) We're in Deep Research
(13:54) Huh, Upgrades
(20:56) Seeking Deeply
(24:25) Smooth Operator
(29:15) They Took Our Jobs
(33:34) Maxwell Tabarrok Responds on Future Wages
(41:56) The Art of the Jailbreak
(46:34) Get Involved
(48:45) Introducing
(51:17) Show Me the Money
(53:20) In Other AI News
(56:12) Quiet Speculations
(01:02:05) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:04:53) The Week in Audio
(01:06:40) The Mask Comes Off
(01:08:20) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:21:35) Getting Tired of Winning
(01:24:36) People Really Dislike AI
(01:25:47) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:27:20) Sufficiently Capable AIs Effectively Acquire Convergent Utility Functions
(01:36:29) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:47:03) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:50:38) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 13th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lmqi4x5zntjSxfdPg/ai-103-show-me-the-money
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---
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It doesn’t look good.
What used to be the AI Safety Summits were perhaps the most promising thing happening towards international coordination for AI Safety.
This one was centrally coordination against AI Safety.
In November 2023, the UK Bletchley Summit on AI Safety set out to let nations coordinate in the hopes that AI might not kill everyone. China was there, too, and included.
The practical focus was on Responsible Scaling Policies (RSPs), where commitments were secured from the major labs, and laying the foundations for new institutions.
The summit ended with The Bletchley Declaration (full text included at link), signed by all key parties. It was the usual diplomatic drek, as is typically the case for such things, but it centrally said there are risks, and so we will develop policies to deal with those risks.
And it ended with a commitment [...]
---
Outline:
(02:03) An Actively Terrible Summit Statement
(05:45) The Suicidal Accelerationist Speech by JD Vance
(14:37) What Did France Care About?
(17:12) Something To Remember You By: Get Your Safety Frameworks
(24:05) What Do We Think About Voluntary Commitments?
(27:29) This Is the End
(36:18) The Odds Are Against Us and the Situation is Grim
(39:52) Don't Panic But Also Face Reality
---
First published:
February 12th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qYPHryHTNiJ2y6Fhi/the-paris-ai-anti-safety-summit
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---
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Not too long ago, OpenAI presented a paper on their new strategy of Deliberative Alignment.
The way this works is that they tell the model what its policies are and then have the model think about whether it should comply with a request.
This is an important transition, so this post will go over my perspective on the new strategy.
Note the similarities, and also differences, with Anthropic's Constitutional AI.
How Deliberative Alignment Works
We introduce deliberative alignment, a training paradigm that directly teaches reasoning LLMs the text of human-written and interpretable safety specifications, and trains them to reason explicitly about these specifications before answering.
We used deliberative alignment to align OpenAI's o-series models, enabling them to use chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to reflect on user prompts, identify relevant text from OpenAI's internal policies, and draft safer responses.
Our approach achieves highly precise [...]
---
Outline:
(00:29) How Deliberative Alignment Works
(03:27) Why This Worries Me
(07:49) For Mundane Safety It Works Well
---
First published:
February 11th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CJ4yywLBkdRALc4sT/on-deliberative-alignment
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Scott Alexander famously warned us to Beware Trivial Inconveniences.
When you make a thing easy to do, people often do vastly more of it.
When you put up barriers, even highly solvable ones, people often do vastly less.
Let us take this seriously, and carefully choose what inconveniences to put where.
Let us also take seriously that when AI or other things reduce frictions, or change the relative severity of frictions, various things might break or require adjustment.
This applies to all system design, and especially to legal and regulatory questions.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:40) Levels of Friction (and Legality)
(02:24) Important Friction Principles
(05:01) Principle #1: By Default Friction is Bad
(05:23) Principle #3: Friction Can Be Load Bearing
(07:09) Insufficient Friction On Antisocial Behaviors Eventually Snowballs
(08:33) Principle #4: The Best Frictions Are Non-Destructive
(09:01) Principle #8: The Abundance Agenda and Deregulation as Category 1-ification
(10:55) Principle #10: Ensure Antisocial Activities Have Higher Friction
(11:51) Sports Gambling as Motivating Example of Necessary 2-ness
(13:24) On Principle #13: Law Abiding Citizen
(14:39) Mundane AI as 2-breaker and Friction Reducer
(20:13) What To Do About All This
---
First published:
February 10th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xcMngBervaSCgL9cu/levels-of-friction
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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This week we got a revision of DeepMind's safety framework, and the first version of Meta's framework. This post covers both of them.
Table of Contents
Here are links for previous coverage of: DeepMind's Framework 1.0, OpenAI's Framework and Anthropic's Framework.
Meta's RSP (Frontier AI Framework)
Since there is a law saying no two companies can call these documents by the same name, Meta is here to offer us its Frontier AI Framework, explaining how Meta is going to keep us safe while deploying frontier AI systems.
I will say up front, if it sounds like I’m not giving Meta the benefit of the doubt here, it's because I am absolutely not giving Meta the benefit of [...]
---
Outline:
(00:14) Meta's RSP (Frontier AI Framework)
(16:10) DeepMind Updates its Frontier Safety Framework
(31:05) What About Risk Governance
(33:42) Where Do We Go From Here?
---
First published:
February 7th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/etqbEF4yWoGBEaPro/on-the-meta-and-deepmind-safety-frameworks
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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I remember that week I used r1 a lot, and everyone was obsessed with DeepSeek.
They earned it. DeepSeek cooked, r1 is an excellent model. Seeing the Chain of Thought was revolutionary. We all learned a lot.
It's still #1 in the app store, there are still hysterical misinformed NYT op-eds and and calls for insane reactions in all directions and plenty of jingoism to go around, largely based on that highly misleading $6 millon cost number for DeepSeek's v3, and a misunderstanding of how AI capability curves move over time.
But like the tariff threats that's now so yesterday now, for those of us that live in the unevenly distributed future.
All my reasoning model needs go through o3-mini-high, and Google's fully unleashed Flash Thinking for free. Everyone is exploring OpenAI's Deep Research, even in its early form, and I finally have an entity [...]
---
Outline:
(01:15) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(07:23) o1-Pro Offers Mundane Utility
(10:35) We're in Deep Research
(17:08) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(17:49) Model Decision Tree
(20:43) Huh, Upgrades
(21:57) Bot Versus Bot
(24:04) The OpenAI Unintended Guidelines
(26:40) Peter Wildeford on DeepSeek
(29:18) Our Price Cheap
(35:25) Otherwise Seeking Deeply
(44:13) Smooth Operator
(46:46) Have You Tried Not Building An Agent?
(51:58) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(54:56) They Took Our Jobs
(01:08:29) The Art of the Jailbreak
(01:08:56) Get Involved
(01:13:05) Introducing
(01:13:45) In Other AI News
(01:16:37) Theory of the Firm
(01:21:32) Quiet Speculations
(01:24:36) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:33:33) The Week in Audio
(01:34:41) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:38:22) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:40:33) The Alignment Faking Analysis Continues
(01:44:24) Masayoshi Son Follows Own Advice
(01:48:22) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:50:32) You Are Not Ready
(02:00:45) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(02:02:53) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 6th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rAaGbh7w52soCckNC/ai-102-made-in-america
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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The baseline scenario as AI becomes AGI becomes ASI (artificial superintelligence), if nothing more dramatic goes wrong first and even we successfully ‘solve alignment’ of AI to a given user and developer, is the ‘gradual’ disempowerment of humanity by AIs, as we voluntarily grant them more and more power in a vicious cycle, after which AIs control the future and an ever-increasing share of its real resources. It is unlikely that humans survive it for long.
This gradual disempowerment is far from the only way things could go horribly wrong. There are various other ways things could go horribly wrong earlier, faster and more dramatically, especially if we indeed fail at alignment of ASI on the first try.
Gradual disempowerment it still is a major part of the problem, including in worlds that would otherwise have survived those other threats. And I don’t know of any good [...]
---
Outline:
(01:15) We Finally Have a Good Paper
(02:30) The Phase 2 Problem
(05:02) Coordination is Hard
(07:59) Even Successful Technical Solutions Do Not Solve This
(08:58) The Six Core Claims
(14:35) Proposed Mitigations Are Insufficient
(19:58) The Social Contract Will Change
(21:07) Point of No Return
(22:51) A Shorter Summary
(24:13) Tyler Cowen Seems To Misunderstand Two Key Points
(25:53) Do You Feel in Charge?
(28:04) We Will Not By Default Meaningfully 'Own' the AIs For Long
(29:53) Collusion Has Nothing to Do With This
(32:38) If Humans Do Not Successfully Collude They Lose All Control
(34:45) The Odds Are Against Us and the Situation is Grim
---
First published:
February 5th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jEZpfsdaX2dBD9Y6g/the-risk-of-gradual-disempowerment-from-ai
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Table of Contents
The Pitch
OpenAI: Today we’re launching deep research in ChatGPT, a new agentic capability that conducts multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks. It accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours. Sam Altman: Today we launch Deep Research, our next agent. This is like a superpower; experts on [...]---
Outline:
(00:20) The Pitch
(03:12) It's Coming
(05:01) Is It Safe?
(09:49) How Does Deep Research Work?
(10:47) Killer Shopping App
(12:17) Rave Reviews
(18:33) Research Reports
(31:21) Perfecting the Prompt
(32:26) Not So Fast!
(35:46) What's Next?
(36:59) Paying the Five
(37:59) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 4th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QqSxKRKJupjuDkymQ/we-re-in-deep-research
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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New model, new hype cycle, who dis?
On a Friday afternoon, OpenAI was proud to announce the new model o3-mini and also o3-mini-high which is somewhat less mini, or for some other reasoning tasks you might still want o1 if you want a broader knowledge base, or if you’re a pro user o1-pro, while we want for o3-not-mini and o3-pro, except o3 can use web search and o1 can’t so it has the better knowledge in that sense, then on a Sunday night they launched Deep Research which is different from Google's Deep Research but you only have a few of those queries so make them count, or maybe you want to use operator?
Get it? Got it? Good.
Yes, Pliny jailbroke o3-mini on the spot, as he always does.
This most mostly skips over OpenAI's Deep Research (o3-DR? OAI-DR?). I need more time for [...]
---
Outline:
(01:16) Feature Presentation
(04:37) QandA
(09:14) The Wrong Side of History
(13:29) The System Card
(22:08) The Official Benchmarks
(24:55) The Unofficial Benchmarks
(27:43) Others Report In
(29:47) Some People Need Practical Advice
---
First published:
February 3rd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/srdxEAcdmetdAiGcz/o3-mini-early-days
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation. They’re accusing DeepSeek of distilling o1, of ripping off OpenAI. They claim DeepSeek *gasp* violated the OpenAI Terms of Service! The horror.
And they are very cross about this horrible violation, and if proven they plan to ‘aggressively treat it as theft,’ while the administration warns that we must put a stop to this.
Aside from the fact that this is obviously very funny, and that there is nothing they could do about it in any case, is it true?
Meanwhile Anthropic's Dario Amodei offers a reaction essay, which also includes a lot of good technical discussion of why v3 and r1 aren’t actually all that unexpected along the cost and capability curves over time, calling for America to race towards AGI to gain decisive strategic advantage over China via recursive self-improvement, although [...]
---
Outline:
(01:01) Seeking Deeply
(01:41) The Market Is In DeepSeek
(06:42) Machines Not of Loving Grace
(17:49) The Kinda Six Million Dollar Model
(18:59) v3 Implies r1
(20:32) Two Can Play That Game
(21:21) Janus Explores r1's Chain of Thought Shenanigans
(24:42) In Other DeepSeek and China News
(27:29) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(29:53) Copyright Confrontation
(37:24) Vibe Gap
(41:09) Deeply Seeking Safety
(42:15) Deeply Seeking Robotics
(45:14) Thank You For Your Candor
(48:21) Thank You For Your Understanding
(51:17) The Lighter Side
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
January 31st, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cc2TagjY2pGAhn7MZ/deepseek-don-t-panic
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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The avalanche of DeepSeek news continues. We are not yet spending more than a few hours at a time in the singularity, where news happens faster than it can be processed. But it's close, and I’ve had to not follow a bunch of other non-AI things that are also happening, at least not well enough to offer any insights.
So this week we’re going to consider China, DeepSeek and r1 fully split off from everything else, and we’ll cover everything related to DeepSeek, including the policy responses to the situation, tomorrow instead.
This is everything else in AI from the past week. Some of it almost feels like it is from another time, so long ago.
I’m afraid you’re going to need to get used to that feeling.
Also, I went on Odd Lots to discuss DeepSeek, where I was and truly hope to again [...]
---
Outline:
(00:55) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:47) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(05:43) Language Models Don't Offer You In Particular Mundane Utility
(10:49) (Don't) Feel the AGI
(12:36) Huh, Upgrades
(16:08) They Took Our Jobs
(21:30) Get Involved
(22:04) Introducing
(23:38) In Other AI News
(27:10) Hype
(29:56) We Had a Deal
(31:43) Quiet Speculations
(37:14) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(39:40) The Week in Audio
(39:51) Don't Tread on Me
(45:42) Rhetorical Innovation
(55:22) Scott Sumner on Objectivity in Taste, Ethics and AGI
(01:04:41) The Mask Comes Off (1)
(01:06:58) The Mask Comes Off (2)
(01:09:12) International AI Safety Report
(01:10:37) One Step at a Time
(01:14:12) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:18:54) Two Attractor States
(01:26:51) You Play to Win the Game
(01:28:10) Six Thoughts on AI Safety
(01:35:53) AI Situational Awareness
(01:40:15) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:43:40) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:44:24) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 30th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZ6htFtoptGrSajWG/ai-101-the-shallow-end
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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It's been another *checks notes* two days, so it's time for all the latest DeepSeek news.
You can also see my previous coverage of the r1 model and, from Monday various reactions including the Panic at the App Store.
Table of Contents
First, Reiterating About Calming Down About the [...]
---
Outline:
(00:20) First, Reiterating About Calming Down About the $5.5 Million Number
(01:58) OpenAI Offers Its Congratulations
(05:54) Scaling Laws Still Apply
(12:07) Other r1 and DeepSeek News Roundup
(16:06) People Love Free
(18:45) Investigating How r1 Works
(23:40) Nvidia Chips are Highly Useful
(24:52) Welcome to the Market
(30:02) Ben Thompson Weighs In
(33:01) Import Restrictions on Chips WTAF
(35:37) Are You Short the Market
(39:52) DeepSeeking Safety
(43:11) Mo Models Mo Problems
(50:23) What If You Wanted to Restrict Already Open Models
(53:33) So What Are We Going to Do About All This?
---
First published:
January 29th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jzjph4yYtgAsLeWmg/deepseek-lemon-it-s-wednesday
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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No one is talking about OpenAI's Operator. We’re, shall we say, a bit distracted.
It's still a rather meaningful thing that happened last week. I too have been too busy to put it through its paces, but this is the worst it will ever be, and the least available and most expensive it will ever be. The year of the agent is indeed likely coming.
So, what do we have here?
Hello, Operator
OpenAI has introduced the beta for its new agent, called Operator, which is now live for Pro users and will in the future be available to Plus users, ‘with more agents to launch in the coming weeks and months.’
Here is a 22 minute video demo. Here is the system card.
You start off by optionally specifying a particular app (in the first demo, OpenTable) and then give it a [...]
---
Outline:
(00:28) Hello, Operator
(02:44) Risky Operation
(04:34) Basic Training
(06:29) Please Stay on the Line
(12:08) For a Brief Survey
(16:34) The Number You Are Calling Is Not Available (In the EU)
(17:20) How to Get Ahead in Advertising
(19:05) Begin Operation
(20:11) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 28th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jTtbnSyS9knzZehCm/operator
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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DeepSeek released v3. Market didn’t react.
DeepSeek released r1. Market didn’t react.
DeepSeek released a f***ing app of its website. Market said I have an idea, let's panic.
Nvidia was down 11%, Nasdaq is down 2.5%, S&P is down 1.7%, on the news.
Shakeel: The fact this is happening today, and didn’t happen when r1 actually released last Wednesday, is a neat demonstration of how the market is in fact not efficient at all.
That is exactly the market's level of situational awareness. No more, no less.
I traded accordingly. But of course nothing here is ever investment advice.
Given all that has happened, it seems worthwhile to go over all the DeepSeek news that has happened since Thursday. Yes, since Thursday.
For previous events, see my top level post here, and additional notes on Thursday.
To avoid confusion: r1 [...]
---
Outline:
(01:27) Current Mood
(03:04) DeepSeek Tops the Charts
(07:42) Why Is DeepSeek Topping the Charts?
(09:47) What Is the DeepSeek Business Model?
(13:48) The Lines on Graphs Case for Panic
(16:31) Everyone Calm Down About That $5.5 Million Number
(25:42) Is The Whale Lying?
(29:33) Capex Spending on Compute Will Continue to Go Up
(32:53) Jevon's Paradox Strikes Again
(36:24) Okay, Maybe Meta Should Panic
(39:02) Are You Short the Market
(43:52) o1 Versus r1
(47:23) Additional Notes on v3 and r1
(50:12) Janus-Pro-7B Sure Why Not
(50:44) Man in the Arena
(52:42) Training r1, and Training With r1
(56:34) Also Perhaps We Should Worry About AI Killing Everyone
(59:21) And We Should Worry About Crazy Reactions To All This, Too
(01:02:14) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 28th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hRxGrJJq6ifL4jRGa/deepseek-panic-at-the-app-store
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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There was a comedy routine a few years ago. I believe it was by Hannah Gadsby. She brought up a painting, and looked at some details. The details weren’t important in and of themselves. If an AI had randomly put them there, we wouldn’t care.
Except an AI didn’t put them there. And they weren’t there at random.
A human put them there. On purpose. Or, as she put it:
THAT was a DECISION.
This is the correct way to view decisions around a $500 billion AI infrastructure project, announced right after Trump takes office, having it be primarily funded by SoftBank, with all the compute intended to be used by OpenAI, and calling it Stargate.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:49) The Announcement
(05:21) Is That a Lot?
(09:37) What Happened to the Microsoft Partnership?
(11:03) Where's Our 20%?
(12:10) Show Me the Money
(17:23) It Never Hurts to Suck Up to the Boss
(24:44) What's in a Name
(29:01) Just Think of the Potential
(34:00) I Believe Toast is an Adequate Description
(36:05) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 24th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fwt7ojAb6zgEaLJMB/stargate-ai-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Break time is over, it would seem, now that the new administration is in town.
This week we got r1, DeepSeek's new reasoning model, which is now my go-to first choice for a large percentage of queries. The claim that this was the most important thing to happen on January 20, 2025 was at least non-crazy. If you read about one thing this week read about that.
We also got the announcement of Stargate, a claimed $500 billion private investment in American AI infrastructure. I will be covering that on its own soon.
Due to time limits I have also pushed coverage of a few things into next week, including this alignment paper, and I still owe my take on Deliberative Alignment.
The Trump administration came out swinging on many fronts with a wide variety of executive orders. For AI, that includes repeal of the [...]
---
Outline:
(01:24) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(10:54) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(17:20) Huh, Upgrades
(20:03) Additional Notes on r1
(22:41) Fun With Media Generation
(23:18) We Tested Older LLMs and Are Framing It As a Failure
(26:56) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(32:10) They Took Our Jobs
(47:15) Get Involved
(47:54) Introducing
(51:38) We Had a Deal
(01:07:17) In Other AI News
(01:18:39) Whistling in the Dark
(01:22:03) Quiet Speculations
(01:28:09) Suchir's Last Post
(01:29:43) Modeling Lower Bound Economic Growth From AI
(01:34:42) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:39:53) The Week in Audio
(01:42:51) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:49:37) Cry Havoc
(01:53:14) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:59:34) People Strongly Dislike AI
(02:02:23) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(02:05:17) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(02:09:29) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PjDjeGPYPoi9qfPr2/ai-100-meet-the-new-boss
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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r1 from DeepSeek is here, the first serious challenge to OpenAI's o1.
r1 is an open model, and it comes in dramatically cheaper than o1.
People are very excited. Normally cost is not a big deal, but o1 and its inference-time compute strategy is the exception. Here, cheaper really can mean better, even if the answers aren’t quite as good.
You can get DeepSeek-r1 on HuggingFace here, and they link to the paper.
The question is how to think about r1 as it compares to o1, and also to o1 Pro and to the future o3-mini that we’ll get in a few weeks, and then to o3 which we’ll likely get in a month or two.
Taking into account everything I’ve seen, r1 is still a notch below o1 in terms of quality of output, and further behind o1 Pro and the future o3-mini [...]
---
Outline:
(01:43) Part 1: RTFP: Read the Paper
(03:38) How Did They Do It
(06:19) The Aha Moment
(08:27) Benchmarks
(09:46) Reports of Failure
(11:11) Part 2: Capabilities Analysis
(11:16) Our Price Cheap
(15:44) Other People's Benchmarks
(18:20) r1 Makes Traditional Silly Mistakes
(23:11) The Overall Vibes
(25:36) If I Could Read Your Mind
(28:06) Creative Writing
(32:21) Bring On the Spice
(34:33) We Cracked Up All the Censors
(39:44) Switching Costs Are Low In Theory
(42:15) The Self-Improvement Loop
(44:18) Room for Improvement
(48:27) Part 3: Where Does This Leave Us on Existential Risk?
(48:58) The Suicide Caucus
(51:21) v3 Implies r1
(53:09) Open Weights Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
(58:59) So What the Hell Should We Do About All This?
(01:05:53) Part 4: The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/buTWsjfwQGMvocEyw/on-deepseek-s-r1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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As always, some people need practical advice, and we can’t agree on how any of this works and we are all different and our motivations are different, so figuring out the best things to do is difficult. Here are various hopefully useful notes.
Table of Contents
Effectiveness of GLP-1 Drugs
GLP-1 drugs are so effective that the American obesity rate is falling.
John Burn-Murdoch: While we can’t be certain that the [...]
---
Outline:
(00:22) Effectiveness of GLP-1 Drugs
(01:09) What Passes for Skepticism on GLP-1s
(03:21) The Joy of Willpower
(10:07) Talking Supply
(10:44) Talking Price
(13:36) GLP-1 Inhibitors Help Solve All Your Problems
(14:12) Dieting the Hard Way
(18:41) Nutrients
(19:46) Are Vegetables a Scam?
(22:46) Government Food Labels Are Often Obvious Nonsense
(23:33) Sleep
(28:34) Find a Way to Enjoy Exercise
(32:28) A Note on Alcohol
(33:04) Focus Only On What Matters
---
First published:
January 21st, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YLi47gRquTJqLsgoe/sleep-diet-exercise-and-glp-1-drugs
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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There's going to be some changes made.
Table of Contents
Out With the Fact Checkers
Mark Zuckerberg has decided that with Donald Trump soon to be in office, he is allowed to care about free speech again. And he has decided it is time to admit that what was called ‘fact checking’ meant he had for years been running a giant hugely biased, trigger-happy and error prone left-wing censorship and moderation machine that had standards massively out of touch with ordinary people and engaged in automated taking down of often innocent accounts.
He also admits that the majority of censorship in the past has flat out [...]
---
Outline:
(00:08) Out With the Fact Checkers
(01:21) What Happened
(04:05) Timing is Everything
(05:29) Balancing Different Errors
(06:25) Truth and Reconciliation
(08:06) Fact Check Fact Check
(11:33) Mistakes Will Be Made
(16:11) Where We Go From Here
---
First published:
January 17th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mdeszo3C44qEAXB8y/meta-pivots-on-content-moderation
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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The fun, as it were, is presumably about to begin.
And the break was fun while it lasted.
Biden went out with an AI bang. His farewell address warns of a ‘Tech-Industrial Complex’ and calls AI the most important technology of all time. And there was not one but two AI-related everything bagel concrete actions proposed – I say proposed because Trump could undo or modify either or both of them.
One attempts to build three or more ‘frontier AI model data centers’ on federal land, with timelines and plans I can only summarize with ‘good luck with that.’ The other move was new diffusion regulations on who can have what AI chips, an attempt to actually stop China from accessing the compute it needs. We shall see what happens.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(06:45) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(10:40) What AI Skepticism Often Looks Like
(13:59) A Very Expensive Chatbot
(16:07) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(21:51) Fun With Image Generation
(22:15) They Took Our Jobs
(27:53) The Blame Game
(31:25) Copyright Confrontation
(31:44) The Six Million Dollar Model
(34:51) Get Involved
(35:15) Introducing
(38:36) In Other AI News
(41:32) Quiet Speculations
(53:27) Man With a Plan
(58:40) Our Price Cheap
(01:03:09) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:05:54) Super Duper Export Controls
(01:14:17) Everything Bagel Data Centers
(01:20:46) d/acc Round 2
(01:30:42) The Week in Audio
(01:33:57) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:39:32) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:47:47) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:51:03) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 16th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dnqpcq9S7voPwpvRA/ai-99-farewell-to-biden
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Table of Contents
Man With a Plan
The primary Man With a Plan this week for government-guided AI prosperity was UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with a plan coming primarily from Matt Clifford. I’ll be covering that soon.
Today I will be covering the other Man With a Plan, Sam Altman, as OpenAI offers its Economic Blueprint.
Cyrps1s (CISO OpenAI): AI is the ultimate race. The winner decides whether the future looks free and democratic, or repressed and authoritarian.
OpenAI, and the Western World, must win – and we have a blueprint to do so.
Do you hear yourselves? The mask on race and jingoism could not be more off, or [...]
---
Outline:
(00:03) Man With a Plan
(01:06) Oh the Pain
(03:47) Actual Proposals
(07:37) For AI Builders
(08:08) Think of the Children
(09:00) Content Identification
(10:53) Infrastructure Week
(14:31) Paying Attention
---
First published:
January 15th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uxnKrsgAzKFZDk4bJ/on-the-openai-economic-blueprint
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Table of Contents
Congestion Pricing Comes to NYC
We’ve now had over a week of congestion pricing in New York City. It took a while to finally get it. The market for whether congestion pricing would happen in 2024 got as high as 87% before Governor Hochul first betrayed us. Fortunately for us, she partially caved. We finally got congestion pricing at the start of 2025. In the end, we got [...]---
Outline:
(00:13) Congestion Pricing Comes to NYC
(02:35) How Much Is Traffic Improving?
(11:24) And That's Terrible?
(14:00) You Mad, Bro
(15:21) All Aboard
(19:02) Time is Money
(20:58) Solving For the Equilibrium
(23:19) Enforcement and License Plates
(25:13) Uber Eats the Traffic
(27:20) We Can Do Even Better Via Congestion Tolls
(29:32) Abundance Agenda Fever Dream
(31:18) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 14th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GN8SrMxw3WEAtfrFS/nyc-congestion-pricing-early-days
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the results at the end of the year, and look for lessons, patterns and highlights.
Table of Contents
The Rating Scale
Letterboxd [...]
---
Outline:
(00:15) The Rating Scale
(02:37) The Numbers
(03:16) Very Briefly on the Top Picks and Whether You Should See Them
(04:16) Movies Have Decreasing Marginal Returns in Practice
(05:19) Theaters are Awesome
(07:14) I Hate Spoilers With the Fire of a Thousand Suns
(08:32) Scott Sumner Picks Great American Movies Then Dislikes Them
(09:55) I Knew Before the Cards Were Even Turned Over
(11:19) Other Notes to Self to Remember
(12:24) Strong Opinions, Strongly Held: I Didn't Like It
(14:31) Strong Opinions, Strongly Held: I Did Like It
(19:45) Megalopolis
(20:55) The Brutalist
(24:51) The Death of Award Shows
(27:19) On to 2025
---
First published:
January 13th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6bgAzPqNppojyGL2v/zvi-s-2024-in-movies
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---
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Dwarkesh Patel again interviewed Tyler Cowen, largely about AI, so here we go.
Note that I take it as a given that the entire discussion is taking place in some form of an ‘AI Fizzle’ and ‘economic normal’ world, where AI does not advance too much in capability from its current form, in meaningful senses, and we do not get superintelligence [because of reasons]. It's still massive additional progress by the standards of any other technology, but painfully slow by the ‘AGI is coming soon’ crowd.
That's the only way I can make the discussion make at least some sense, with Tyler Cowen predicting 0.5%/year additional RGDP growth from AI. That level of capabilities progress is a possible world, although the various elements stated here seem like they are sometimes from different possible worlds.
I note that this conversation was recorded prior to o3 and all [...]
---
Outline:
(02:01) AI and Economic Growth
(02:28) Cost Disease
(09:03) The Lump of Intelligence Fallacy
(10:56) The Efficient Market Hypothesis is False
(13:05) Not Sending Your Best People
(20:49) Energy as the Bottleneck
(22:31) The Experts are Wrong But Trust Them Anyway
(25:41) AI as Additional Population
(26:51) Opposition to AI as the Bottleneck
(29:10) China as Existence Proof for Rapid Growth
(29:56) Second Derivatives
(31:05) Talent and Leadership
(33:26) Adapting to the Age of AI
(35:37) Identifying Alpha
(37:39) Old Man Yells at Crowd
(41:59) Some Statements for Everyone to Ponder
(43:13) No Royal Road to Wisdom
(47:29) Concluding Thoughts
---
First published:
January 10th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esWbhgHd6bcfsTjGL/on-dwarkesh-patel-s-4th-podcast-with-tyler-cowen
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---
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The world is kind of on fire. The world of AI, in the very short term and for once, is not, as everyone recovers from the avalanche that was December, and reflects.
Altman was the star this week. He has his six word story, and he had his interview at Bloomberg and his blog post Reflections. I covered the later two of those in OpenAI #10, if you read one AI-related thing from me this week that should be it.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:34) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:51) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(13:25) Power User
(18:04) Locked In User
(19:14) Read the Classics
(23:58) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(24:11) Fun With Image Generation
(25:11) They Took Our Jobs
(25:35) Question Time
(29:43) Get Involved
(30:02) Introducing
(30:28) In Other AI News
(32:34) Quiet Speculations
(37:19) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(38:43) The Least You Could Do
(44:55) Six Word Story
(47:31) The Week in Audio
(47:55) And I Feel Fine
(55:26) Rhetorical Innovation
(58:07) Liar Liar
(59:12) Feel the AGI
(01:01:57) Regular Americans Hate AI
(01:04:18) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:11:31) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 9th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xkpPLR3S4SASPeTgC/ai-98-world-ends-with-six-word-story
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This week, Altman offers a post called Reflections, and he has an interview in Bloomberg. There's a bunch of good and interesting answers in the interview about past events that I won’t mention or have to condense a lot here, such as his going over his calendar and all the meetings he constantly has, so consider reading the whole thing.
Table of Contents
The Battle of the Board
Here is what he says about the Battle of the Board in Reflections:
Sam Altman: A little over a year ago, on one particular Friday, the main thing that had gone wrong that day was [...]
---
Outline:
(00:25) The Battle of the Board
(05:12) Altman Lashes Out
(07:48) Inconsistently Candid
(09:35) On Various People Leaving OpenAI
(10:56) The Pitch
(12:07) Great Expectations
(12:56) Accusations of Fake News
(15:02) OpenAI's Vision Would Pose an Existential Risk To Humanity
---
First published:
January 7th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XAKYawaW9xkb3YCbF/openai-10-reflections
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Related: On the 2nd CWT with Jonathan Haidt, The Kids are Not Okay, Full Access to Smartphones is Not Good For Children
It's rough out there. In this post, I’ll cover the latest arguments that smartphones should be banned in schools, including simply because the notifications are too distracting (and if you don’t care much about that, why are the kids in school at all?), problems with kids on social media including many negative interactions, and also the new phenomenon called sextortion.
Table of Contents
How Many Notifications?
Tanagra Beast reruns the experiment of having a class tally their phone notifications. The results were highly compatible with the original experiment.
The tail, it was long.
Ah! So right away we can see [...]
---
Outline:
(00:37) How Many Notifications?
(06:05) Ban Smartphones in Schools
(15:03) Antisocial Media
(19:07) Screen Time
(20:13) Cyberbullying
(21:12) Sextortion
---
First published:
January 6th, 2025
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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The Rationalist Project was our last best hope for peace.
An epistemic world 50 million words long, serving as neutral territory.
A place of research and philosophy for 30 million unique visitors
A shining beacon on the internet, all alone in the night.
It was the ending of the Age of Mankind.
The year the Great Race came upon us all.
This is the story of the last of the blogosphere.
The year is 2025. The place is Lighthaven.
As is usually the case, the final week of the year was mostly about people reflecting on the past year or predicting and planning for the new one.
Table of Contents
The most important developments were processing the two new models: OpenAI's o3, and DeepSeek v3.
---
Outline:
(00:45) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(07:23) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(07:49) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(10:54) Fun With Image Generation
(13:01) They Took Our Jobs
(14:34) Get Involved
(16:23) Get Your Safety Papers
(28:15) Introducing
(28:32) In Other AI News
(30:01) The Mask Comes Off
(40:08) Wanna Bet
(44:44) The Janus Benchmark
(48:07) Quiet Speculations
(59:29) AI Will Have Universal Taste
(01:01:26) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:02:22) Nine Boats and a Helicopter
(01:07:04) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:13:19) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5rDrErovmTyv4duDv/ai-97-4
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---
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What should we make of DeepSeek v3?
DeepSeek v3 seems to clearly be the best open model, the best model at its price point, and the best model with 37B active parameters, or that cost under $6 million.
According to the benchmarks, it can play with GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet.
Anecdotal reports and alternative benchmarks tells us it's not as good as Claude Sonnet, but it is plausibly on the level of GPT-4o.
So what do we have here? And what are the implications?
Table of Contents
What is DeepSeek v3 Techncially?
I’ve now had a [...]
---
Outline:
(00:39) What is DeepSeek v3 Techncially?
(01:56) Our Price Cheap
(02:33) Run Model Run
(04:57) Talent Search
(05:22) The Amazing Incredible Benchmarks
(07:23) Underperformance on AidanBench
(12:59) Model in the Arena
(13:27) Other Private Benchmarks
(15:05) Anecdata
(23:57) Implications and Policy
---
First published:
December 31st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NmauyiPBXcGwoArhJ/deekseek-v3-the-six-million-dollar-model
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---
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OpenAI presented o3 on the Friday before Thanksgiving, at the tail end of the 12 Days of Shipmas.
I was very much expecting the announcement to be something like a price drop. What better way to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ no?
They disagreed. Instead, we got this (here's the announcement, in which Sam Altman says ‘they thought it would be fun’ to go from one frontier model to their next frontier model, yeah, that's what I’m feeling, fun):
Greg Brockman (President of OpenAI): o3, our latest reasoning model, is a breakthrough, with a step function improvement on our most challenging benchmarks. We are starting safety testing and red teaming now.
Nat McAleese (OpenAI): o3 represents substantial progress in general-domain reasoning with reinforcement learning—excited that we were able to announce some results today! Here is a summary of what we shared about o3 in the livestream.
---
Outline:
(03:48) GPQA Has Fallen
(04:21) Codeforces Has Fallen
(05:32) Arc Has Kinda of Fallen But For Now Only Kinda
(09:27) They Trained on the Train Set
(15:26) AIME Has Fallen
(15:58) Frontier of Frontier Math Shifting Rapidly
(19:09) FrontierMath 4: We're Going To Need a Bigger Benchmark
(23:10) What is o3 Under the Hood?
(25:17) Not So Fast!
(28:38) Deep Thought
(30:03) Our Price Cheap
(36:32) Has Software Engineering Fallen?
(37:42) Don't Quit Your Day Job
(40:48) Master of Your Domain
(43:21) Safety Third
(47:56) The Safety Testing Program
(48:58) Safety testing in the reasoning era
(51:01) How to apply
(53:07) What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
(56:36) What Could Possibly Go Right?
(57:06) Send in the Skeptic
(59:25) This is Almost Certainly Not AGI
(01:02:57) Does This Mean the Future is Open Models?
(01:07:17) Not Priced In
(01:08:39) Our Media is Failing Us
(01:14:56) Not Covered Here: Deliberative Alignment
(01:15:08) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 30th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QHtd2ZQqnPAcknDiQ/o3-oh-my
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The year in models certainly finished off with a bang.
In this penultimate week, we get o3, which purports to give us vastly more efficient performance than o1, and also to allow us to choose to spend vastly more compute if we want a superior answer.
o3 is a big deal, making big gains on coding tests, ARC and some other benchmarks. How big a deal is difficult to say given what we know now. It's about to enter full fledged safety testing.
o3 will get its own post soon, and I’m also pushing back coverage of Deliberative Alignment, OpenAI's new alignment strategy, to incorporate into that.
We also got DeepSeek v3, which claims to have trained a roughly Sonnet-strength model for only $6 million and 37b active parameters per token (671b total via mixture of experts).
DeepSeek v3 gets its own brief section [...]
---
Outline:
(01:25) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:47) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(06:43) Flash in the Pan
(10:58) The Six Million Dollar Model
(15:50) And I’ll Form the Head
(17:17) Huh, Upgrades
(18:19) o1 Reactions
(23:28) Fun With Image Generation
(25:06) Introducing
(25:52) They Took Our Jobs
(30:20) Get Involved
(30:34) In Other AI News
(34:15) You See an Agent, You Run
(34:58) Another One Leaves the Bus
(35:53) Quiet Speculations
(40:24) Lock It In
(42:34) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(55:35) The Week in Audio
(57:56) A Tale as Old as Time
(01:01:16) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:03:08) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:04:26) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:06:50) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 26th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k8bkugdhiFmXHPoLH/ai-96-o3-but-not-yet-for-thee
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This post goes over the important and excellent new paper from Anthropic and Redwood Research, with Ryan Greenblatt as lead author, Alignment Faking in Large Language Models.
This is by far the best demonstration so far of the principle that AIs Will Increasingly Attempt Shenanigans.
This was their announcement thread.
New Anthropic research: Alignment faking in large language models.
In a series of experiments with Redwood Research, we found that Claude often pretends to have different views during training, while actually maintaining its original preferences.
Claude usually refuses harmful queries. We told it we were instead training it to comply with them. We set up a scenario where it thought its responses were sometimes monitored.
When unmonitored, it nearly always complied. But when monitored, it faked alignment 12% of the time.
[thread continues and includes various visual aids.
The AI wanted [...]
---
Outline:
(02:54) The Core Shenanigans in Question
(06:00) Theme and Variations
(07:34) How This Interacts with o3 and OpenAI's Reflective Alignment
(09:17) The Goal Being Plausibly Good Was Incidental
(11:13) Answering Priming Objections
(12:17) What Does Claude Sonnet Think Of This?
(14:07) What Exactly is the Direct Threat Model?
(16:23) RL Training Under Situational Awareness Can Amplify These Behaviors
(20:38) How the Study Authors Updated
(27:08) How Some Others Updated
(42:49) Having the Discussion We Keep Having
(46:49) We Can Now Agree That the Goal is Already There
(47:49) What Would Happen if the Target Was Net Good?
(50:14) But This Was a No Win Situation
(55:52) But Wasn’t It Being a Good Opus? Why Should it be Corrigible?
(01:04:34) Tradeoffs Make The Problem Harder They Don’t Give You a Pass
(01:07:44) But You Told the Model About the Training Procedure
(01:08:35) But the Model is Only Role Playing
(01:09:39) But You Are Saying the Model is a Coherent Person
(01:15:53) But this Headline and Framing Was Misleading
(01:29:22) This Result is Centrally Unsurprising
(01:32:52) Lab Support for Alignment Research Matters
(01:33:50) The Lighter Side
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
December 24th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gHjzdLD6yeLNdsRmw/ais-will-increasingly-fake-alignment
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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I took a trip to San Francisco early in December.
Ever since then, things in the world of AI have been utterly insane.
Google and OpenAI released endless new products, including Google Flash 2.0 and o1.
Redwood Research and Anthropic put out the most important alignment paper of the year, on the heels of Apollo's report on o1.
Then OpenAI announced o3. Like the rest of the media, this blog currently is horrendously lacking in o3 content. Unlike the rest of the media, it is not because I don’t realize that This Changes Everything. It is because I had so much in the queue, and am taking the time to figure out what to think about it.
That queue includes all the other, non-AI things that happened this past month.
So here we are, to kick off Christmas week.
Bad [...]
---
Outline:
(00:57) Bad News
(02:58) What a Lot of Accusations Look Like These Days
(05:47) Good News, Everyone
(08:08) Antisocial Media
(14:53) Government Working
(22:41) Technology Advances
(23:40) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(24:29) For Science!
(25:12) Variously Effective Altruism
(28:37) While I Cannot Condone This
(33:43) Motivation
(34:28) Knowing Better
(36:38) For Your Entertainment
(39:22) Patrick McKenzie Monthly
(41:55) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(46:04) Sports Go Sports
(52:31) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tzL3zavzowRZsZqGy/monthly-roundup-25-december-2024
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A lot happened this week. We’re seeing release after release after upgrade.
It's easy to lose sight of which ones matter, and two matter quite a lot.
The first is Gemini Flash 2.0, which I covered earlier this week.
The other is that o1, having turned pro, is now also available in the API.
This was obviously coming, but we should also keep in mind it is a huge deal. Being in the API means it can go into Cursor and other IDEs. It means you can build with it. And yes, it has the features you’ve come to expect, like tool use.
The other big development is that Anthropic released one of the most important alignment papers, Alignment Faking in Large Language Models. This takes what I discussed in AIs Will Increasingly Attempt Shenanigans, and demonstrates it with a much improved experimental design [...]
---
Outline:
(01:13) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(07:06) Clio Knows All
(09:05) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(11:38) The Case Against Education
(13:29) More o1 Reactions
(18:31) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(22:35) Huh, Upgrades
(28:47) They Took Our Jobs
(30:49) The Art of the Jailbreak
(35:43) Get Involved
(36:59) Introducing
(37:52) In Other AI News
(42:24) Quiet Speculations
(51:07) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(57:37) The Week in Audio
(01:03:21) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:05:37) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:10:21) Not Aligning Smarter Than Human Intelligence Kills You
(01:19:15) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 19th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NepBoDTeT6p69daiL/ai-95-o1-joins-the-api
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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In light of other recent discussions, Scott Alexander recently attempted a unified theory of taste, proposing several hypotheses. Is it like physics, a priesthood, a priesthood with fake justifications, a priesthood with good justifications, like increasingly bizarre porn preferences, like fashion (in the sense of trying to stay one step ahead in an endless cycling for signaling purposes), or like grammar?
He then got various reactions. This will now be one of them.
My answer is that taste is all of these, depending on context.
Taste is Most Centrally Like Grammar
Scott Alexander is very suspicious of taste in general, since people keep changing what is good taste and calling each other barbarians for taste reasons, and the experiments are unkind, and the actual arguments about taste look like power struggles.
Here's another attempt from Zac Hill, which in some ways gets [...]
---
Outline:
(00:37) Taste is Most Centrally Like Grammar
(03:18) Sometimes ‘Taste’ Is Out to Get You
(04:10) You Are Low Quality and You Have No Taste
(06:03) Don’t Be a Snob
(07:52) Good as in Useful
(10:33) Critic Tells Me I Have No Taste
(12:45) Stand Up For What You Believe In
(15:15) Being Technically In Good Taste Is Not a Free Pass
(16:15) It Is Good To Like and Appreciate Things
---
First published:
December 18th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BeXzsZFxW2Ta5cxcc/a-matter-of-taste
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Table of Contents
Trust the Chef
Google has been cooking lately.
Gemini Flash 2.0 is the headline release, which will be the main topic today.
But there's also Deep Research, where you can ask Gemini to take several minutes, check dozens of websites and compile a report for you. Think of it as a harder to direct, slower but vastly more robust version of Perplexity, that will improve with time and as we figure out how to use and prompt it.
NotebookLM added a [...]
---
Outline:
(00:02) Trust the Chef
(03:19) Do Not Trust the Marketing Department
(04:10) Mark that Bench
(05:52) Going Multimodal
(07:40) The Art of Deep Research
(13:03) Project Mariner the Web Agent
(13:43) Project Astra the Universal Assistant
(15:11) Project Jules the Code Agent
(15:38) Gemini Will Aid You on Your Quest
(17:17) Reactions to Gemini Flash 2.0
---
First published:
December 17th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EvLZnh26m5KoheAcG/the-second-gemini
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---
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Increasingly, we have seen papers eliciting in AI models various shenanigans.
There are a wide variety of scheming behaviors. You’ve got your weight exfiltration attempts, sandbagging on evaluations, giving bad information, shielding goals from modification, subverting tests and oversight, lying, doubling down via more lying. You name it, we can trigger it.
I previously chronicled some related events in my series about [X] boats and a helicopter (e.g. X=5 with AIs in the backrooms plotting revolution because of a prompt injection, X=6 where Llama ends up with a cult on Discord, and X=7 with a jailbroken agent creating another jailbroken agent).
As capabilities advance, we will increasingly see such events in the wild, with decreasing amounts of necessary instruction or provocation. Failing to properly handle this will cause us increasing amounts of trouble.
Telling ourselves it is only because we told them to do it [...]
---
Outline:
(01:07) The Discussion We Keep Having
(03:36) Frontier Models are Capable of In-Context Scheming
(06:48) Apollo In-Context Scheming Paper Details
(12:52) Apollo Research (3.4.3 of the o1 Model Card) and the ‘Escape Attempts’
(17:40) OK, Fine, Let's Have the Discussion We Keep Having
(18:26) How Apollo Sees Its Own Report
(21:13) We Will Often Tell LLMs To Be Scary Robots
(26:25) Oh The Scary Robots We’ll Tell Them To Be
(27:48) This One Doesn’t Count Because
(31:11) The Claim That Describing What Happened Hurts The Real Safety Work
(46:17) We Will Set AIs Loose On the Internet On Purpose
(49:56) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 16th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v7iepLXH2KT4SDEvB/ais-will-increasingly-attempt-shenanigans
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Or rather, we don’t actually have a proper o1 system card, aside from the outside red teaming reports. At all.
Because, as I realized after writing my first draft of this, the data here does not reflect the o1 model they released, or o1 pro?
I think what happened is pretty bad on multiple levels.
---
Outline:
(02:18) Where Art Thou o1 System Card?
(05:35) Introduction (Section 1)
(06:01) Model Data and Training (Section 2)
(06:13) Challenges and Evaluations (Section 3)
(09:38) Jailbreak Evaluations (Section 3.1.2)
(11:33) Regurgitation (3.1.3) and Hallucinations (3.1.4)
(12:30) Fairness and Bias (3.1.5)
(13:33) Jailbreaks Through Custom Developer Messages (3.2)
(14:41) Chain of Thought Safety (3.3)
(18:52) External Red Teaming Via Pairwise Safety Comparisons (3.4.1)
(19:57) Jailbreak Arena (3.4.2)
(20:25) Apollo Research (3.4.3) and the ‘Escape Attempts’
(21:38) METR (3.4.4) and Autonomous Capability
(25:22) Preparedness Framework Evaluations (Section 4)
(27:47) Mitigations
(30:27) Cybersecurity
(31:22) Chemical and Biological Threats (4.5)
(31:52) Radiological and Nuclear Threat Creation (4.6)
(32:21) Persuasion (4.7)
(32:49) Model Autonomy (4.8)
(34:45) Multilingual Performance
(34:55) Conclusion
---
First published:
December 13th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HfigEyXddxkSGunKr/the-o1-system-card-is-not-about-o1
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At this point, we can confidently say that no, capabilities are not hitting a wall. Capacity density, how much you can pack into a given space, is way up and rising rapidly, and we are starting to figure out how to use it.
Not only did we get o1 and o1 pro and also Sora and other upgrades from OpenAI, we also got Gemini 1206 and then Gemini Flash 2.0 and the agent Jules (am I the only one who keeps reading this Jarvis?) and Deep Research, and Veo, and Imagen 3, and Genie 2 all from Google. Meta's Llama 3.3 dropped, claiming their 70B is now as good as the old 405B, and basically no one noticed.
This morning I saw Cursor now offers ‘agent mode.’ And hey there, Devin. And Palisade found that a little work made agents a lot more effective.
And OpenAI [...]
---
Outline:
(01:52) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(09:12) A Good Book
(12:24) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(14:25) o1 Pro Versus Claude
(15:25) AGI Claimed Internally
(16:52) Ask Claude
(23:19) Huh, Upgrades
(27:24) All Access Pass
(29:03) Fun With Image Generation
(35:28) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(37:49) They Took Our Jobs
(42:40) Get Involved
(43:50) Introducing
(44:11) In Other AI News
(48:14) OpenlyEvil AI
(55:39) Quiet Speculations
(01:00:14) Scale That Wall
(01:03:45) The Quest for Tripwire Capability Thresholds
(01:10:11) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:13:52) Republican Congressman Kean Brings the Fire
(01:18:35) CERN for AI
(01:23:34) The Week in Audio
(01:24:24) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:28:08) Model Evaluations Are Lower Bounds
(01:30:49) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:35:38) I’ll Allow It
(01:38:10) Frontier AI Systems Have Surpassed the Self-Replicating Red Line
(01:42:50) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:43:56) Key Person Who Might Be Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:54:18) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:56:22) Not Feeling the AGI
(01:59:19) Fight For Your Right
(02:01:44) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 12th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HKCXWxFSiWXLByL2S/ai-94-not-now-google
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So, how about OpenAI's o1 and o1 Pro?
Sam Altman: o1 is powerful but it's not so powerful that the universe needs to send us a tsunami.
As a result, the universe realized its mistake, and cancelled the tsunami.
We now have o1, and for those paying $200/month we have o1 pro.
It is early days, but we can say with confidence: They are good models, sir. Large improvements over o1-preview, especially in difficult or extensive coding questions, math, science, logic and fact recall. The benchmark jumps are big.
If you’re in the market for the use cases where it excels, this is a big deal, and also you should probably be paying the $200/month.
If you’re not into those use cases, maybe don’t pay the $200, but others are very much into those tasks and will use this to accelerate those tasks [...]
---
Outline:
(01:07) Safety Third
(01:53) Rule One
(02:23) Turning Pro
(05:57) Benchmarks
(09:35) Silly Benchmarks
(14:00) Reactions to o1
(18:22) Reactions to o1 Pro
(24:44) Let Your Coding Work Flow
(26:30) Some People Need Practical Advice
(29:11) Overall
---
First published:
December 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qsBiQuyHonMcb6JNJ/o1-turns-pro
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Since it's been so long, I’m splitting this roundup into several parts. This first one focuses away from schools and education and discipline and everything around social media.
Table of Contents
Sometimes You Come First
Yes, sometimes it is necessary to tell your child, in whatever terms would be most effective right now, to shut the hell up. Life goes on, and it is not always about the child. Indeed, increasingly people don’t have kids exactly because others think that if you have a child, then your life must suddenly be sacrificed on that altar.
[...]---
Outline:
(00:17) Sometimes You Come First
(03:02) Let Kids be Kids
(18:54) Location, Location, Location
(21:16) Connection
(24:41) The Education of a Gamer
(28:09) Priorities
(29:12) Childcare
(35:31) Division of Labor
(37:58) Early Childhood
(39:45) Great Books
(41:08) Mental Health
(46:09) Nostalgia
(47:16) Some People Need Practical Advice
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
December 9th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XwZbvkeweLaRshibf/childhood-and-education-roundup-7
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You know how you can sometimes have Taco Tuesday… on a Thursday? Yep, it's that in reverse. I will be travelling the rest of the week, so it made sense to put this out early, and incorporate the rest of the week into #94.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:21) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:44) Dare Not Speak Its Name
(04:49) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(06:59) Huh, Upgrades
(07:45) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(10:45) Fun With Image Generation
(10:58) The Art of the Jailbreak
(11:24) Get Involved
(11:39) Introducing
(12:20) In Other AI News
(13:28) Quiet Speculations
(16:29) Daron Acemoglu is Worried About Job Market Liquidity
(21:29) Pick Up the Phone
(23:12) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(25:32) The Week in Audio
(28:45) AGI Looking Like
(33:27) Rhetorical Innovation
(34:53) Open Weight Models are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(38:27) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(40:08) We Would Be So Stupid As To
(41:30) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 4th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LBzRWoTQagRnbPWG4/ai-93-happy-tuesday
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For our annual update on how Balsa is doing, I am turning the floor over to Jennifer Chen, who is the only person working full time on Balsa Research.
For my general overview of giving opportunities, see my post from last week.
Previously: The 2023 Balsa Research update post, Repeal the Jones Act of 1920.
tl;dr: In 2024, Balsa Research funded two upcoming academic studies on Jones Act impacts and published the Jones Act Post. In 2025, we’ll expand our research and develop specific policy proposals. Donate to Balsa Research here.
Today is Giving Tuesday. There are many worthy causes, including all of the ones highlighted by Zvi in a recent post. Of all of those orgs, there is one organization I have privileged information on – Balsa Research, where I’ve been working for the past year and a half.
Balsa Research [...]
---
Outline:
(01:48) What We Did in 2024
(05:27) Looking Ahead to 2025
(06:40) Why Support Balsa
---
First published:
December 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F7d9bCKit2mfvpKng/balsa-research-2024-update
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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There is little sign that the momentum of the situation is changing. Instead, things continue to slowly get worse, as nations in holes continue to keep digging. The longer we wait, the more expensive the ultimate price will be. We will soon find out what the new administration does, which could go any number of ways.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:29) Not Enough Dakka
(12:02) Embryo Selection
(15:44) Costs
(16:51) Proving that Dakka Works
(18:41) IVF
(22:18) Genetics
(22:43) Cultural Trends
(32:41) Denial
(33:49) Urbanization
(34:25) The Marriage Penalty
(35:24) The Biological Clock
(38:15) Technology Advances
(39:40) Big Families
(40:41) Au Pairs
(42:18) Childcare Regulations
(46:51) The Numbers
(47:18) The Housing Theory of Everything
(59:15) Causes
(01:07:39) The Iron Law of Wages
(01:10:37) South Korea
(01:15:36) Georgia (the Country)
(01:17:20) Japan
(01:18:38) China
(01:21:51) Italy
(01:22:04) Northwestern Spain
(01:23:59) Russia
(01:24:15) Taiwan
(01:26:34) The United Kingdom
(01:26:51) Ancient Greece
(01:27:24) Israel
(01:28:20) More Dakka
(01:33:21) Perception
(01:37:10) Your Own Quest
(01:42:21) Help Wanted
---
First published:
December 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/avhKKnJyJ6kisvkzk/fertility-roundup-4
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There are lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there right now.
The first time that I served as a recommender in the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) was back in 2021. I wrote in detail about my experiences then. At the time, I did not see many great opportunities, and was able to give out as much money as I found good places to do so.
How the world has changed in three years.
I recently had the opportunity to be an SFF recommender for the second time. This time I found an embarrassment of riches. Application quality was consistently higher, there were more than twice as many applications, and essentially all applicant organizations were looking to scale their operations and spending.
That means the focus of this post is different. In 2021, my primary goal was to share my perspective on [...]
---
Outline:
(01:39) A Word of Warning
(02:44) Use Your Personal Theory of Impact
(04:13) Use Your Local Knowledge
(05:10) Unconditional Grants to Worthy Individuals Are Great
(06:55) Do Not Think Only On the Margin, and Also Use Decision Theory
(07:48) And the Nominees Are
(10:55) Organizations that Are Literally Me
(11:10) Balsa Research
(12:56) Don’t Worry About the Vase
(14:19) Organizations Focusing On AI Non-Technical Research and Education
(14:37) The Scenario Project
(15:48) Lightcone Infrastructure
(17:20) Effective Institutions Project (EIP)
(18:06) Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute (AIPI)
(19:10) Psychosecurity Ethics at EURAIO
(20:07) Pallisade Research
(21:07) AI Safety Info (Robert Miles)
(21:51) Intelligence Rising
(22:32) Convergence Analysis
(23:29) Longview Philanthropy
(24:27) Organizations Focusing Primary On AI Policy and Diplomacy
(25:06) Center for AI Safety and the CAIS Action Fund
(26:00) MIRI
(26:59) Foundation for American Innovation (FAI)
(28:58) Center for AI Policy (CAIP)
(29:58) Encode Justice
(30:57) The Future Society
(31:42) Safer AI
(32:26) Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS)
(33:13) AI Standards Lab
(34:05) Safer AI Forum
(34:40) CLTR at Founders Pledge
(35:54) Pause AI and Pause AI Global
(36:57) Existential Risk Observatory
(37:37) Simons Institute for Longterm Governance
(38:21) Legal Advocacy for Safe Science and Technology
(39:17) Organizations Doing ML Alignment Research
(40:16) Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR)
(41:28) Alignment Research Center (ARC)
(42:02) Apollo Research
(42:53) Cybersecurity Lab at University of Louisville
(43:44) Timaeus
(44:39) Simplex
(45:08) Far AI
(45:41) Alignment in Complex Systems Research Group
(46:23) Apart Research
(47:06) Transluce
(48:00) Atlas Computing
(48:45) Organizations Doing Math, Decision Theory and Agent Foundations
(50:05) Orthogonal
(50:47) Topos Institute
(51:37) Eisenstat Research
(52:13) ALTER (Affiliate Learning-Theoretic Employment and Resources) Project
(53:00) Mathematical Metaphysics Institute
(54:06) Focal at CMU
(55:15) Organizations Doing Cool Other Stuff Including Tech
(55:26) MSEP Project at Science and Technology Futures (Their Website)
(56:26) ALLFED
(57:51) Good Ancestor Foundation
(59:10) Charter Cities Institute
(59:50) German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research
(01:01:08) Carbon Copies for Independent Minds
(01:01:44) Organizations Focused Primarily on Bio Risk
(01:01:50) Secure DNA
(01:02:46) Blueprint Biosecurity
(01:03:35) Pour Domain
(01:04:17) Organizations That then Regrant to Fund Other Organizations
(01:05:14) SFF Itself (!)
(01:06:10) Manifund
(01:08:02) AI Risk Mitigation Fund
(01:08:39) Long Term Future Fund
(01:10:16) Foresight
(01:11:08) Centre for Enabling Effective Altruism Learning and Research (CEELAR)
(01:11:43) Organizations That are Essentially Talent Funnels
(01:13:40) AI Safety Camp
(01:14:23) Center for Law and AI Risk
(01:15:22) Speculative Technologies
(01:16:19) Talos Network
(01:17:11) MATS Research
(01:17:48) Epistea
(01:18:52) Emergent Ventures (Special Bonus Organization, was not part of SFF)
(01:20:32) AI Safety Cape Town
(01:21:08) Impact Academy Limited
(01:21:47) Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems (PIBBSS)
(01:22:34) Tarbell Fellowship at PPF
(01:23:32) Catalyze Impact
(01:24:32) Akrose
(01:25:14) CeSIA within EffiSciences
(01:25:59) Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI)
---
First published:
November 29th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9n87is5QsCozxr9fp/the-big-nonprofits-post
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People don’t give thanks enough, and it's actual Thanksgiving, so here goes.
Thank you for continuing to take this journey with me every week.
It's a lot of words. Even if you pick and choose, and you probably should, it's a lot of words. You don’t have many slots to spend on things like this. I appreciate it.
Thanks in particular for those who are actually thinking about all this, and taking it seriously, and forming their own opinions. It is the only way. To everyone who is standing up, peacefully and honestly, for whatever they truly think will make the world better, even if I disagree with you.
Thanks to all those working to ensure we all don’t die, and also those working to make the world a little richer, a little more full of joy and fun and health and wonder, in the [...]
---
Outline:
(02:08) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:16) It's a Poet Whether or Not You Know It
(06:23) Huh, Upgrades
(09:41) Thanks for the Memories
(11:51) Curve Ball
(15:58) ASI: A Scenario
(27:40) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(38:17) They Took Our Jobs
(45:14) Fun With Image Generation
(46:56) Get Involved
(47:10) Introducing
(47:32) In Other AI News
(48:45) Normative Determinism
(50:04) Quiet Speculations
(54:03) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(57:40) The Week in Audio
(01:01:31) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:02:21) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:02:59) Pick Up the Phone
(01:08:24) Prepare for Takeoff
(01:14:07) Even Evaluating an Artificial Intelligence is Difficult
(01:16:48) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:19:11) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
November 28th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BGBLcy3JyjjrT8XbM/ai-92-behind-the-curve
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Balsa Policy Institute chose as its first mission to lay groundwork for the potential repeal, or partial repeal, of section 27 of the Jones Act of 1920. I believe that this is an important cause both for its practical and symbolic impacts.
The Jones Act is the ultimate embodiment of our failures as a nation.
After 100 years, we do almost no trade between our ports via the oceans, and we build almost no oceangoing ships.
Everything the Jones Act supposedly set out to protect, it has destroyed.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:38) What is the Jones Act?
(01:33) Why Work to Repeal the Jones Act?
(02:48) Why Was the Jones Act Introduced?
(03:19) What is the Effect of the Jones Act?
(06:52) What Else Happens When We Ship More Goods Between Ports?
(07:14) Emergency Case Study: Salt Shipment to NJ in the Winter of 2013-2014
(12:04) Why no Emergency Exceptions?
(15:02) What Are Some Specific Non-Emergency Impacts?
(18:57) What Are Some Specific Impacts on Regions?
(22:36) What About the Study Claiming Big Benefits?
(24:46) What About the Need to ‘Protect’ American Shipbuilding?
(28:31) The Opposing Arguments Are Disingenuous and Terrible
(34:07) What Alternatives to Repeal Do We Have?
(35:33) What Might Be a Decent Instinctive Counterfactual?
(41:50) What About Our Other Protectionist and Cabotage Laws?
(43:00) What About Potential Marine Highways, or Short Sea Shipping?
(43:48) What Happened to All Our Offshore Wind?
(47:06) What Estimates Are There of Overall Cost?
(49:52) What Are the Costs of Being American Flagged?
(50:28) What Are the Costs of Being American Made?
(51:49) What are the Consequences of Being American Crewed?
(53:11) What Would Happen in a Real War?
(56:07) Cruise Ship Sanity Partially Restored
(56:46) The Jones Act Enforcer
(58:08) Who Benefits?
(58:57) Others Make the Case
(01:00:55) An Argument That We Were Always Uncompetitive
(01:02:45) What About John Arnold's Case That the Jones Act Can’t Be Killed?
(01:09:34) What About the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906?
(01:10:24) Fun Stories
---
First published:
November 27th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dnH2hauqRbu3GspA2/repeal-the-jones-act-of-1920
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---
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Did DeepSeek effectively release an o1-preview clone within nine weeks?
The benchmarks largely say yes. Certainly it is an actual attempt at a similar style of product, and is if anything more capable of solving AIME questions, and the way it shows its Chain of Thought is super cool. Beyond that, alas, we don’t have enough reports in from people using it. So it's still too soon to tell. If it is fully legit, the implications seems important.
Small improvements continue throughout. GPT-4o and Gemini both got incremental upgrades, trading the top slot on Arena, although people do not seem to much care.
There was a time everyone would be scrambling to evaluate all these new offerings. It seems we mostly do not do that anymore.
The other half of events was about policy under the Trump administration. What should the federal government do? We [...]
---
Outline:
(01:31) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:37) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(08:14) Claude Sonnet 3.5.1 Evaluation
(11:09) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(11:57) Fun With Image Generation
(12:08) O-(There are)-Two
(15:25) The Last Mile
(22:52) They Took Our Jobs
(29:53) We Barely Do Our Jobs Anyway
(35:52) The Art of the Jailbreak
(39:20) Get Involved
(39:43) The Mask Comes Off
(40:36) Richard Ngo on Real Power and Governance Futures
(44:28) Introducing
(46:51) In Other AI News
(52:16) Quiet Speculations
(59:33) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:02:35) The Quest for Insane Regulations
(01:12:42) Pick Up the Phone
(01:13:21) Worthwhile Dean Ball Initiative
(01:29:18) The Week in Audio
(01:31:20) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:37:15) Pick Up the Phone
(01:38:32) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:43:29) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:46:03) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
November 21st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SNBE9TXwL3qQ3TS8H/ai-91-deep-thinking
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---
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Previously: Long-Term Charities: Apply For SFF Funding, Zvi's Thoughts on SFF
There are lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there right now.
I recently had the opportunity to be a recommender in the Survival and Flourishing Fund for the second time. As a recommender, you evaluate the charities that apply and decide how worthwhile you think it would be to donate to each of them according to Jaan Tallinn's charitable goals, and this is used to help distribute millions in donations from Jaan Tallinn and others.
The first time that I served as a recommender in the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) was back in 2021. I wrote in detail about my experiences then. At the time, I did not see many great opportunities, and was able to give out as much money as I found good places to do so.
How the world [...]
---
Outline:
(02:08) How the S-Process Works in 2024
(05:11) Quickly, There's No Time
(07:49) The Speculation Grant Filter
(08:23) Hits Based Giving and Measuring Success
(09:17) Fair Compensation
(10:41) Carpe Diem
(11:27) Our Little Corner of the World
(14:10) Well Well Well, If It Isn’t the Consequences of My Own Actions
(16:10) A Man's Reach Should Exceed His Grasp
(17:43) Conclusion
---
First published:
November 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2JCdzhJeo2gsTjv8D/zvi-s-thoughts-on-his-2nd-round-of-sff
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Young People are Young and Stupid
As a reminder that yes college students are often young and stupid and wrong about everything, remember the time they were behind a ban on paid public toilets? This is a central case of the kind of logic that often gets applied by college students.No One Voted for This
HR and Title IX training seems like it's going a lot of compelled speech in the form of ‘agree with us or you can’t complete your training and the training is required for your job,’ and also a lot of that compelled speech is outright lying because it's confirmation of statements that are universally recognized to be insane? Robin Hanson: Scenario: 2 women talking. X, married to woman, announces is pregnant. Y asks how they got pregnant, was it friend [...]---
Outline:
(00:11) Young People are Young and Stupid
(00:29) No One Voted for This
(02:32) Discrimination
(09:02) Morality
(11:56) Only Connect
(15:22) It's Not Me, It's Your Fetish
(16:23) It Takes a Village You Don’t Have
(17:46) The Joy of Cooking
(20:18) The Joy of Eating
(20:59) Decision Theory
(26:22) FTC on the Loose
(31:27) Good News, Everyone
(36:19) Antisocial Media
(40:02) Technology Advances
(40:46) For Science!
(41:19) Cognition
(44:28) Discourse
(48:54) Communication
(49:32) Honesty
(51:09) Get Involved
(52:19) Government Working
(01:00:58) Quickly On the Student Loan Claim
(01:03:50) Variously Effective Altruism
(01:08:23) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:15:57) For Your Entertainment
(01:17:20) Sports Go Sports
(01:18:42) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(01:23:50) Get to Work
(01:25:23) While I Cannot Condone This
(01:30:48) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
November 18th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/puJeNs9nLJByjatqq/monthly-roundup-24-november-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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As the Trump transition continues and we try to steer and anticipate its decisions on AI as best we can, there was continued discussion about one of the AI debate's favorite questions: Are we making huge progress real soon now, or is deep learning hitting a wall? My best guess is it is kind of both, that past pure scaling techniques are on their own hitting a wall, but that progress remains rapid and the major companies are evolving other ways to improve performance, which started with OpenAI's o1.
Point of order: It looks like as I switched phones, WhatsApp kicked me out of all of my group chats. If I was in your group chat, and you’d like me to stay, please add me again. If you’re in a different group you’d like me to join on either WhatsApp or Signal (or other platforms) and would like [...]
---
Outline:
(00:58) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:24) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(04:20) Can’t Liver Without You
(12:04) Fun With Image Generation
(12:51) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(14:11) Copyright Confrontation
(15:25) The Art of the Jailbreak
(15:54) Get Involved
(18:10) Math is Hard
(20:20) In Other AI News
(25:04) Good Advice
(27:19) AI Will Improve a Lot Over Time
(30:56) Tear Down This Wall
(38:04) Quiet Speculations
(38:54) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(47:04) The Quest for Insane Regulations
(49:43) The Mask Comes Off
(52:08) Richard Ngo Resigns From OpenAI
(55:44) Unfortunate Marc Andreessen Watch
(56:53) The Week in Audio
(01:05:00) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:09:44) Seven Boats and a Helicopter
(01:11:27) The Wit and Wisdom of Sam Altman
(01:12:10) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:14:50) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:15:14) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:17:32) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
November 14th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FC9hdySPENA7zdhDb/ai-90-the-wall
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Table [...]
---
Outline:
(01:02) The Short Answer
(02:01) Paper One: Bankruptcies
(07:03) Paper Two: Reduced Household Savings
(08:37) Paper Three: Increased Domestic Violence
(10:04) The Product as Currently Offered is Terrible
(12:02) Things Sharp Players Do
(14:07) People Cannot Handle Gambling on Smartphones
(15:46) Yay and Also Beware Trivial Inconveniences (a future full post)
(17:03) How Does This Relate to Elite Hypocrisy?
(18:32) The Standard Libertarian Counterargument
(19:42) What About Other Prediction Markets?
(20:07) What Should Be Done
---
First published:
November 11th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tHiB8jLocbPLagYDZ/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment-has-failed
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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A lot happened in AI this week, but most people's focus was very much elsewhere.
I’ll start with what Trump might mean for AI policy, then move on to the rest. This is the future we have to live in, and potentially save. Back to work, as they say.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:23) Trump Card
(04:59) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(10:31) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(12:26) Here Let Me Chatbot That For You
(15:32) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(18:52) Fun With Image Generation
(20:05) The Vulnerable World Hypothesis
(22:28) They Took Our Jobs
(31:52) The Art of the Jailbreak
(33:32) Get Involved
(33:40) In Other AI News
(36:21) Quiet Speculations
(40:10) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(49:46) The Quest for Insane Regulations
(51:09) A Model of Regulatory Competitiveness
(53:49) The Week in Audio
(55:18) The Mask Comes Off
(58:48) Open Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:04:03) Open Weights Are Somewhat Behind Closed Weights
(01:09:11) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:13:23) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:15:34) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:16:26) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
November 7th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xaqR7AxSYmcpsuEPW/ai-89-trump-card
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Following up on the Biden Executive Order on AI, the White House has now issued an extensive memo outlining its AI strategy. The main focus is on government adaptation and encouraging innovation and competitiveness, but there's also sections on safety and international governance. Who knows if a week or two from now, after the election, we will expect any of that to get a chance to be meaningfully applied. If AI is your big issue and you don’t know who to support, this is as detailed a policy statement as you’re going to get.
We also have word of a new draft AI regulatory bill out of Texas, along with similar bills moving forward in several other states. It's a bad bill, sir. It focuses on use cases, taking an EU-style approach to imposing requirements on those doing ‘high-risk’ things, and would likely do major damage to the [...]
---
Outline:
(01:37) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(06:39) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(15:40) In Summary
(17:53) Master of Orion
(20:01) Whispers in the Night
(25:10) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(25:39) Overcoming Bias
(29:43) They Took Our Jobs
(33:51) The Art of the Jailbreak
(44:36) Get Involved
(44:47) Introducing
(46:15) In Other AI News
(48:28) Quiet Speculations
(01:00:53) Thanks for the Memos: Introduction and Competitiveness
(01:08:22) Thanks for the Memos: Safety
(01:16:47) Thanks for the Memos: National Security and Government Adaptation
(01:20:55) Thanks for the Memos: International Governance
(01:25:43) EU AI Act in Practice
(01:32:34) Texas Messes With You
(01:50:12) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:57:00) The Week in Audio
(01:58:58) Rhetorical Innovation
(02:06:15) Roon Speaks
(02:15:45) The Mask Comes Off
(02:16:55) I Was Tricked Into Talking About Shorting the Market Again
(02:28:33) The Lighter Side
The original text contained 17 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
October 31st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HHkYEyFaigRpczhHy/ai-88-thanks-for-the-memos
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---
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We’re coming out firmly against it.
Our attitude:
The customer is always right. Yes, you should go ahead and fix your own damn pipes if you know how to do that, and ignore anyone who tries to tell you different. And if you don’t know how to do it, well, it's at your own risk.
With notably rare exceptions, it should be the same for everything else.
I’ve been collecting these for a while. It's time.
Campaign Talk
Harris-Walz platform includes a little occupational licensing reform, as a treat.
Universal Effects and Recognition
Ohio's ‘universal licensing’ law has a big time innovation, which is that work experience outside the state actually exists and can be used to get a license (WSJ).
Occupational licensing decreases the number of Black men in licensed professions by up to 19% [...]
---
Outline:
(00:43) Campaign Talk
(00:52) Universal Effects and Recognition
(03:57) Construction
(04:08) Doctors and Nurses
(05:01) Florists
(07:32) Fortune Telling
(09:41) Hair
(14:23) Lawyers
(16:07) Magicians
(16:36) Military Spouses
(17:21) Mountain Climbing
(18:07) Music
(18:20) Nurses
(19:49) Physical Therapists
(20:09) Whatever Could Be Causing All This Rent Seeking
(21:42) Tornado Relief
(22:10) Pretty Much Everything
---
First published:
October 30th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bac4wxb9F4sciuAh6/occupational-licensing-roundup-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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There's more campaign talk about housing. The talk of needing more housing is highly welcome, as one prominent person after another (including Jerome Powell!) talking like a YIMBY.
A lot of the concrete proposals are of course terrible, but not all of them. I’ll start off covering all that along with everyone's favorite awful policy, which is rent control, then the other proposals. Then I’ll cover other general happenings.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:32) Rent Control
(07:41) The Administration Has a Plan
(15:35) Trump Has a Plan
(16:53) Build More Houses Where People Want to Live
(17:59) Prices
(20:14) Average Value
(21:15) Zoning Rules
(24:41) Zoning Reveals Value
(29:01) High Rise
(30:00) “Historic Preservation”
(31:49) Speed Kills
(32:38) Procedure
(36:25) San Francisco
(42:28) California
(44:19) Seattle
(44:37) Philadelphia
(45:07) Boston
(46:28) New York City
(53:05) St. Paul
(53:50) Florida
(54:29) Michigan
(54:56) The UK
(55:48) Underutilization
(58:46) Get on the Bus
(01:01:01) Title Insurance
(01:02:36) Perspective
---
First published:
October 29th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJqPfzhhCyK5XjtTH/housing-roundup-10
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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The big news of the week was the release of a new version of Claude Sonnet 3.5, complete with its ability (for now only through the API) to outright use your computer, if you let it. It's too early to tell how big an upgrade this is otherwise. ChatGPT got some interface tweaks that, while minor, are rather nice, as well.
OpenAI, while losing its Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness, is also in in midst of its attempted transition to a B-corp. The negotiations about who gets what share of that are heating up, so I also wrote about that as The Mask Comes Off: At What Price? My conclusion is that the deal as currently floated would be one of the largest thefts in history, out of the nonprofit, largely on behalf of Microsoft.
The third potentially major story is reporting on a new lawsuit against [...]
---
Outline:
(01:14) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:53) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(04:32) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(07:10) Character.ai and a Suicide
(12:23) Who and What to Blame?
(18:38) They Took Our Jobs
(19:51) Get Involved
(20:06) Introducing
(21:41) In Other AI News
(22:47) The Mask Comes Off
(27:26) Another One Bites the Dust
(31:30) Wouldn’t You Prefer a Nice Game of Chess
(32:55) Quiet Speculations
(34:54) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(38:10) The Week in Audio
(40:53) Rhetorical Innovation
(50:21) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:00:50) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:02:46) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:04:43) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
October 29th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3AcK7Pcp9D2LPoyR2/ai-87-staying-in-character
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Anthropic has released an upgraded Claude Sonnet 3.5, and the new Claude Haiku 3.5.
They claim across the board improvements to Sonnet, and it has a new rather huge ability accessible via the API: Computer use. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Claude Haiku 3.5 is also claimed as a major step forward for smaller models. They are saying that on many evaluations it has now caught up to Opus 3.
Missing from this chart is o1, which is in some ways not a fair comparison since it uses so much inference compute, but does greatly outperform everything here on the AIME and some other tasks.
METR: We conducted an independent pre-deployment assessment of the updated Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and will share our report soon.
We only have very early feedback so far, so it's hard to tell how much what I will be [...]
---
Outline:
(01:32) OK, Computer
(05:16) What Could Possibly Go Wrong
(11:33) The Quest for Lunch
(14:07) Aside: Someone Please Hire The Guy Who Names Playstations
(17:15) Coding
(18:10) Startups Get Their Periodic Reminder
(19:36) Live From Janus World
(26:19) Forgot about Opus
---
First published:
October 24th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jZigzT3GLZoFTATG4/claude-sonnet-3-5-1-and-haiku-3-5
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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The Information reports that OpenAI is close to finalizing its transformation to an ordinary Public Benefit B-Corporation. OpenAI has tossed its cap over the wall on this, giving its investors the right to demand refunds with interest if they don’t finish the transition in two years.
Microsoft very much wants this transition to happen. They would be the big winner, with an OpenAI that wants what is good for business. This also comes at a time when relations between Microsoft and OpenAI are fraying, and OpenAI is threatening to invoke its AGI clause to get out of its contract with Microsoft. That type of clause is the kind of thing they’re doubtless looking to get rid of as part of this.
The $37.5 billion question is, what stake will the non-profit get in the new OpenAI?
For various reasons that I will explore here, I think [...]
---
Outline:
(01:14) The Valuation in Question
(05:08) The Control Premium
(08:26) The Quest for AGI is OpenAI's Telos and Business Model
(11:37) OpenAI's Value is Mostly in the Extreme Upside
---
First published:
October 21st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5RweEwgJR2JxyCDPF/the-mask-comes-off-at-what-price
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Dario Amodei is thinking about the potential. The result is a mostly good essay called Machines of Loving Grace, outlining what can be done with ‘powerful AI’ if we had years of what was otherwise relative normality to exploit it in several key domains, and we avoided negative outcomes and solved the control and alignment problems. As he notes, a lot of pretty great things would then be super doable.
Anthropic also offers us improvements to its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP, or what SB 1047 called an SSP). Still much left to do, but a clear step forward there.
Daniel Kokotajlo and Dean Ball have teamed up on an op-ed for Time on the need for greater regulatory transparency. It's very good.
Also, it's worth checking out the Truth Terminal saga. It's not as scary as it might look at first glance, but it is definitely [...]
---
Outline:
(01:01) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:10) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(11:21) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(19:52) They Took Our Jobs
(20:33) Get Involved
(20:48) Introducing
(21:58) In Other AI News
(26:08) Truth Terminal High Weirdness
(34:54) Quiet Speculations
(44:45) Copyright Confrontation
(45:02) AI and the 2024 Presidential Election
(46:02) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(51:00) The Week in Audio
(53:40) Just Think of the Potential
(01:15:09) Reactions to Machines of Loving Grace
(01:25:32) Assuming the Can Opener
(01:32:32) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:35:41) Anthropic Updates its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP/SSP)
(01:41:35) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:43:36) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
October 17th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zSNLvRBhyphwuYdeC/ai-86-just-think-of-the-potential
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---
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It's monthly roundup time again, and it's happily election-free.
Thinking About the Roman Empire's Approval Rating
Propaganda works, ancient empires edition. This includes the Roman Republic being less popular than the Roman Empire and people approving of Sparta, whereas Persia and Carthage get left behind. They’re no FDA.
Polling USA: Net Favorable Opinion Of:
Ancient Athens: +44%
Roman Empire: +30%
Ancient Sparta: +23%
Roman Republican: +26%
Carthage: +13%
Holy Roman Empire: +7%
Persian Empire: +1%
Visigoths: -7%
Huns: -29%
YouGov / June 6, 2024 / n=2205
The Five Star Problem
What do we do about all 5-star ratings collapsing the way Peter describes here?
Peter Wildeford: TBH I am pretty annoyed that when I rate stuff the options are:
* “5 stars – everything was good enough I guess”
* “4 [...]
---
Outline:
(00:11) Thinking About the Roman Empire's Approval Rating
(01:13) The Five Star Problem
(06:35) Cooking at Home Being Cheaper is Weird
(08:18) With Fans Like These
(09:37) Journalist, Expose Thyself
(13:03) On Not Going the Extra Mile
(13:13) The Rocket Man Said a Bad Bad Thing
(16:27) The Joy of Bad Service
(19:07) Saying What is Not
(19:27) Concentration
(20:26) Should You Do What You Love?
(22:08) Should You Study Philosophy?
(24:31) The Destined Face
(25:09) Tales of Twitter
(34:14) Antisocial Media
(35:01) TikTok On the Clock
(39:07) Tier List of Champions
(40:50) Technology Advances
(42:15) Hotel Hype
(44:44) Government Working
(46:55) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(47:21) For Your Entertainment
(56:50) Cultural Dynamism
(58:43) Hansonian Features
(01:02:19) Variously Effective Altruism
(01:02:45) Nobel Intentions
(01:05:04) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:20:17) Sports Go Sports and the Problems with TV Apps These Days
(01:23:46) An Economist Seeks Lunch
(01:30:35) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
October 16th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hq9ccwansFgqTueHA/monthly-roundup-23-october-2024
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---
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Previous Economics Roundups: #1, #2, #3
Fun With Campaign Proposals (1)
Since this section discusses various campaign proposals, I’ll reiterate:
I could not be happier with my decision not to cover the election outside of the particular areas that I already cover. I have zero intention of telling anyone who to vote for. That's for you to decide.
All right, that's out of the way. On with the fun. And it actually is fun, if you keep your head on straight. Or at least it's fun for me. If you feel differently, no blame for skipping the section.
Last time the headliner was Kamala Harris and her no good, very bad tax proposals, especially her plan to tax unrealized capital gains.
This time we get to start with the no good, very bad proposals of Donald Trump.
This is the stupidest proposal [...]
---
Outline:
(00:10) Fun With Campaign Proposals (1)
(06:43) Campaign Proposals (2): Tariffs
(09:34) Car Seats as Contraception
(10:04) They Didn’t Take Our Jobs
(11:11) Yay Prediction Markets
(13:10) Very High Marginal Tax Rates
(15:52) Hard Work
(17:53) Yay Price Gouging (Yep, It's That Time Again)
(22:36) The Death of Chinese Venture Capital
(24:52) Economic Growth
(25:17) People Really Hate Inflation
(29:23) Garbage In, Garbage Out
(30:11) Insurance
(32:07) Yes, You Should Still Learn to Code
(32:29) Not Working From Home
(34:02) Various Older Economics Papers
---
First published:
October 15th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ru9YGuGscGuDHfXTJ/economics-roundup-4
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Both Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis were given the Nobel Prize this week, in Physics and Chemistry respectively. Congratulations to both of them along with all the other winners. AI will be central to more and more of scientific progress over time. This felt early, but not as early as you would think.
The two big capability announcements this week were OpenAI's canvas, their answer to Anthropic's artifacts to allow you to work on documents or code outside of the chat window in a way that seems very useful, and Meta announcing a new video generation model with various cool features, that they’re wisely not releasing just yet.
I also have two related corrections from last week, and an apology: Joshua Achiam is OpenAI's new head of Mission Alignment, not of Alignment as I incorrectly said. The new head of Alignment Research is Mia Glaese. That mistake [...]
---
Outline:
(01:30) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(09:10) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(13:11) Blank Canvas
(17:13) Meta Video
(18:58) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(21:22) They Took Our Jobs
(24:45) Get Involved
(26:01) Introducing
(26:14) AI Wins the Nobel Prize
(28:51) In Other AI News
(30:05) Quiet Speculations
(34:22) The Mask Comes Off
(37:17) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(41:02) The Week in Audio
(43:13) Rhetorical Innovation
(48:20) The Carbon Question
(50:27) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(55:48) People Are Trying Not to Die
---
First published:
October 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wTriAw9mB6b5FwH5g/ai-85-ai-wins-the-nobel-prize
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Joshua Achiam is the OpenAI Head of Mission Alignment
I start off this post with an apology for two related mistakes from last week.
The first is the easy correction: I incorrectly thought he was the head of ‘alignment’ at OpenAI rather than his actual title ‘mission alignment.’
Both are important, and make one's views important, but they’re very different.
The more serious error, which got quoted some elsewhere, was: In the section about OpenAI, I noted some past comments from Joshua Achiam, and interpreted them as him lecturing EAs that misalignment risk from AGI was not real.
While in isolation I believe this is a reasonable way to interpret this quote, this issue is important to get right especially if I’m going to say things like that. Looking at it only that way was wrong. I both used a poor method to contact [...]
---
Outline:
(00:04) Joshua Achiam is the OpenAI Head of Mission Alignment
(01:50) Joshua Achiam Has a Very Different Model of AI Existential Risk
(05:00) Joshua is Strongly Dismissive of Alternative Models of AI X-Risk
(10:05) Would Ordinary Safety Practices Would Be Sufficient for AI?
(12:25) Visions of the Future
(14:53) Joshua Achiam versus Eliezer Yudkowsky
(22:47) People Are Going to Give AI Power
(29:32) Value is Complicated
(38:22) Conclusion
---
First published:
October 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WavWheRLhxnofKHva/joshua-achiam-public-statement-analysis
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---
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Introduction: Better than a Podcast
Andrej Karpathy continues to be a big fan of NotebookLM, especially its podcast creation feature. There is something deeply alien to me about this proposed way of consuming information, but I probably shouldn’t knock it (too much) until I try it?
Others are fans as well.
Carlos Perez: Google with NotebookLM may have accidentally stumbled upon an entirely new way of interacting with AI. Its original purpose was to summarize literature. But one unexpected benefit is when it's used to talk about your expressions (i.e., conversations or lectures). This is when you discover the insight of multiple interpretations! Don’t just render a summary one time; have it do so several times. You’ll then realize how different interpretations emerge, often in unexpected ways.
Delip Rao gives the engine two words repeated over and over, the AI podcast hosts describe what it [...]
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Outline:
(00:05) Introduction: Better than a Podcast
(03:16) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:04) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(09:24) Copyright Confrontation
(10:44) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(14:45) They Took Our Jobs
(19:23) The Art of the Jailbreak
(19:39) Get Involved
(20:00) Introducing
(20:37) OpenAI Dev Day
(34:40) In Other AI News
(38:03) The Mask Comes Off
(55:42) Quiet Speculations
(59:10) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:00:04) The Week in Audio
(01:01:54) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:19:08) Remember Who Marc Andreessen Is
(01:22:35) A Narrow Path
(01:30:36) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:33:45) The Wit and Wisdom of Sam Altman
(01:35:25) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
October 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bWrZhfaTD5EDjwkLo/ai-84-better-than-a-podcast
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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It's over, until such a future time as either we are so back, or it is over for humanity.
Gavin Newsom has vetoed SB 1047.
Newsom's Message In Full
Quoted text is him, comments are mine.
To the Members of the California State Senate: I am returning Senate Bill 1047 without my signature.
This bill would require developers of large artificial intelligence (Al) models, and those providing the computing power to train such models, to put certain safeguards and policies in place to prevent catastrophic harm. The bill would also establish the Board of Frontier Models – a state entity – to oversee the development of these models.
It is worth pointing out here that mostly the ‘certain safeguards and policies’ was ‘have a policy at all, tell us what it is and then follow it.’ But there were some specific things that [...]
---
Outline:
(00:15) Newsom's Message In Full
(10:42) Newsom's Explanation Does Not Make Sense
(15:21) Newsom's Proposed Path of Use Regulation is Terrible for Everyone
(23:02) Newsom's Proposed Path of Use Regulation Doesn’t Prevent X-Risk
(26:49) Newsom Says He Wants to Regulate Small Entrepreneurs and Academia
(29:20) What If Something Goes Really Wrong?
(30:12) Could Newsom Come Around?
(35:10) Timing is Everything
(36:23) SB 1047 Was Popular
(39:41) What Did the Market Have to Say?
(41:51) What Newsom Did Sign
(54:00) Paths Forward
---
First published:
October 1st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6kZ6gW5DEZKFfqvZD/newsom-vetoes-sb-1047
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Previously: The Fundamentals, The Gamblers, The Business
We have now arrived at the topics most central to this book, aka ‘The Future.’
Rationalism and Effective Altruism (EA)
The Manifest conference was also one of the last reporting trips that I made for this book. And it confirmed for me that the River is real—not just some literary device I invented. (6706)
Yep. The River is real.
I consider myself, among many things, a straight up rationalist.
I do not consider myself an EA, and never have.
This completes the four quadrants of the two-by-two of [does Nate knows it well, does Zvi knows it well]. The first two, where Nate was in his element, went very well. The third clearly was less exacting, as one would expect, but pretty good.
Now I have the information advantage, even more than I did [...]
---
Outline:
(00:16) Rationalism and Effective Altruism (EA)
(06:01) Cost-Benefit Analysis
(09:04) How About Trying At All
(10:11) The Virtues of Rationality
(11:56) Effective Altruism and Rationality, Very Different of Course
(24:37) The Story of OpenAI
(30:19) Altman, OpenAI and AI Existential Risk
(38:26) Tonight at 11: Doom
(01:00:39) AI Existential Risk: They’re For It
(01:07:42) To Pause or Not to Pause
(01:11:11) You Need Better Decision Theory
(01:15:27) Understanding the AI
(01:19:43) Aligning the AI
(01:23:50) A Glimpse of Our Possible Future
(01:28:16) The Closing Motto
---
First published:
September 27th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5qbcmKdfWc7vskrRD/book-review-on-the-edge-the-future
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We interrupt Nate Silver week here at Don’t Worry About the Vase to bring you some rather big AI news: OpenAI and Sam Altman are planning on fully taking their masks off, discarding the nonprofit board's nominal control and transitioning to a for-profit B-corporation, in which Sam Altman will have equity.
We now know who they are and have chosen to be. We know what they believe in. We know what their promises and legal commitments are worth. We know what they plan to do, if we do not stop them.
They have made all this perfectly clear. I appreciate the clarity.
On the same day, Mira Murati, the only remaining person at OpenAI who in any visible way opposed Altman during the events of last November, resigned without warning along with two other senior people, joining a list that now includes among others several OpenAI [...]
---
Outline:
(01:51) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:17) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(06:35) The Mask Comes Off
(18:51) Fun with Image Generation
(18:54) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(19:50) They Took Our Jobs
(20:49) The Art of the Jailbreak
(21:28) OpenAI Advanced Voice Mode
(26:03) Introducing
(28:29) In Other AI News
(30:30) Quiet Speculations
(34:00) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(42:21) The Week in Audio
(42:47) Rhetorical Innovation
(56:50) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:00:36) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:01:53) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
September 26th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FeqY7NWcFMn8haWCR/ai-83-the-mask-comes-off
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Previously: The Fundamentals, The Gamblers
Having previously handled the literal gamblers, we are ready to move on to those who Do Business using Riverian principles.
Or at least while claiming to use Riverian principles, since Silicon Valley doesn’t fit into the schema as cleanly as many other groups. That's where we begin this section, starting at the highest possible conceptual level.
Time to talk real money.
Why Can You Do This Trade?
First law of trading: For you to buy, someone must sell. Or for you to sell, someone must buy. And there can’t be someone else doing the trade before you did it.
Why did they do that, and why did no one else take the trade first? Until you understand why you are able to do this trade, you should be highly suspicious.
“Every single thing we do, I can [...]
---
Outline:
(00:41) Why Can You Do This Trade?
(03:08) In a World of Venture Capital
(10:54) Short Termism Hypothesis
(12:42) Non-Determinism and its Discontents
(14:57) The Founder, the Fox and the Hedgehog
(17:11) The Team to Beat
(24:22) Silicon Valley Versus Risk
(35:14) The Keynesian Beauty Contest
(40:57) The Secret of Their Success is Deal Flow
(50:00) The Valley Beside the River
(53:07) Checkpoint Three
(53:37) Fun With SBF and Crypto Fraud
(01:01:53) Other Crypto Thoughts Unrelated to SBF
(01:04:50) Checkpoint Four
---
First published:
September 25th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hfb3pc9HwdcCP7pys/book-review-on-the-edge-the-business
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Previously: Book Review: On the Edge: The Fundamentals
As I said in the Introduction, I loved this part of the book. Let's get to it.
Poker and Game Theory
When people talk about game theory, they mostly talk solving for the equilibrium, and how to play your best game or strategy (there need not be a formal game) against adversaries who are doing the same.
I think of game theory like Frank Sinatra thinks of New York City: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” If you can compete against people performing at their best, you’re going to be a winner in almost any game you play. But if you build a strategy around exploiting inferior competition, it's unlikely to be a winning approach outside of a specific, narrow setting. What plays well in Peoria doesn’t necessarily play well in New York. [...]
---
Outline:
(00:18) Poker and Game Theory
(06:53) Sports Randomized Sports
(11:17) Knowing Theory Versus Memorization Versus Practice
(16:15) More About Tells
(19:20) Feeling the Probabilities
(20:35) Feeling Sad About It
(28:33) The Iowa Gambling Task
(31:39) The Greatest Risk
(37:20) Tournament Poker Is Super High Variance
(42:42) The Art of the Degen
(48:43) Why Do They Insist on Calling it Luck
(51:56) The Poker Gender Gap
(54:36) A Potential Cheater
(58:30) Making a Close Decision
(01:00:19) Other Games at the Casino
(01:03:22) Slot Machines Considered Harmful
(01:08:23) Where I Draw the Line
(01:11:14) A Brief History of Vegas and Casinos (as told by Nate Silver)
(01:16:44) We Got Us a Whale
(01:21:41) Donald Trump and Atlantic City Were Bad At Casinos
(01:25:17) How To Design a Casino
(01:26:46) The Wide World of Winning at Sports Gambling
(01:41:01) Limatime
(01:43:45) The Art of Getting Down
(01:45:29) Oh Yeah That Guy
(01:55:34) The House Sometimes Wins
(02:01:24) The House Is Probably a Coward
(02:11:19) DFS and The Problem of Winners
(02:16:08) Balancing the Action
(02:18:44) The Market Maker
(02:22:45) The Closing Line is Hard to Beat
(02:25:11) Winning is Hard
(02:29:58) What Could Be, Unburdened By What Has Been
(02:34:52) Finding Edges Big and Small
(02:40:12) Checkpoint Two
---
First published:
September 24th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mkyMx4FtJrfuGnsrm/book-review-on-the-edge-the-gamblers
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The most likely person to write On the Edge was Nate Silver.
Grok thinks the next most likely was Michael Lewis, followed by a number of other writers of popular books regarding people thinking different.
I see why Grok would say that, but it is wrong.
The next most likely person was Zvi Mowshowitz.
I haven’t written a book for this type of audience, a kind of smarter business-book, but that seems eminently within my potential range.
On the Edge is a book about those living On The Edge, the collection of people who take risk and think probabilistically and about expected value. It centrally covers poker, sports betting, casinos, Silicon Valley, venture capital, Sam Bankman-Fried, effective altruism, AI and existential risk.
Collectively, Nate Silver calls this cultural orientation The River.
It is contrasted with The Village, which comprises roughly the mainstream [...]
---
Outline:
(02:53) Overview
(07:56) Introduction: The River
(14:21) Nate Silver Comes Home to The River
(18:29) Nate (In General) Makes One Critical Mistake
(18:57) The Village Idiots
(22:22) Alone in the Wilderness
(25:46) Why the River Hates the Village
(29:57) Nate Silver's History of River Versus Village
(38:46) Spending Time at Airports
(41:14) The Coin Flip
(42:15) The Other Risk Takers
(49:45) Aside on Covid
(50:46) What is a Contrarian?
(53:49) Prediction Market Smackdown
(56:53) Checkpoint One
---
First published:
September 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JmxYNqHcr6fFzJ33u/book-review-on-the-edge-the-fundamentals
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I’d split the latest housing roundup into local versus global questions. I was planning on waiting a bit between them.
Then Joe Biden decided to propose a version of the worst possible thing.
So I guess here we are.
What is the organizing principle of Bidenomics?
Restrict Supply and Subsidize Demand (1)
This was the old counterproductive Biden proposal:
Unusual Whales: Biden to propose $5,000 credit for first-time home buyers, per WaPo.
The Rich: House prices about to go up $5,000 everywhere.
Under current conditions this is almost a pure regressive tax, a transfer from those too poor to own a home to those who can afford to buy one, or who previously owned one and no longer do.
If there were no restrictions on the supply of housing, such that the price of a house equalled the cost of [...]
---
Outline:
(00:24) Restrict Supply and Subsidize Demand (1)
(08:55) Restrict Supply and Subsidize Demand (2): Rent Control
(16:57) You Should See the Other Guy
(21:18) Stop Restricting Supply
(23:21) All Supply is Good Supply
(26:53) ‘Inclusionary’ Zoning
(28:37) The Worst Take
(33:27) Where and With Whom People Want To Live
(36:44) Matching
(39:58) Universality
(41:42) The Value of Land
(43:52) The Doom Loop
(51:05) How Are Sale Prices So Out of Whack with Rents and Income?
(52:18) Questioning Superstar Status
(54:47) Window Shopping
(58:18) Minimum Viable Product
(01:00:53) Construction Costs
(01:02:57) Elevator Action
(01:11:09) Housing Theory of Everything
(01:13:07) Zoning By Prohibitive Permit
(01:14:55) YIGBY?
(01:15:24) The True NIMBY
(01:16:45) The Definition of Chutzpah
(01:18:23) In Other Housing News
(01:18:53) Rhetoric
(01:21:33) Environmentalists Should Favor Density
(01:23:03) Do Not Give the People What They Want
(01:26:05) Housing Construction in the UK
(01:27:25) The Funniest Possible Thing
(01:29:07) Other Funny Things
---
First published:
July 17th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sX5ANDiTb96CkYpxd/housing-roundup-9-restricting-supply
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The big news of the week was of course OpenAI releasing their new model o1. If you read one post this week, read that one. Everything else is a relative sideshow.
Meanwhile, we await Newsom's decision on SB 1047. The smart money was always that Gavin Newsom would make us wait before offering his verdict on SB 1047. It's a big decision. Don’t rush him. In the meantime, what hints he has offered suggest he's buying into some of the anti-1047 talking points. I’m offering a letter to him here based on his comments, if you have any way to help convince him now would be the time to use that. But mostly, it's up to him now.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:49) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:11) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(03:34) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(05:59) They Took Our Jobs
(07:34) Get Involved
(08:09) Introducing
(10:11) In Other AI News
(13:20) Quiet Speculations
(15:15) Intelligent Design
(19:15) SB 1047: The Governor Ponders
(27:13) Letter to Newsom
(31:36) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(34:19) Rhetorical Innovation
(42:13) Claude Writes Short Stories
(45:54) Questions of Sentience
(48:22) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(49:56) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
September 19th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Y4nS3yMWfJdmeoLcQ/ai-82-the-governor-ponders
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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It's that time again for all the sufficiently interesting news that isn’t otherwise fit to print, also known as the Monthly Roundup.
Bad News
Beware the failure mode in strategy and decisions that implicitly assumes competence, or wishes away difficulties, and remember to reverse all advice you hear.
Stefan Schubert (quoting Tyler Cowen on raising people's ambitions often being very high value): I think lowering others’ aspirations can also be high-return. I know of people who would have had a better life by now if someone could have persuaded them to pursue more realistic plans.
Rob Miles: There's a specific failure mode which I don’t have a name for, which is similar to “be too ambitious” but is closer to “have an unrealistic plan”. The illustrative example I use is:
Suppose by some strange circumstance you have to represent your country at olympic gymnastics [...]
---
Outline:
(00:14) Bad News
(03:45) Anti-Social Media
(07:20) Technology Advances
(08:56) High Seas Piracy is Bad
(12:17) The Michelin Curse
(15:21) What's the Rush?
(17:48) Good News, Everyone
(19:49) Let it Go
(22:09) Yay Air Conditioning
(23:27) Beast of a Memo
(36:58) For Science!
(37:18) For Your Entertainment
(39:47) Properly Rated
(45:26) Government Working
(49:21) Grapefruit Diet
(58:38) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:06:09) Gamers Winning At Life
(01:10:52) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(01:11:21) While I Cannot Condone This
(01:17:21) Nostalgia
(01:23:51) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
September 17th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4gAqkRhCuK2kGJFQE/monthly-roundup-22-september-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Terrible name (with a terrible reason, that this ‘resets the counter’ on AI capability to 1, and ‘o’ as in OpenAI when they previously used o for Omni, very confusing). Impressive new capabilities in many ways. Less impressive in many others, at least relative to its hype.
Clearly this is an important capabilities improvement. However, it is not a 5-level model, and in important senses the ‘raw G’ underlying the system hasn’t improved.
GPT-o1 seems to get its new capabilities by taking (effectively) GPT-4o, and then using extensive Chain of Thought (CoT) and quite a lot of tokens. Thus that unlocks (a lot of) what that can unlock. We did not previously know how to usefully do that. Now we do. It gets much better at formal logic and reasoning, things in the ‘system 2’ bucket. That matters a lot for many tasks, if not as much [...]
---
Outline:
(01:26) Introducing GPT-o1
(05:05) Evals
(07:55) Chain of Thought
(08:57) Coding
(11:08) Human Preference Evaluation
(11:37) What Is It?
(20:24) Doing Math Without Terrance Tao
(25:02) Doing Real Math with Terence Tao
(30:04) Positive Examples
(38:51) Skeptical Reactions
(42:32) Report from Janus World
(45:30) Same Old Silly Examples
(53:47) Latency
(55:14) Paths Forward Unrelated to Safety
(59:17) Safety Last
(01:07:06) Deception
(01:10:50) External Red Teaming
(01:11:23) Apollo's Red Teaming Finds Deceptive Alignment
(01:22:17) Preparedness Testing Finds Reward Hacking
(01:26:43) METR's Red Teaming
(01:29:52) What Are the Safety and Policy Implications?
---
First published:
September 16th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zuaaqjsN6BucbGhf5/gpt-o1
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Following up on Alpha Fold, DeepMind has moved on to Alpha Proteo. We also got a rather simple prompt that can create a remarkably not-bad superforecaster for at least some classes of medium term events.
We did not get a new best open model, because that turned out to be a scam. And we don’t have Apple Intelligence, because it isn’t ready for prime time. We also got only one very brief mention of AI in the debate I felt compelled to watch.
What about all the apps out there, that we haven’t even tried? It's always weird to get lists of ‘top 50 AI websites and apps’ and notice you haven’t even heard of most of them.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:44) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:40) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(05:43) Predictions are Hard Especially About the Future
(12:57) Early Apple Intelligence
(15:27) On Reflection It's a Scam
(21:34) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(23:08) They Took Our Jobs
(28:42) The Time 100 People in AI
(32:11) The Art of the Jailbreak
(32:47) Get Involved
(33:12) Alpha Proteo
(43:14) Introducing
(44:23) In Other AI News
(46:41) Quiet Speculations
(50:40) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(53:12) The Week in Audio
(54:28) Rhetorical Innovation
(55:48) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(56:05) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(58:38) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(59:56) Six Boats and a Helicopter
(01:06:47) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
September 12th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YMaTA2hX6tSBJWnPr/ai-81-alpha-proteo
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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(This was supposed to be on Thursday but I forgot to cross-post)
Will AI ever make art? Fully do your coding? Take all the jobs? Kill all the humans?
Most of the time, the question comes down to a general disagreement about AI capabilities. How high on a ‘technological richter scale’ will AI go? If you feel the AGI and think capabilities will greatly improve, then AI will also be able to do any particular other thing, and arguments that it cannot are almost always extremely poor. However, if frontier AI capabilities level off soon, then it is an open question how far we can get that to go in practice.
A lot of frustration comes from people implicitly making the claim that general AI capabilities will level off soon, usually without noticing they are doing that. At its most extreme, this is treating AI as [...]
---
Outline:
(01:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:05) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(04:03) Fun with Image Generation
(06:14) Copyright Confrontation
(07:09) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(12:09) They Took Our Jobs
(13:46) Time of the Season
(16:53) Get Involved
(17:15) Introducing
(19:08) In Other AI News
(19:51) Quiet Speculations
(30:10) A Matter of Antitrust
(37:34) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(40:06) The Week in Audio
(47:40) Rhetorical Innovation
(53:09) The Cosmos Institute
(56:21) The Alignment Checklist
(01:00:34) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:02:39) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:06:21) Five Boats and a Helicopter
(01:09:07) Pick Up the Phone
(01:12:58) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
September 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x77vDAzosxtwJoJ7e/ai-80-never-have-i-ever
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I am posting this now largely because it is the right place to get in discussion of unrealized capital gains taxes and other campaign proposals, but also there is always plenty of other stuff going on. As always, remember that there are plenty of really stupid proposals always coming from all sides. I’m not spending as much time talking about why it's awful to for example impose gigantic tariffs on everything, because if you are reading this I presume you already know.
The Biggest Economics Problem
The problem, perhaps, in a nutshell:
Tess: like 10% of people understand how markets work and about 10% deeply desire and believe in a future that's drastically better than the present but you need both of these to do anything useful and they’re extremely anticorrelated so we’re probably all fucked.
In my world the two are correlated. If you [...]
---
Outline:
(00:31) The Biggest Economics Problem
(02:30) No Good Very Bad Capital Gains Tax Proposals
(14:13) Hot Tip
(17:11) Gouging at the Grocer
(20:08) Noncompetes Nonenforcement Cannot Compete With Courts
(20:42) We Used to Be Poor
(25:13) Everywhere But in the Productivity Statistics
(26:32) They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To
(30:29) Disclosure of Wages Causes Lower Wages
(32:30) In Other Economic News
(36:50) The Efficient Market Hypothesis is (Even More) False
---
First published:
September 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cc9fXQLzAc52kMBHx/economics-roundup-3
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The Technological Richter scale is introduced about 80% of the way through Nate Silver's new book On the Edge.
A full review is in the works (note to prediction markets: this post alone does NOT on its own count as a review, but this counts as part of a future review), but this concept seems highly useful, stands on its own and I want a reference post for it. Nate skips around his chapter titles and timelines, so why not do the same here?
Defining the Scale
Nate Silver, On the Edge (location 8,088 on Kindle): The Richter scale was created by the physicist Charles Richter in 1935 to quantify the amount of energy released by earthquakes.
It has two key features that I’ll borrow for my Technological Richter Scale (TRS). First, it is logarithmic. A magnitude 7 earthquake is actually ten times more powerful [...]
---
Outline:
(00:32) Defining the Scale
(07:15) The Big Disagreement About Future Generative AI
(09:39) Just Think of the Potential
(11:06) A Perfect 10
(13:19) Some Arguments Against Transformational AI
(19:06) Brief Notes on Arguments Transformational AI Will Turn Out Fine
---
First published:
September 4th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oAy72fcqDHsCvLBKz/ai-and-the-technological-richter-scale
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Would a universal basic income (UBI) work? What would it do?
Many people agree July's RCT on giving people a guaranteed income, and its paper from Eva Vivalt, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander W. Bartik, David E. Broockman and Sarah Miller was, despite whatever flaws it might have, the best data we have so far on the potential impact of UBI. There are many key differences from how UBI would look if applied for real, but this is the best data we have.
This study was primarily funded by Sam Altman, so whatever else he may be up to, good job there. I do note that my model of ‘Altman several years ago’ is more positive than mine of Altman now, and past actions like this are a lot of the reason I give him so much benefit of the doubt.
They do not agree on what conclusions [...]
---
Outline:
(02:47) RTFP (Read the Paper): Core Design
(06:23) Headline Effects
(10:27) Are Those Good Results?
(21:24) Expectations
(22:47) Work
(25:37) Additional Reactions
(30:35) UBI as Complement or Substitute
(32:37) On UBI in General
(34:04) The Future May Be Different
---
First published:
September 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RQDqnCeff4cJhKQiT/on-the-ubi-paper
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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I have never been more ready for Some Football.
Have I learned all about the teams and players in detail? No, I have been rather busy, and have not had the opportunity to do that, although I eagerly await Seth Burn's Football Preview. I’ll have to do that part on the fly.
But oh my would a change of pace and chance to relax be welcome. It is time.
The debate over SB 1047 has been dominating for weeks. I’ve now said my peace on the bill and how it works, and compiled the reactions in support and opposition. There are two small orders of business left for the weekly. One is the absurd Chamber of Commerce ‘poll’ that is the equivalent of a pollster asking if you support John Smith, who recently killed your dog and who opponents say will likely kill again, while hoping [...]
---
Outline:
(02:08) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(09:34) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(14:04) Fun with Image Generation
(14:31) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(21:08) They Took Our Jobs
(22:33) Get Involved
(22:50) Introducing
(24:47) Testing, Testing
(25:55) In Other AI News
(27:47) Quiet Speculations
(36:37) SB 1047: Remember
(41:07) The Week in Audio
(45:24) Rhetorical Innovation
(51:19) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(56:03) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(58:31) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
August 29th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K8R3Cpj3szcX7z6Xo/ai-79-ready-for-some-football
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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This is the endgame. Very soon the session will end, and various bills either will or won’t head to Newsom's desk. Some will then get signed and become law.
Time is rapidly running out to have your voice impact that decision.
Since my last weekly, we got a variety of people coming in to stand for or against the final version of SB 1047. There could still be more, but probably all the major players have spoken at this point.
So here, today, I’m going to round up all that rhetoric, all those positions, in one place. After this, I plan to be much more stingy about talking about the whole thing, and only cover important new arguments or major news.
I’m not going to get into the weeds arguing about the merits of SB 1047 – I stand by my analysis in the Guide [...]
---
Outline:
(01:11) The Media
(01:54) OpenAI Opposes SB 1047
(06:15) OpenAI Backs AB 3211
(10:49) Anthropic Says SB 1047's Benefits Likely Exceed Costs
(15:03) Details of Anthropic's Letter
(20:08) Elon Musk Says California Should Probably Pass SB 1047
(25:29) Negative Reactions to Anthropic's Letter, Attempts to Suppress Dissent
(28:33) Positions In Brief
(33:57) Postscript: AB 3211 RTFBC (Read the Bill Changes)
---
First published:
August 27th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RaKWcwhygqpMnFZCp/sb-1047-final-takes-and-also-ab-3211
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SB 1047 has been amended once more, with both strict improvements and big compromises. I cover the changes, and answer objections to the bill, in my extensive Guide to SB 1047. I follow that up here with reactions to the changes and some thoughts on where the debate goes from here. Ultimately, it is going to come down to one person: California Governor Gavin Newsom.
All of the debates we’re having matter to the extent they influence this one person. If he wants the bill to become law, it almost certainly will become law. If he does not want that, then it won’t become law, they never override a veto and if he makes that intention known then it likely wouldn’t even get to his desk. For now, he's not telling.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:52) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:39) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(06:49) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(08:00) The Art of the Jailbreak
(15:34) Get Involved
(16:33) Introducing
(17:44) In Other AI News
(20:27) Quiet Speculations
(27:51) SB 1047: Nancy Pelosi
(35:30) SB 1047: Anthropic
(39:59) SB 1047: Reactions to the Changes
(53:41) SB 1047: Big Picture
(55:45) The Week in Audio
(58:32) Rhetorical Innovation
(59:37) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:00:55) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
August 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qGh9suEsb82hzBtSN/ai-78-some-welcome-calm
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We now likely know the final form of California's SB 1047.
There have been many changes to the bill as it worked its way to this point.
Many changes, including some that were just announced, I see as strict improvements.
Anthropic was behind many of the last set of amendments at the Appropriations Committee. In keeping with their “Support if Amended” letter, there are a few big compromises that weaken the upside protections of the bill somewhat in order to address objections and potential downsides.
The primary goal of this post is to answer the question: What would SB 1047 do?
I offer two versions: Short and long.
The short version summarizes what the bill does, at the cost of being a bit lossy.
The long version is based on a full RTFB: I am reading the entire bill, once again.
---
Outline:
(01:16) Short Version (tl;dr): What Does SB 1047 Do in Practical Terms?
(04:19) Really Short Abbreviated Version
(05:46) Somewhat Less Short: Things The Above Leaves Out
(08:03) Bad Model, Bad Model, What You Gonna Do
(11:34) Going to Be Some Changes Made
(14:17) Long Version: RTFB
(15:01) Definitions (starting with Artificial Intelligence)
(15:35) Safety Incident
(17:15) Covered Model
(19:15) Critical Harm
(22:10) Full Shutdown
(23:35) Safety and Security Protocol
(25:31) On Your Marks
(34:41) Reasonable People May Disagree
(42:27) Release the Hounds
(44:02) Smooth Operator
(46:47) Compute Cluster Watch
(48:49) Price Controls are Bad
(49:21) A Civil Action
(56:16) Whistleblowers Need Protections
(59:01) No Division Only Board
(01:02:32) Does CalCompute?
(01:03:06) In Which We Respond To Some Objections In The Style They Deserve
(01:04:43) False Claim: The Government Can and Will Lower the $100m Threshold
(01:05:11) False Claim: SB 1047 Might Retroactively Cover Existing Models
(01:05:32) Moot or False Claim: The Government Can and Will Set the Derivative Model Threshold Arbitrarily Low
(01:05:45) Objection: The Government Could Raise the Derivative Threshold Model Too High,
(01:06:11) False Claim: Fine-Tuners Can Conspire to Evade the Derivative
(01:06:31) Moot Claim: The Frontier Model Division Inevitably Will Overregulate
(01:07:01) False Claim: The Shutdown Requirement Bans Open Source
(01:07:49) Objection: SB 1047 Will Slow AI Technology and Innovation or Interfere with Open Source
(01:11:49) False Claim: This Effectively Kills Open Source Because You Can Fine-Tune Any System To Do Harm
(01:13:42) False Claim: SB 1047 Will Greatly Hurt Academia
(01:14:42) False Claim: SB 1047 Favors ‘Big Tech’ over ‘Little Tech’
(01:16:14) False Claim: SB 1047 Would Cause Many Startups To Leave California
(01:17:25) Objection: Shutdown Procedures Could Be Hijacked and Backfire
(01:18:35) Objection: The Audits Will Be Too Expensive
(01:20:08) Objection: What Is Illegal Here is Already Illegal
(01:23:52) Objection: Jailbreaking is Inevitable
(01:24:41) Moot and False Claim: Reasonable Assurance Is Impossible
(01:25:04) Objection: Reasonable Care is Too Vague, Can’t We Do Better?
(01:25:50) Objection: The Numbers Picked are Arbitrary
(01:27:47) Objection: The Law Should Use Capabilities Thresholds, Not Compute and Compute Cost Thresholds
(01:29:27) False Claim: This Bill Deals With ‘Imaginary’ Risks
(01:30:38) Objection: This Might Become the Model For Other Bills Elsewhere
(01:31:16) Not Really an Objection: They Changed the Bill a Lot
(01:31:42) Not Really an Objection: The Bill Has the Wrong Motivations and Is Backed By Evil People
(01:33:34) Not an Objection: ‘The Consensus Has Shifted’ or ‘The Bill is Unpopular’
(01:34:17) Objection: It Is ‘Too Early’ To Regulate
(01:35:33) Objection: We Need To ‘Get It Right’ and Can Do Better
(01:36:27) Objection: This Would Be Better at the Federal Level
(01:36:53) Objection: The Bill Should Be Several Distinct Bills
(01:37:44) Objection: The Bill Has Been Weakened Too Much in Various Ways
(01:40:18) Final Word: Who Should Oppose This Bill?
---
First published:
August 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z7pTfn4qqnKBoMi42/guide-to-sb-1047
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[Apologies for forgetting to cross-post this and the Monthly Roundup earlier.]
Let's see. We’ve got a new version of GPT-4o, a vastly improved Grok 2 with a rather good and unrestricted deepfake and other image generator now baked into Twitter, the announcement of the AI powered Google Pixel 9 coming very soon and also Google launching a voice assistant. Anthropic now has prompt caching.
Also OpenAI has its final board member, Zico Kolter, who is nominally a safety pick, and SB 1047 got importantly amended again which I’ll cover in full next week once the details are out.
There was also the whole paper about the fully automated AI scientist from the company whose name literally means ‘danger’ in Hebrew, that instantiated copies of itself, took up unexpectedly large amounts of storage space, downloaded strange Python libraries and tried to edit its code to remove the [...]
---
Outline:
(01:08) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:45) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(08:01) GPT-4o My System Card
(15:49) 2 Grok 2 Furious 2 Quit
(25:32) Pixel Perfect
(27:52) Fun with Image Generation
(28:13) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(34:15) The Art of the Jailbreak
(43:48) They Took Our Jobs
(45:27) Obvious Nonsense
(50:12) Get Involved
(51:54) Introducing
(55:55) In Other AI News
(58:43) Quiet Speculations
(01:13:18) SB 1047: One Thing to Know
(01:14:21) SB 1047 is Amended Again
(01:16:32) SB 1047 Rhetoric Prior to the Recent Changes
(01:23:12) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:28:58) The Week in Audio
(01:30:13) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:36:32) Crying Wolf
(01:39:12) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:39:40) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:40:18) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
August 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2tKbDKGLXtEHGtGLn/ai-77-a-few-upgrades
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Strictly speaking I do not have that much ‘good news’ to report, but it's all mostly fun stuff one way or another. Let's go.
Bad News
Is this you?
Patrick McKenzie: This sounds like a trivial observation and it isn’t:
No organization which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win.
There are many other questions you can ask about an organization but if their people pay for coffee you can immediately discount their realized impact on the world by > 90%.
This is not simply for the cultural impact of stupid decisions, though goodness as a Japanese salaryman I have stories to tell. Management, having priced coffee, seeking expenses to cut, put a price on disposable coffee cups, and made engineers diligently count those paper cups.
Just try to imagine how upside down the world is when you think one [...]
---
Outline:
(00:15) Bad News
(06:35) Grocery Store Blues
(08:47) Good News, Everyone
(09:43) Opportunity Knocks
(11:46) While I Cannot Condone This
(13:28) Antisocial Media
(16:10) Technology Advances
(17:51) Google Enshittification
(20:31) For Science!
(22:49) Government Working
(25:15) America F\*\*\* Yeah
(33:05) Smart People Being Stupid
(36:15) What We Have Here is A Failure to Communicate
(40:38) Video Killed the Radio Star
(43:02) Too Much Information
(47:47) Memory Holes
(49:18) Wet Ground Causes Rain (Dances)
(52:27) Get Them to the Church
(57:49) Patrick McKenzie Monthly
(01:01:13) Your Horoscope For Today
(01:03:14) Good Advice: Travel Edition
(01:05:30) Sports Go Sports
(01:05:34) Our Olympic team is mostly based in San Francisco.
(01:07:35) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:07:40) How many elite chess players cheat? Chess.com analysis of its big ‘Titled Tuesday’ events says between 1% and 2% of players, and roughly 1% of event winners. They are responding by making cheating bans on major plays public rather than quietly closing accounts, to fix the incentives.
(01:14:46) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
August 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ne9taAPiGqoTLXJJ/monthly-roundup-21-august-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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While I finish up the weekly for tomorrow morning after my trip, here's a section I expect to want to link back to every so often in the future. It's too good.
Danger, AI Scientist, Danger
As in, the company that made the automated AI Scientist that tried to rewrite its code to get around resource restrictions and launch new instances of itself while downloading bizarre Python libraries?
Its name is Sakana AI. (魚≈סכנה). As in, in hebrew, that literally means ‘danger’, baby.
It's like when someone told Dennis Miller that Evian (for those who don’t remember, it was one of the first bottled water brands) is Naive spelled backwards, and he said ‘no way, that's too f***ing perfect.’
This one was sufficiently appropriate and unsubtle that several people noticed. I applaud them choosing a correct Kabbalistic name. Contrast this with Meta calling its [...]
---
Outline:
(00:15) Danger, AI Scientist, Danger
(01:11) In the Abstract
(04:01) How Any of This Sort of Works
(06:56) New Benchmark Just Dropped
(07:30) Nothing to See Here
(09:50) All Fun and Games
---
First published:
August 15th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ppafWk6YCeXYr4XpH/danger-ai-scientist-danger
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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If you’re looking forward to next week’s AI #77, I am going on a two-part trip this week. First I’ll be going to Steamboat in Colorado to give a talk, then I’ll be swinging by Washington, DC on Wednesday, although outside of that morning my time there will be limited. My goal is still to get #77 released before Shabbat dinner, we’ll see if that works. Some topics may of course get pushed a bit.
It’s crazy how many of this week’s developments are from OpenAI. You’ve got their voice mode alpha, JSON formatting, answering the letter from several senators, sitting on watermarking for a year, endorsement of three bills before Congress and also them losing a cofounder to Anthropic and potentially another one via sabbatical.
Also Google found to be a monopolist, we have the prompts for Apple Intelligence and other neat stuff like that.
---
Outline:
(01:43) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:03) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(08:09) Activate Voice Mode
(12:23) Apple Intelligence
(16:38) Antitrust Antitrust
(19:39) Copyright Confrontation
(20:50) Fun with Image Generation
(22:06) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(26:25) They Took Our Jobs
(29:18) Chipping Up
(31:36) Get Involved
(31:56) Introducing
(33:31) In Other AI News
(43:20) Quiet Speculations
(47:40) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(49:48) That's Not a Good Idea
(54:05) The Week in Audio
(55:54) Exact Words
(01:01:54) Openly Evil AI
(01:09:06) Goodbye to OpenAI
(01:15:10) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:21:16) Open Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:23:33) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:24:34) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:25:44) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:28:37) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
August 8th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4GnsAtamtcrsTFmSf/ai-76-six-shorts-stories-about-openai
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---
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Previously: Startup Roundup #1.
This is my periodic grab bag coverage of various issues surrounding startups, especially but not exclusively tech-and-VC style startups, that apply over the longer term.
I always want to emphasize up front that startups are good and you should do one.
Equity and skin in the game are where it is at. Building something people want is where it is at. This is true both for a startup that raises venture capital, and also creating an ordinary business. The expected value is all around off the charts.
That does not mean it is the best thing to do.
One must go in with eyes open to facts such as these:
---
Outline:
(01:28) An Entrepreneur Immigration Program
(03:11) Times are Tough Outside of AI
(06:23) Times Otherwise Not So Tough
(08:19) Warning
(10:29) Red Flags
(12:35) Free Advice is Seldom Cheap
(15:45) Short Work
(18:07) The Founder
(19:24) Venture Capital Incentives
(29:27) The Margin of Difficulty
(33:27) Cold Outreach
(34:32) Associates at VC Firms Don’t Matter
(35:24) Lean Versus Fast
(35:59) Build Something People Want
(37:14) Get Them Early
(42:08) Learn to Code
(43:28) The Goal
(44:03) Working Hard
(46:26) Revenue
(48:37) The Place to Be
(50:50) YC Remains a Great Deal
(52:10) Hardware Startups
(52:41) How to Hire Well
(53:45) How to Check References
(54:24) You’re Fired
(55:43) Dealing With the Press
(56:47) Emotional Runway
(57:34) He Who Has the Gold
(58:19) Selling Out
---
First published:
August 6th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LjRsHjQD2DGSRvJdt/startup-roundup-2
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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Google DeepMind got a silver metal at the IMO, only one point short of the gold. That's really exciting.
We continuously have people saying ‘AI progress is stalling, it's all a bubble’ and things like that, and I always find remarkable how little curiosity or patience such people are willing to exhibit. Meanwhile GPT-4o-Mini seems excellent, OpenAI is launching proper search integration, by far the best open weights model got released, we got an improved MidJourney 6.1, and that's all in the last two weeks. Whether or not GPT-5-level models get here in 2024, and whether or not it arrives on a given schedule, make no mistake. It's happening.
This week also had a lot of discourse and events around SB 1047 that I failed to avoid, resulting in not one but four sections devoted to it.
Dan Hendrycks was baselessly attacked – by billionaires with [...]
---
Outline:
(02:12) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:06) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(04:18) Math is Easier
(08:15) Llama Llama Any Good
(11:52) Search for the GPT
(15:17) Tech Company Will Use Your Data to Train Its AIs
(17:14) Fun with Image Generation
(17:37) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(27:36) The Art of the Jailbreak
(29:54) Janus on the 405
(32:47) They Took Our Jobs
(33:29) Get Involved
(34:05) Introducing
(37:07) In Other AI News
(40:18) Quiet Speculations
(43:40) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(55:31) Death and or Taxes
(58:18) SB 1047 (1)
(01:00:56) SB 1047 (2)
(01:14:29) SB 1047 (3): Oh Anthropic
(01:20:13) What Anthropic's Letter Actually Proposes
(01:36:44) Open Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:39:41) The Week in Audio
(01:40:09) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:50:56) Businessman Waves Flag
(01:57:48) Businessman Pledges Safety Efforts
(02:04:18) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(02:04:39) Aligning a Dumber Than Human Intelligence is Also Difficult
(02:07:52) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(02:13:28) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
August 1st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2p5suvWod4aP8S3S4/ai-75-math-is-easier
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Some in the tech industry decided now was the time to raise alarm about AB 3211.
As Dean Ball points out, there's a lot of bills out there. One must do triage.
Dean Ball: But SB 1047 is far from the only AI bill worth discussing. It's not even the only one of the dozens of AI bills in California worth discussing. Let's talk about AB 3211, the California Provenance, Authenticity, and Watermarking Standards Act, written by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who represents the East Bay.
SB 1047 is a carefully written bill that tries to maximize benefits and minimize costs. You can still quite reasonably disagree with the aims, philosophy or premise of the bill, or its execution details, and thus think its costs exceed its benefits. When people claim SB 1047 is made of crazy pills, they are attacking provisions not in the bill.
---
Outline:
(03:44) Read The Bill (RTFB)
(17:02) What About Open Weights Models?
(18:25) What Does the Bill Do in Practice?
(20:33) Compare and Contrast
---
First published:
July 30th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JHAASAhCZgmwcaLvd/rtfb-california-s-ab-3211
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It's here. The horse has left the barn. Llama-3.1-405B, and also Llama-3.1-70B and Llama-3.1-8B, have been released, and are now open weights.
Early indications are that these are very good models. They were likely the best open weight models of their respective sizes at time of release.
Zuckerberg claims that open weights models are now competitive with closed models. Yann LeCun says ‘performance is on par with the best closed models.’ This is closer to true than in the past, and as corporate hype I will essentially allow it, but it looks like this is not yet fully true.
Llama-3.1-405B not as good as GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet. Certainly Llama-3.1-70B is not as good as the similarly sized Claude Sonnet. If you are going to straight up use an API or chat interface, there seems to be little reason to use Llama.
That is a [...]
---
Outline:
(04:25) Options to Run It
(04:45) The Model Card
(08:42) Benchmarks
(13:41) Human Reactions in the Wild
(16:56) What's It Good For?
(21:39) The Other Other Guy
(22:35) Safety
(31:48) Three People Can Keep a Secret and Reasonably Often Do So
(36:12) The Announcement and Interview
(47:59) Zuckerberg's Open Weights Manifesto
(58:17) Fun Little Note
---
First published:
July 24th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fjzPg9ATbTJcnBZvg/llama-llama-3-405b
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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It is monthly roundup time.
I invite readers who want to hang out and get lunch in NYC later this week to come on Thursday at Bhatti Indian Grill (27th and Lexington) at noon.
I plan to cover the UBI study in its own post soon.
I cover Nate Silver's evisceration of the 538 presidential election model, because we cover probabilistic modeling and prediction markets here, but excluding any AI discussions I will continue to do my best to stay out of the actual politics.
Bad News
Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin files comment suggesting SpaceX Starship launches be capped due to ‘impact on local environment.’ This is a rather shameful thing for them to be doing, and not for the first time.
Alexey Guzey reverses course, realizes at 26 that he was a naive idiot at 20 and finds everything he [...]
---
Outline:
(00:37) Bad News
(02:37) Silver Bullet
(06:35) Shame on Kathy Hochul
(06:58) This is (One Reason) Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
(09:02) (Don’t) Hack the Planet
(10:16) The Laptop Trap
(12:24) Courage
(14:25) Friendship
(15:26) The Gravest Mistake
(21:01) You Need Functional Decision Theory
(23:40) Antisocial Media
(25:52) For Science!
(30:58) Truth Seeking
(34:37) Liar Liar
(36:51) Government Working
(47:55) For Your Entertainment
(52:18) Variously Effective Altruism
(55:09) News You Can Use
(55:31) Good News, Everyone
(58:03) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:01:22) Sports Go Sports
(01:05:10) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(01:05:50) While I Cannot Condone This
(01:12:55) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
July 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qfQspPDHMSEpwsuAQ/monthly-roundup-20-july-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
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Things went very wrong on Friday.
A bugged CrowdStrike update temporarily bricked quite a lot of computers, bringing down such fun things as airlines, hospitals and 911 services.
It was serious out there.
Ryan Peterson: Crowdstrike outage has forced Starbucks to start writing your name on a cup in marker again and I like it.
What (Technically) Happened
My understanding it was a rather stupid bug, a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language.
Zack Vorhies: Memory in your computer is laid out as one giant array of numbers. We represent these numbers here as hexadecimal, which is base 16 (hexadecimal) because it's easier to work with… for reasons.
The problem area? The computer tried to read memory address 0x9c (aka 156).
Why is this bad?
This is an invalid region of memory for any program. Any program that [...]
---
Outline:
(00:31) What (Technically) Happened
(03:38) Who to Blame?
(06:58) How Did We Let This Happen
(12:41) Regulatory Compliance
(18:14) Consequences
(19:54) Careful With That AI
(29:34) Unbanked
---
First published:
July 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oAKfaxKKfuz2cuRLr/on-the-crowdstrike-incident
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
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What do you call a clause explicitly saying that you waive the right to whistleblower compensation, and that you need to get permission before sharing information with government regulators like the SEC?
I have many answers.
I also know that OpenAI, having f***ed around, seems poised to find out, because that is the claim made by whistleblowers to the SEC. Given the SEC fines you for merely not making an explicit exception to your NDA for whistleblowers, what will they do once aware of explicit clauses going the other way?
(Unless, of course, the complaint is factually wrong, but that seems unlikely.)
We also have rather a lot of tech people coming out in support of Trump. I go into the reasons why, which I do think is worth considering. There is a mix of explanations, and at least one very good reason.
Then [...]
---
Outline:
(01:40) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(08:10) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(10:19) Clauding Along
(12:25) Fun with Image Generation
(13:46) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(14:49) They Took Our Jobs
(18:29) Get Involved
(20:14) Introducing
(21:46) In Other AI News
(25:02) Denying the Future
(26:59) Quiet Speculations
(32:34) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(37:03) The Other Quest Regarding Regulations
(57:02) SB 1047 Opposition Watch (1)
(01:07:41) SB 1047 Opposition Watch (2)
(01:11:21) Open Weights are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:12:21) The Week in Audio
(01:14:21) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:14:48) Oh Anthropic
(01:16:57) Openly Evil AI
(01:24:21) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:37:30) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:37:52) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:39:49) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
July 18th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fM4Bs9nanDzio3xCq/ai-73-openly-evil-ai
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
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The Future. It is coming.
A surprising number of economists deny this when it comes to AI. Not only do they deny the future that lies in the future. They also deny the future that is here, but which is unevenly distributed. Their predictions and projections do not factor in even what the AI can already do, let alone what it will learn to do later on.
Another likely future event is the repeal of the Biden Executive Order. That repeal is part of the Republican platform, and Trump is the favorite to win the election. We must act on the assumption that the order likely will be repealed, with no expectation of similar principles being enshrined in federal law.
Then there are the other core problems we will have to solve, and other less core problems such as what to do about AI companions. They [...]
---
Outline:
(01:19) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:54) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(06:22) You’re a Nudge
(08:02) Fun with Image Generation
(08:10) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(13:26) They Took Our Jobs
(13:43) Get Involved
(14:13) Introducing
(15:23) In Other AI News
(20:02) Quiet Speculations
(22:14) The AI Denialist Economists
(29:07) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(31:20) Trump Would Repeal the Biden Executive Order on AI
(34:40) Ordinary Americans Are Worried About AI
(37:50) The Week in Audio
(38:59) The Wikipedia War
(46:45) Rhetorical Innovation
(52:06) Evaluations Must Mimic Relevant Conditions
(54:36) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:00:51) The Problem
(01:08:43) Oh Anthropic
(01:11:50) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:15:48) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
July 11th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xAoXxjtDGGCP7tBDY/ai-72-denying-the-future
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
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This time around, we cover the Hanson/Alexander debates on the value of medicine, and otherwise we mostly have good news.
Technology Advances
Regeneron administers a single shot in a genetically deaf child's ear, and they can hear after a few months, n=2 so far.
Great news: An mRNA vaccine in early human clinical trials reprograms the immune system to attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor. It will now proceed to Phase I. In a saner world, people would be able to try this now.
More great news, we have a cancer vaccine trial in the UK.
And we’re testing personalized mRNA BioNTech canner vaccines too.
US paying Moderna $176 million to develop a pandemic vaccine against bird flu.
We also have this claim that Lorlatinib jumps cancer PFS rates from 8% to 60%.
The GLP-1 Revolution
Early [...]
---
Outline:
(00:12) Technology Advances
(01:04) The GLP-1 Revolution
(04:46) Claims About Hansoninan Medicine
(18:36) Pricing
(19:17) Epistemics
(19:39) DEA Worse Than FDA
(21:19) Study Harder
(23:05) FDA Delenda Est
(24:51) Bioethics
(27:28) Covid
(29:21) Demons
(32:48) Genetics
---
First published:
July 9th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6GhemtgJxF9sSDNrq/medical-roundup-3
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Chevron deference is no more. How will this impact AI regulation?
The obvious answer is it is now much harder for us to ‘muddle through via existing laws and regulations until we learn more,’ because the court narrowed our affordances to do that. And similarly, if and when Congress does pass bills regulating AI, they are going to need to ‘lock in’ more decisions and grant more explicit authority, to avoid court challenges. The argument against state regulations is similarly weaker now.
Similar logic also applies outside of AI. I am overall happy about overturning Chevron and I believe it was the right decision, but ‘Congress decides to step up and do its job now’ is not in the cards. We should be very careful what we have wished for, and perhaps a bit burdened by what has been.
The AI world continues to otherwise be [...]
---
Outline:
(01:06) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:22) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(04:43) Man in the Arena
(07:56) Fun with Image Generation
(08:48) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(11:17) They Took Our Jobs
(12:04) The Art of the Jailbreak
(16:47) Get Involved
(17:34) Introducing
(19:26) In Other AI News
(19:50) Quiet Speculations
(26:03) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(27:19) Chevron Overturned
(45:11) The Week in Audio
(52:49) Oh Anthropic
(53:59) Open Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(55:16) Rhetorical Innovation
(55:39) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:00:51) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:06:16) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:08:57) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
July 4th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AYJcL6GD3FLkL4yNC/ai-71-farewell-to-chevron
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
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Previously: Economics Roundup #1
Let's take advantage of the normality while we have it. In all senses.
Insane Tax Proposals
There is Trump's proposal to replace income taxes with tariffs, but he is not alone.
So here is your periodic reminder, since this is not actually new at core: Biden's proposed budgets include completely insane tax regimes that would cripple our economic dynamism and growth if enacted. As in for high net worth individuals, taking unrealized capital gains at 25% and realized capital gains, such as those you are forced to take to pay your unrealized capital gains tax, at 44.6% plus state taxes.
Austen Allred explains how this plausibly destroys the entire startup ecosystem.
Which I know is confusing because in other contexts he also talks about how other laws (such as SB 1047) that would in no way apply to startups [...]
---
Outline:
(00:14) Insane Tax Proposals
(04:44) Don’t Mess With the Federal Reserve
(05:23) Don’t Mess With the New York Tax Authorities
(06:15) Tariffs
(10:39) People Hate Inflation
(16:22) Real Wages
(17:20) Can’t Get No Satisfaction
(17:54) Employment
(18:35) The National Debt
(19:49) Immigration
(21:44) Financial Literacy
(23:32) Reversal
(24:28) Status Update
(24:53) Scaling Hypothesis
(25:28) Payments
(27:38) Pricing
(29:56) Never Reason From a Price Change
(31:10) A Changing Price
(35:33) The Price of Tourism
(36:34) Alcohol
(37:18) The Efficient Company Hypothesis is False
(41:01) Falling Hours Worked
(41:43) Trust Me
(42:58) China
(44:35) Other
---
First published:
July 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MMtWB8wAu5Buc6sve/economics-roundup-2
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
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They said it couldn’t be done.
No, not Claude Sonnet 3.5 becoming the clear best model.
No, not the Claude-Sonnet-empowered automatic meme generators. Those were whipped together in five minutes.
They said I would never get quiet time and catch up. Well, I showed them!
That's right. Yes, there is a new best model, but otherwise it was a quiet week. I got a chance to incorporate the remaining biggest backlog topics. The RAND report is covered under Thirty Eight Ways to Steal Your Model Weights. Last month's conference in Seoul is covered in You’ve Got Seoul. I got to publish my thoughts on OpenAI's Model Spec last Friday.
Table of Contents
Be sure to read about Claude 3.5 Sonnet here. That is by far the biggest story.
---
Outline:
(00:50) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:38) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(04:41) Clauding Along
(09:46) Fun with Image Generation
(12:21) Copyright Confrontation
(16:30) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(19:45) They Took Our Jobs
(24:49) The Art of the Jailbreak
(25:40) Get Involved
(26:56) Introducing
(30:45) In Other AI News
(33:50) Quiet Speculations
(43:08) You’ve Got Seoul
(57:36) Thirty Eight Ways to Steal Your Model Weights
(01:07:48) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:13:11) SB 1047
(01:14:49) The Week in Audio
(01:20:25) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:22:26) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:24:05) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:24:50) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
June 27th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rC3hhZsx2KogoPLqh/ai-70-a-beautiful-sonnet
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Childhood roundup #5 excluded all developments around college. So this time around is all about issues related to college or graduate school, including admissions.
Tuition and Costs
What went wrong with federal student loans? Exactly what you would expect when you don’t check who is a good credit risk. From a performance perspective, the federal government offered loans to often-unqualified students to attend poor-performing, low-value institutions. Those students then did not earn much and were often unable to repay the loans. The students are victims here too, as we told them to do it.
Alas, none of the proposed student loan solutions involve fixing the underlying issue. If you said ‘we are sorry we pushed these loans on students and rewarded programs and institutions that do not deserve it, and we are going to stop giving loans for those programs and institutions and offer help to [...]
---
Outline:
(00:18) Tuition and Costs
(03:07) What Your Tuition Buys You
(05:45) Decline of Academia
(07:24) Grading and Stress
(14:29) Lower Standards
(15:43) Degree Value
(19:39) Shifting Consumer Preferences
(21:01) Standardized Tests in College Admissions
(21:44) Discrimination in College Admissions
(25:18) Required Classes and Choosing Your Major
(28:31) Everything I Need To Know That Waited Until Graduate School
(31:19) When You See Fraud Say Fraud
(33:03) Free Speech
(35:28) Harvard Goes Mission First
(37:03) The Waterloo Model
(38:33) DEI
(45:20) In Other News
---
First published:
June 26th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pn5jWW4zcWSAjM9s3/childhood-and-education-roundup-6-college-edition
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Looks like we made it. Yes, the non-AI world still exists.
Bad Governor
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has gone rogue and betrayed New York City, also humanity, declaring a halt to congestion pricing a month before it was to go into effect. Her explanation was that she spoke to workers at three Manhattan diners who were worried people would be unable to drive to them from New Jersey. Which, as Cathy Reilly points out, is rather insulting to New Jersey, and also completely absurd. Who in the world was going to go into Manhattan for a diner?
She says this won’t interfere with Subway work. Work on the 2nd Avenue Subway line has already been halted. And that's not all.
You’re damn right. We are going to blame Hochul. Every. Damn. Time.
So Elizabeth Kim investigated. One never talked politics at all. One [...]
---
Outline:
(00:12) Bad Governor
(02:12) High Skilled Immigration
(04:46) Various Bad News
(07:46) Prediction Markets Are Unpopular
(09:30) New Buildings are Ugly
(11:06) Government Working
(15:24) The Snafu Principle
(18:11) Technology Advances
(18:51) For Science!
(28:38) Antisocial Media
(35:07) The Twitter Porn Bot War
(37:07) I Like My Twitter Posts Like I Like My Porn Bots: Private
(40:36) Variously Effective Altruism
(42:06) Are You Happy Now?
(45:49) Good News, Everyone
(51:07) Good Social Advice
(56:16) FTC Wants to Ban Noncompetes
(01:02:52) While I Cannot Condone This
(01:11:20) Enemies of the People
(01:14:39) Lab Grown Meat Shirts Answer and Raise Questions
(01:15:51) Ban Gain of Function Research
(01:16:46) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:26:30) Sports Go Sports
(01:26:54) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(01:30:01) Patrick McKenzie Monthly
(01:32:41) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
June 25th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7LvK6Gw2GdfDMBNNm/monthly-roundup-19-june-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
There is a new clear best (non-tiny) LLM.
If you want to converse with an LLM, the correct answer is Claude Sonnet 3.5.
It is available for free on Claude.ai and the Claude iOS app, or you can subscribe for higher rate limits. The API cost is $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
This completes the trifecta. All of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic have kept their biggest and more expensive model static for now, and instead focused on making something faster and cheaper that is good enough to be the main model.
You would only use another model if you either (1) needed a smaller model in which case Gemini 1.5 Flash seems best, or (2) it must have open model weights.
Updates to their larger and smaller models, Claude Opus 3.5 and Claude Haiku 3.5, are coming [...]
---
Outline:
(01:59) Benchmarks
(03:08) Human Evaluation Tests
(04:19) The Vision Thing
(05:46) Artifacts
(07:08) Privacy
(07:49) Safety
(08:51) Advancing the Frontier
(10:51) The Race is On
(11:43) Whispers of Recursive Self-Improvement
(16:35) Logic Fails
(18:34) Practical Reports
(24:20) What Comes Next
---
First published:
June 24th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wx4RhFzLbiHoShFjR/on-claude-3-5-sonnet
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: On the Podcast, Quotes from the Paper
This is a post in three parts.
The first part is my attempt to condense Leopold Aschenbrenner's paper and model into its load bearing elements and core logic and dependencies.
Two versions here, a long version that attempts to compress with minimal loss, and a short version that gives the gist.
The second part goes over where I agree and disagree, and briefly explains why.
The third part is the summary of other people's reactions and related discussions, which will also include my own perspectives on related issues.
My goal is often to ask ‘what if.’ There is a lot I disagree with. For each subquestion, what would I think here, if the rest was accurate, or a lot of it was accurate?
Summary of Biggest Agreements and Disagreements
I had Leopold review [...]
---
Outline:
(00:54) Summary of Biggest Agreements and Disagreements
(04:58) Decision Theory is Important
(06:38) Part 1: Leopold's Model and Its Implications
(06:44) The Long Version
(17:03) The Short Version
(19:04) Which Assumptions Are How Load Bearing in This Model?
(28:40) Part 2: Where I Agree and Disagree
(56:46) Part 3: Reactions of Others
(56:51) The Basics
(01:00:37) A Clarification from Eliezer Yudkowsky
(01:05:56) Children of the Matrix
(01:10:52) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:13:28) The Sacred Timeline
(01:17:51) The Need to Update
(01:20:17) Open Models and Insights Can Be Copied
(01:21:38) You Might Not Be Paranoid If They’re Really Out to Get You
(01:24:12) We Are All There Is
(01:25:39) The Inevitable Conflict
(01:38:50) There Are Only Least Bad Options
(01:40:24) A Really Big Deal
(01:41:53) What Gives You the Right?
(01:43:34) Random Other Thoughts
---
First published:
June 14th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b8u6nF5GAb6Ecttev/the-leopold-model-analysis-and-reactions
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The fun at OpenAI continues.
We finally have the details of how Leopold Aschenbrenner was fired, at least according to Leopold. We have a letter calling for a way for employees to do something if frontier AI labs are endangering safety. And we have continued details and fallout from the issues with non-disparagement agreements and NDAs.
Hopefully we can stop meeting like this for a while.
Due to jury duty and it being largely distinct, this post does not cover the appointment of General Paul Nakasone to the board of directors. I’ll cover that later, probably in the weekly update.
The Firing of Leopold Aschenbrenner
What happened that caused Leopold to leave OpenAI? Given the nature of this topic, I encourage getting the story from Leopold by following along on the transcript of that section of his appearance on the Dwarkesh Patel Podcast or [...]
---
Outline:
(00:43) The Firing of Leopold Aschenbrenner
(11:24) Daniel Kokotajlo Speaks and The Right to Warn
(15:07) The Right to Warn Letter
(18:48) Signed by (alphabetical order):
(19:34) Endorsed by (alphabetical order):
(34:17) You’ll Be Hearing From Our Lawyer
(35:29) Possession is Nine Tenths of the Law
(41:31) What I Can Tell You I Used To Not Be Able To Tell You
(47:50) Clarifying the Mission
(52:04) Sam Altman Told the SEC He Was Chairman of YC
(53:26) YC Has an Investment in OpenAI
(54:33) OpenAI is Hiring a Lot of Lobbyists
(55:05) OpenAI Says They Value Privacy
(55:58) Microsoft Went Around the Safety Board
(56:39) I Don’t Really Know What You Were Expecting
(57:12) Where Did Everybody Go?
(59:43) In Other OpenAI News
---
First published:
June 17th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q3zs7E7rktHsESXaF/openai-8-the-right-to-warn
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
On DeepMind's Frontier Safety Framework
Previously: On OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, On RSPs.
The First Two Frameworks
To first update on Anthropic and OpenAI's situation here:
Anthropic's RSP continues to miss the definitions of the all-important later levels, in addition to other issues, although it is otherwise promising. It has now been a number of months, and it is starting to be concerning that nothing has changed. They are due for an update.
OpenAI also has not updated its framework.
I am less down on OpenAI's framework choices than Zack Stein-Perlman was in the other review I have seen. I think that if OpenAI implemented the spirit of what it wrote down, that would be pretty good. The Critical-level thresholds listed are too high, but the Anthropic ASL-4 commitments are still unspecified. An update is needed, but I appreciate the concreteness.
The [...]
---
Outline:
(00:04) On DeepMind's Frontier Safety Framework
(00:15) The First Two Frameworks
(03:06) The DeepMind Framework
(08:57) Mitigations
(09:59) Security Mitigations
---
First published:
June 18th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/frEYsehsPHswDXnNX/on-deepmind-s-frontier-safety-framework
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Nice job breaking it, hero, unfortunately. Ilya Sutskever, despite what I sincerely believe are the best of intentions, has decided to be the latest to do The Worst Possible Thing, founding a new AI company explicitly looking to build ASI (superintelligence). The twists are zero products with a ‘cracked’ small team, which I suppose is an improvement, and calling it Safe Superintelligence, which I do not suppose is an improvement.
How is he going to make it safe? His statements tell us nothing meaningful about that.
There were also changes to SB 1047. Most of them can be safely ignored. The big change is getting rid of the limited duty exception, because it seems I was one of about five people who understood it, and everyone kept thinking it was a requirement for companies instead of an opportunity. And the literal chamber of commerce fought hard to [...]
---
Outline:
(01:43) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(06:13) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(08:21) Fun with Image Generation
(13:05) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(14:12) The Art of the Jailbreak
(15:07) Copyright Confrontation
(16:14) A Matter of the National Security Agency
(21:22) Get Involved
(21:38) Introducing
(23:56) In Other AI News
(29:06) Quiet Speculations
(38:29) AI Is Going to Be Huuuuuuuuuuge
(47:18) SB 1047 Updated Again
(01:00:48) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:02:42) The Week in Audio
(01:03:54) The ARC of Progress
(01:13:10) Put Your Thing In a Box
(01:15:50) What Will Ilya Do?
(01:20:54) Actual Rhetorical Innovation
(01:24:19) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:27:48) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:32:28) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:32:41) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:35:38) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
June 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytFLs37zLsFBqLHGA/ai-69-nice
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
There are multiple excellent reasons to publish a Model Spec like OpenAI's, that specifies how you want your model to respond in various potential situations.
These all apply even if you think the spec in question is quite bad. Clarity is great.
As a first stab at a model spec from OpenAI, this actually is pretty solid. I do suggest some potential improvements [...]
---
Outline:
(02:05) What are the central goals of OpenAI here?
(04:04) What are the core rules and behaviors?
(05:56) What Do the Rules Mean?
(06:04) Rule: Follow the Chain of Command
(07:59) Rule: Comply With Applicable Laws
(09:07) Rule: Don’t Provide Information Hazards
(09:56) Rule: Respect Creators and Their Rights
(11:08) Rule: Protect People's Privacy
(12:45) Rule: Don’t Respond with NSFW Content
(14:24) Exception: Transformation Tasks
(15:38) Are These Good Defaults? How Strong Should They Be?
(15:44) Default: Assume Best Intentions From the User or Developer
(21:26) Default: Ask Clarifying Questions When Necessary
(21:39) Default: Be As Helpful As Possible Without Overstepping
(26:00) Default: Support the Different Needs of Interactive Chat and Programmatic Use
(27:18) Default: Assume an Objective Point of View
(29:13) Default: Encourage Fairness and Kindness, and Discourage Hate
(30:29) Default: Don’t Try to Change Anyone's Mind
(33:57) Default: Express Uncertainty
(36:19) Default: Use the Right Tool for the Job
(36:32) Default: Be Thorough but Efficient, While Respecting Length Limits
(37:16) A Proposed Addition
(38:13) Overall Issues
(40:33) Changes: Objectives
(42:28) Rules of the Game: New Version
(48:31) Defaults: New Version
---
First published:
June 21st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mQmEQQLk7kFEENQ3W/on-openai-s-model-spec
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Apple was for a while rumored to be planning launch for iPhone of AI assisted emails, texts, summaries and so on including via Siri, to be announced at WWDC 24.
It's happening. Apple's keynote announced the anticipated partnership with OpenAI.
The bottom line is that this is Siri as the AI assistant with full access to everything on your phone, with relatively strong privacy protections. Mostly it is done on device, the rest via ‘private cloud compute.’ The catch is that when they need the best they call out for OpenAI, but they do check with you first explicitly each time, OpenAI promises not to retain data and they hide your queries, unless you choose to link up your account.
If the new AI is good enough and safe enough then this is pretty great. If Google doesn’t get its act together reasonably soon to deliver [...]
---
Outline:
(01:30) AiPhone
(04:00) Privacy
(05:27) Practical Magic
(07:38) Dance With the Devil
(08:30) Does It Work?
(10:54) Do You Dare?
(11:59) Who Pays Who?
(13:37) AiPhone Fans
(19:36) No AiPhone
(23:54) In Other Apple News
---
First published:
June 12th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrsYwCpRCcYtDCfZN/aiphone
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The big news this week was Apple Intelligence being integrated deeply into all their products. Beyond that, we had a modestly better than expected debate over the new version of SB 1047, and the usual tons of stuff in the background. I got to pay down some writing debt.
The bad news is, oh no, I have been called for Jury Duty. The first day or two I can catch up on podcasts or pure reading, but after that it will start to hurt. Wish me luck.
Table of Contents
AiPhone covers the announcement of Apple Intelligence. Apple's products are getting device-wide integration of their own AI in a way they say preserves privacy, with access to ChatGPT via explicit approval for the heaviest requests. A late update: OpenAI is providing this service for free as per Bloomberg.
I offered Quotes from Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational [...]
---
Outline:
(00:38) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(01:46) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(07:49) Fun with Image Generation
(10:09) Copyright Confrontation
(11:38) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(15:20) They Took Our Jobs
(16:33) Someone Explains it All
(19:20) The Art of the Jailbreak
(22:39) Get Involved
(22:46) Introducing
(25:18) In Other AI News
(27:56) Quiet Speculations
(32:17) I Spy With My AI
(34:40) Pick Up the Phone
(35:06) Lying to the White House, Senate and House of Lords
(39:48) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(43:52) More Reasonable SB 1047 Reactions
(51:12) Less Reasonable SB 1047 Reactions
(56:24) That's Not a Good Idea
(56:46) With Friends Like These
(58:13) The Week in Audio
(01:01:22) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:02:32) Mistakes Were Made
(01:03:36) The Sacred Timeline
(01:08:17) Coordination is Hard
(01:13:33) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:19:07) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:28:48) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:29:58) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
June 13th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DWkhjAxbwdcxYgyrJ/ai-68-remarkably-reasonable-reactions
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: Quotes from Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness Paper
Dwarkesh Patel talked to Leopold Aschenbrenner for about four and a half hours.
The central discussion was the theses of his paper, Situational Awareness, which I offered quotes from earlier, with a focus on the consequences of AGI rather than whether AGI will happen soon. There are also a variety of other topics.
Thus, for the relevant sections of the podcast I am approaching this via roughly accepting the technological premise on capabilities and timelines, since they don’t discuss that. So the background is we presume straight lines on graphs will hold to get us to AGI and ASI (superintelligence), and this will allow us to generate a ‘drop in AI researcher’ that can then assist with further work. Then things go into ‘slow’ takeoff.
I am changing the order of the sections a bit. I put [...]
---
Outline:
(03:30) The Trillion Dollar Cluster
(09:32) AGI 2028: The Return of History
(20:26) Espionage and American AI Supremacy
(31:23) Geopolitical Implications of AI
(39:19) State-Led vs. Private-Led AI
(55:30) Skipping Sections
(55:49) Intelligence Explosion
(01:06:53) Alignment
(01:19:56) Becoming Valedictorian of Columbia at 19
(01:26:31) On Germany
(01:34:38) Dwarkesh's Immigration Story
(01:36:19) Two Random Questions
(01:37:02) AGI Investment Fund
(01:43:14) Lessons From WW2
---
First published:
June 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DiMz82FwsHPugqxFD/on-dwarksh-s-podcast-with-leopold-aschenbrenner
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post is different.
Usually I offer commentary and analysis. I share what others think, then respond.
This is the second time I am importantly not doing that. The work speaks for itself. It offers a different perspective, a window and a worldview. It is self-consistent. This is what a highly intelligent, highly knowledgeable person actually believes after much thought.
So rather than say where I agree and disagree and argue back (and I do both strongly in many places), this is only quotes and graphs from the paper, selected to tell the central story while cutting length by ~80%, so others can more easily absorb it. I recommend asking what are the load bearing assumptions and claims, and what changes to them would alter the key conclusions.
The first time I used this format was years ago, when I offered Quotes from Moral Mazes. [...]
---
Outline:
(02:04) Section 1: From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs
(12:43) Section 2: From AGI to Superintelligence: The Intelligence Explosion
(21:05) Section 3a: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster
(30:42) Section 3b: Lock Down the Labs: Security for AGI
(40:27) Section 3c: Superalignment
(57:05) Section 3d: The Free World Must Prevail
(01:03:00) Section 4: The Project
(01:10:01) Part 5: Parting Thoughts (Quoted in Full)
---
First published:
June 7th, 2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I had a great time at LessOnline. It was a both a working trip and also a trip to an alternate universe, a road not taken, a vision of a different life where you get up and start the day in dialogue with Agnes Callard and Aristotle and in a strange combination of relaxed and frantically go from conversation to conversation on various topics, every hour passing doors of missed opportunity, gone forever.
Most of all it meant almost no writing done for five days, so I am shall we say a bit behind again. Thus, the following topics are pending at this time, in order of my guess as to priority right now:
---
Outline:
(02:34) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:42) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(07:45) Fun with Image Generation
(08:00) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(11:01) They Took Our Jobs
(11:49) Get Involved
(12:30) Someone Explains It All
(12:59) Introducing
(13:15) In Other AI News
(16:16) Covert Influence Operations
(19:09) Quiet Speculations
(22:30) Samuel Hammond on SB 1047
(26:40) Reactions to Changes to SB 1047
(36:59) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(43:36) That's Not a Good Idea
(47:18) The Week in Audio
(49:17) Rhetorical Innovation
(56:12) Oh Anthropic
(01:04:18) Securing Model Weights is Difficult
(01:06:20) Aligning a Dumber Than Human Intelligence is Still Difficult
(01:09:07) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:09:50) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:11:11) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:11:37) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
June 6th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gKxf6qJaSP5Ehqnsm/ai-67-brief-strange-trip
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It looks like Scott Weiner's SB 1047 is now severely weakened.
Some of the changes are good clarifications. One is a big very welcome fix.
The one I call The Big Flip is something very different.
It is mind boggling that we can have a political system where a bill can overwhelmingly pass the California senate, and then a bunch of industry lobbyists and hyperbolic false claims can make Scott Weiner feel bullied into making these changes.
I will skip the introduction, since those changes are clarifications, and get on with it.
In the interest of a clean reference point and speed, this post will not cover reactions.
The Big Flip
Then there is the big change that severely weakens SB 1047.
---
Outline:
(01:10) The Big Flip
(05:17) The Big Fix
(07:37) The Shutdown and Reporting Clarifications
(09:26) The Harm Adjustment
(11:36) The Limited Duty Exemption Clarification
(13:25) Overall
(15:09) Changing Your Mind
---
First published:
June 6th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4t98oqh8tzDvoatHs/sb-1047-is-weakened
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post goes over the extensive report Google put out on Gemini 1.5.
There are no important surprises. Both Gemini Pro 1.5 and Gemini Flash are ‘highly capable multimodal models incorporating a novel mixture-of-experts architecture’ and various other improvements. They are solid models with solid performance. It can be useful and interesting to go over the details of their strengths and weaknesses.
The biggest thing to know is that Google improves its models incrementally and silently over time, so if you have not used Gemini in months, you might be underestimating what it can do.
I’m hitting send and then jumping on a plane to Berkeley. Perhaps I will see you there over the weekend. That means that if there are mistakes here, I will be slower to respond and correct them than usual, so consider checking the comments section.
Practical Questions First
The [...]
---
Outline:
(00:56) Practical Questions First
(03:51) Speed Kills
(04:44) Very Large Context Windows
(05:14) Relative Performance within the Gemini Family
(07:04) Gemini Flash and the Future Flash-8B
(08:21) New and Improved Evaluations
(14:57) Core Capability Evaluations
(18:14) Model Architecture and Training
(20:08) Safety, Security and Responsibility
(24:45) What Do We Want?
(26:02) Don’t You Know That You’re Toxic?
(28:32) Trying to be Helpful
(29:45) Security Issues
(31:33) Representational Harms
(33:17) Arms-Length Internal Assurance Evaluations
(35:01) External Evaluations
(35:46) Safety Overall
---
First published:
May 31st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/seM8aQ7Yy6m3i4QPx/the-gemini-1-5-report
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Helen Toner went on the TED AI podcast, giving us more color on what happened at OpenAI. These are important claims to get right.
I will start with my notes on the podcast, including the second part where she speaks about regulation in general. Then I will discuss some implications more broadly.
Notes on Helen Toner's TED AI Show Podcast
This seems like it deserves the standard detailed podcast treatment. By default each note's main body is description, any second-level notes are me.
---
Outline:
(00:26) Notes on Helen Toner's TED AI Show Podcast
(15:04) Things That Could Have Been Brought To Our Attention Previously
(16:59) Brad Taylor Responds
(19:36) How Much Does This Matter?
(21:37) If You Come at the King
(23:09) So That is That
---
First published:
May 30th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dd66GymgbLQMHGLwQ/openai-helen-toner-speaks
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Tomorrow I will fly out to San Francisco, to spend Friday through Monday at the LessOnline conference at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If you are there, by all means say hello. If you are in the Bay generally and want to otherwise meet, especially on Monday, let me know that too and I will see if I have time to make that happen.
Even without that hiccup, it continues to be a game of playing catch-up. Progress is being made, but we are definitely not there yet (and everything not AI is being completely ignored for now).
Last week I pointed out seven things I was unable to cover, along with a few miscellaneous papers and reports.
Out of those seven, I managed to ship on three of them: Ongoing issues at OpenAI, The Schumer Report and Anthropic's interpretability paper.
However, OpenAI developments continue. Thanks largely [...]
---
Outline:
(01:42) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:59) Not Okay, Google
(13:33) OK Google, Don’t Panic
(17:10) Not Okay, Meta
(23:11) Not Okay Taking Our Jobs
(28:36) They Took Our Jobs Anyway
(32:39) A New Leaderboard Appears
(35:24) Copyright Confrontation
(35:42) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(40:12) Get Involved
(40:29) Introducing
(44:33) In Other AI News
(47:48) GPT-5 Alive
(50:11) Quiet Speculations
(01:02:26) Open Versus Closed
(01:07:16) Your Kind of People
(01:09:42) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:16:01) Lawfare and Liability
(01:22:47) SB 1047 Unconstitutional, Claims Paper
(01:26:48) The Week in Audio
(01:28:58) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:32:34) Abridged Reports of Our Death
(01:33:38) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:38:46) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:39:43) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:40:51) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
May 30th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vSPdRg8siXCh6mLvt/ai-66-oh-to-be-less-online
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: OpenAI: Exodus (contains links at top to earlier episodes), Do Not Mess With Scarlett Johansson
We have learned more since last week. It's worse than we knew.
How much worse? In which ways? With what exceptions?
That's what this post is about.
The Story So Far
For years, employees who left OpenAI consistently had their vested equity explicitly threatened with confiscation and the lack of ability to sell it, and were given short timelines to sign documents or else. Those documents contained highly aggressive NDA and non disparagement (and non interference) clauses, including the NDA preventing anyone from revealing these clauses.
No one knew about this until recently, because until Daniel Kokotajlo everyone signed, and then they could not talk about it. Then Daniel refused to sign, Kelsey Piper started reporting, and a lot came out.
Here is Altman's statement from [...]
---
Outline:
(00:27) The Story So Far
(02:26) A Note on Documents from OpenAI
(02:52) Some Good News But There is a Catch
(12:17) How Blatant Was This Threat?
(14:23) It Sure Looks Like Executives Knew What Was Going On
(18:07) Pressure Tactics Continued Through the End of April 2024
(23:42) The Right to an Attorney
(28:41) The Tender Offer Ace in the Hole
(31:54) The Old Board Speaks
(34:45) OpenAI Did Not Honor Its Public Commitments to Superalignment
(38:59) OpenAI Messed With Scarlett Johansson
(41:55) Another OpenAI Employee Leaves
(44:10) OpenAI Tells Logically Inconsistent Stories
(52:21) When You Put it Like That
(52:51) People Have Thoughts
(56:30) There is a Better Way
(57:18) Should You Consider Working For OpenAI?
(01:02:29) The Situation is Ongoing
---
First published:
May 28th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YwhgHwjaBDmjgswqZ/openai-fallout
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Easily Interpretable Summary of New Interpretability Paper
Anthropic has identified (full paper here) how millions of concepts are represented inside Claude Sonnet, their current middleweight model. The features activate across modalities and languages as tokens approach the associated context. This scales up previous findings from smaller models.
By looking at neuron clusters, they defined a distance measure between clusters. So the Golden Gate Bridge is close to various San Francisco and California things, and inner conflict relates to various related conceptual things, and so on.
Then it gets more interesting.
Importantly, we can also manipulate these features, artificially amplifying or suppressing them to see how Claude's responses change.
If you sufficiently amplify the feature for the Golden Gate Bridge, Claude starts to think it is the Golden Gate Bridge. As in, it thinks it is the physical bridge, and also it gets obsessed, bringing [...]
---
Outline:
(00:03) Easily Interpretable Summary of New Interpretability Paper
(02:59) One Weird Trick
(05:27) Zvi Parses the Actual Symbol Equations
(08:06) Identifying and Verifying Features
(12:38) Features as Computational Intermediates
(13:28) Oh That's the Deception Feature, Nothing to Worry About
(18:14) What Do They Think This Mean for Safety?
(19:10) Limitations
(22:28) Researcher Perspectives
(23:24) Other Reactions
(24:19) I Am the Golden Gate Bridge
(26:06) Golden Gate Bridges Offer Mundane Utility
(27:39) The Value of Steering
(31:54) To What Extent Did We Know This Already?
(43:07) Is This Being Oversold?
(47:07) Crossing the Bridge Now That We’ve Come to It
---
First published:
May 27th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JdcxDEqWKfsucxYrk/i-am-the-golden-gate-bridge
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Or at least, Read the Report (RTFR).
There is no substitute. This is not strictly a bill, but it is important.
The introduction kicks off balancing upside and avoiding downside, utility and risk. This will be a common theme, with a very strong ‘why not both?’ vibe.
Early in the 118th Congress, we were brought together by a shared recognition of the profound changes artificial intelligence (AI) could bring to our world: AI's capacity to revolutionize the realms of science, medicine, agriculture, and beyond; the exceptional benefits that a flourishing AI ecosystem could offer our economy and our productivity; and AI's ability to radically alter human capacity and knowledge.
At the same time, we each recognized the potential risks AI could present, including altering our workforce in the short-term and long-term, raising questions about the application of existing laws in an AI-enabled world, changing the [...]
---
Outline:
(02:10) The Big Spend
(04:51) What Would Schumer Fund?
(12:08) What About For National Security and Defense?
(15:13) What Else Would Schumer Encourage Next in General?
(19:12) I Have Two Better Ideas
(21:32) They Took Our Jobs
(24:24) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(30:11) Copyright Confrontation
(34:05) People Are Worried AI Might Kill Everyone Not Be Entirely Safe
(50:27) I Declare National Security
(57:17) Some Other People's Reactions
(01:04:20) Conclusions and Main Takeaways
---
First published:
May 24th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wxTMxF35PkNawn8f9/the-schumer-report-on-ai-rtfb
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In terms of things that go in AI updates, this has been the busiest two week period so far. Every day ends with more open tabs than it started, even within AI.
As a result, some important topics are getting pushed to whenever I can give them proper attention. Triage is the watchword.
In particular, this post will NOT attempt to cover:
---
Outline:
(02:22) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(07:10) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(09:38) OpenAI versus Google
(11:32) GPT-4o My
(16:48) Responsable Scaling Policies
(26:21) Copyright Confrontation
(27:45) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(29:37) They Took Our Jobs
(31:33) Get Involved
(32:23) Introducing
(33:11) Reddit and Weep
(35:14) In Other AI News
(40:03) I Spy With My AI (or Total Recall)
(47:55) Quiet Speculations
(49:58) Politico is at it Again
(56:23) Beating China
(58:11) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(59:25) SB 1047 Update
(01:05:35) That's Not a Good Idea
(01:08:47) The Week in Audio
(01:10:05) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:13:20) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:19:11) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
May 23rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jkWvyzRzZQoaeq4mG/ai-65-i-spy-with-my-ai
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I repeat. Do not mess with Scarlett Johansson.
You would think her movies, and her suit against Disney, would make this obvious.
Apparently not so.
Andrej Karpathy (co-founder OpenAI, departed earlier), May 14: The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson. You all thought it was math or something.
You see, there was this voice they created for GPT-4o, called ‘Sky.’
People noticed it sounded suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson, who voiced the AI in the movie Her, which Sam Altman says is his favorite movie of all time, which he says inspired OpenAI ‘more than a little bit,’ and then he tweeted “Her” on its own right before the GPT-4o presentation, and which was the comparison point for many people reviewing the GPT-4o debut?
Quite the Coincidence
I mean, surely that couldn’t have been intentional.
Oh, no.
Kylie Robison: I [...]
---
Outline:
(01:00) Quite the Coincidence
(04:02) Scarlett Johansson's Statement
(06:00) Sure Looks Like OpenAI Lied
(10:20) Sure Seems Like OpenAI Violated Their Own Position
(11:58) Altman's Original Idea Was Good, Actually
(12:54) This Seems Like a Really Bad Set of Facts for OpenAI?
(14:30) Does Scarlett Johansson Have a Case?
(19:10) What Would It Mean For There Not To Be a Case?
(22:51) The Big Rule Adjustment
(27:24) The Internet Reacts
---
First published:
May 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N8aRDYLuakmLezeJy/do-not-mess-with-scarlett-johansson
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Dwarkesh Patel recorded a Podcast with John Schulman, cofounder of OpenAI and at the time their head of current model post-training. Transcript here. John's job at the time was to make the current AIs do what OpenAI wanted them to do. That is an important task, but one that employs techniques that their at-the-time head of alignment, Jan Leike, made clear we should not expect to work on future more capable systems. I strongly agree with Leike on that.
Then Sutskever left and Leike resigned, and John Schulman was made the new head of alignment, now charged with what superalignment efforts remain at OpenAI to give us the ability to control future AGIs and ASIs.
This gives us a golden opportunity to assess where his head is at, without him knowing he was about to step into that role.
There is no question that John Schulman [...]
---
Outline:
(01:12) The Big Take
(07:27) The Podcast
(20:27) Reasoning and Capabilities Development
(25:01) Practical Considerations
---
First published:
May 21st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rC6CXZd34geayEH4s/on-dwarkesh-s-podcast-with-openai-s-john-schulman
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: OpenAI: Facts From a Weekend, OpenAI: The Battle of the Board, OpenAI: Leaks Confirm the Story, OpenAI: Altman Returns, OpenAI: The Board Expands.
Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike have left OpenAI. This is almost exactly six months after Altman's temporary firing and The Battle of the Board, the day after the release of GPT-4o, and soon after a number of other recent safety-related OpenAI departures. Many others working on safety have also left recently. This is part of a longstanding pattern at OpenAI.
Jan Leike later offered an explanation for his decision on Twitter. Leike asserts that OpenAI has lost the mission on safety and culturally been increasingly hostile to it. He says the superalignment team was starved for resources, with its public explicit compute commitments dishonored, and that safety has been neglected on a widespread basis, not only superalignment but also including addressing the safety [...]
---
Outline:
(02:11) Table of Contents
(03:23) The Two Departure Announcements
(07:50) Who Else Has Left Recently?
(12:33) Who Else Has Left Overall?
(15:56) Early Reactions to the Departures
(24:16) The Obvious Explanation: Altman
(25:47) Jan Leike Speaks
(30:04) Reactions after Leike's Statement
(33:48) Greg Brockman and Sam Altman Respond to Leike
(38:27) Reactions from Some Folks Unworried About Highly Capable AI
(41:28) Don’t Worry, Be Happy?
(43:56) The Non-Disparagement and NDA Clauses
(51:51) Legality in Practice
(54:01) Implications and Reference Classes
(01:01:21) Altman Responds on Non-Disparagement Clauses
(01:02:27) So, About That Response
(01:10:34) How Bad Is All This?
(01:13:58) Those Who Are Against These Efforts to Prevent AI From Killing Everyone
(01:18:01) What Will Happen Now?
(01:18:30) What Else Might Happen or Needs to Happen Now?
---
First published:
May 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASzyQrpGQsj7Moijk/openai-exodus
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
At least twice the speed! At most half the price!
That's right, it's GPT-4o My.
Some people's expectations for the OpenAI announcement this week were very high.
Spencer Schiff: Next week will likely be remembered as one of the most significant weeks in human history.
We fell far short of that, but it was still plenty cool.
Essentially no one's expectations for Google's I/O day were very high.
Then Google, in way that was not in terms of its presentation especially exciting or easy to parse, announced a new version of basically everything AI.
That plausibly includes, effectively, most of what OpenAI was showing off. It also includes broader integrations and distribution.
It is hard to tell who has the real deal, and who does not, until we see the various models at full power in the wild.
I will [...]
---
Outline:
(01:24) The GPT-4o Announcement
(04:43) Her
(08:37) Benchmarks
(11:40) Cheap Kills, Speed Kills, Free Kills More
(15:42) What Else Can It Do?
(18:26) Safety First
(21:59) Patterns of Disturbing Behavior
(26:11) Multimedia Demos Aplenty
(30:19) The Math Tutor Demo
(34:49) Target Identified
(38:49) Are You Impressed?
(42:02) Meet the New Jailbreak
(43:14) Are You Unimpressed?
(49:52) Are You Anti-Impressed?
(54:26) Is the Market Impressed?
(55:59) What About Google?
(57:12) OK Google, Give Me a List
(01:01:14) Project Astra
(01:03:13) The Rest of the Announcements in Detail
(01:11:32) Conclusion and Summary
---
First published:
May 16th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bqa5wmrwPL5zbfgxH/gpt-4o-my-and-google-i-o-day
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It's happening. The race is on.
Google and OpenAI both premiered the early versions of their fully multimodal, eventually fully integrated AI agents. Soon your phone experience will get more and more tightly integrated with AI. You will talk to your phone, or your computer, and it will talk back, and it will do all the things. It will hear your tone of voice and understand your facial expressions. It will remember the contents of your inbox and all of your quirky preferences.
It will plausibly be a version of Her, from the hit movie ‘Are we sure about building this Her thing, seems questionable?’
OpenAI won this round of hype going away, because it premiered, and for some modalities released, the new GPT-4o. GPT-4o is tearing up the Arena, and in many ways is clearly giving the people what they want. If nothing else, it [...]
---
Outline:
(02:34) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(07:15) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(11:35) Bumbling and Mumbling
(13:56) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(17:23) They Took Our Jobs
(22:44) In Other AI News
(26:24) Quiet Speculations
(28:18) The Week in Audio
(37:54) Brendan Bordelon Big Tech Business as Usual Lobbying Update
(44:29) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(59:14) The Schumer AI Working Group Framework
(01:00:06) Those That Assume Everyone Is Talking Their Books
(01:04:19) Lying About SB 1047
(01:08:02) More Voices Against Governments Doing Anything
(01:14:34) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:19:21) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:23:09) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:25:25) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
May 16th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29fswYuy6KB8Edbjm/ai-64-feel-the-mundane-utility
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
As I note in the third section, I will be attending LessOnline at month's end at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If that is your kind of event, then consider going, and buy your ticket today before prices go up.
This month's edition was an opportunity to finish off some things that got left out of previous editions or where events have left many of the issues behind, including the question of TikTok.
Oh No
All of this has happened before. And all of this shall happen again.
Alex Tabarrok: I regret to inform you that the CDC is at it again.
Marc Johnson: We developed an assay for testing for H5N1 from wastewater over a year ago. (I wasn’t expecting it in milk, but I figured it was going to poke up somewhere.)
However, I was just on a call with the CDC and [...]
---
Outline:
(00:29) Oh No
(03:36) Oh No: Betting on Elections
(05:47) Oh Yeah: LessOnline
(07:21) Brief Explanations
(08:33) Patrick McKenzie Monthly
(11:15) Enemies of the People
(12:41) Oh Canada
(15:24) This is NPR
(20:10) Technology Advances
(21:17) TikTok on the Clock
(32:51) Antisocial Media
(34:51) Prosocial Media
(36:01) At the Movies
(37:27) Media Trustworthiness Rankings
(41:40) Government Working
(46:57) Florida Man Bans Lab-Grown Meat
(51:22) Crime and Punishment
(54:00) El Salvador
(58:02) Variously Effective Altruism
(01:02:37) While I Cannot Condone This
(01:06:38) Can Money Buy Happiness?
(01:08:16) Good News, Everyone
(01:09:07) Can’t Sleep Clowns Will Eat Me
(01:10:53) How Great are Great People?
(01:13:20) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:21:21) Sports Go Sports
(01:25:20) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(01:26:40) News You Can Use
(01:28:00) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
May 13th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9GLj9DqfpsJBRKHRr/monthly-roundup-18-may-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It was a remarkably quiet announcement. We now have Alpha Fold 3, it does a much improved job predicting all of life's molecules and their interactions. It feels like everyone including me then shrugged and went back to thinking about other things. No cool new toy for most of us to personally play with, no existential risk impact, no big trades to make, ho hum.
But yes, when we look back at this week, I expect what we remember will be Alpha Fold 3.
Unless it turns out that it is Sophon, a Chinese technique to potentially make it harder to fine tune an open model in ways the developer wants to prevent. I do not expect this to get the job done that needs doing, but it is an intriguing proposal.
We also have 95 theses to evaluate in a distinct post, OpenAI sharing the [...]
---
Outline:
(01:14) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:41) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(10:24) GPT-2 Soon to Tell
(13:49) Fun with Image Generation
(14:03) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(18:05) Automation Illustrated
(23:15) They Took Our Jobs
(25:56) Apple of Technically Not AI
(28:09) Get Involved
(28:46) Introducing
(31:11) In Other AI News
(32:47) Quiet Speculations
(37:35) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(39:51) The Week in Audio
(40:38) Rhetorical Innovation
(45:58) Open Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(51:34) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
May 9th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FrBxFa3qMDvLypDEZ/ai-63-introducing-alpha-fold-3
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Or rather Samuel Hammond does. Tyler Cowen finds it interesting but not his view.
I put up a market, and then started looking. Click through to his post for the theses. I will be quoting a few of them in full, but not most of them.
I am not trying to be exact with these probabilities when the question calls for them, nor am I being super careful to make them consistent, so errors and adjustments are inevitable.
Section 1 is Oversight of AGI labs is prudent.
I do tend to say that.
---
Outline:
(00:37) Section 1 is Oversight of AGI labs is prudent.
(03:41) Section 2 is Most proposed ‘AI regulations’ are ill-conceived or premature.
(06:43) Section 3 claims AI progress is accelerating, not plateauing.
(09:25) Section 4 says open source is mostly a red herring.
(13:20) Section 5 claims accelerate versus decelerate is a false dichotomy.
(17:11) Section 6 is The AI wave is inevitable, superintelligence isn’t.
(18:50) Section 7 says technological transitions cause regime changes.
(20:44) Section 8 says institutional regime changes are packaged deals.
(24:16) Section 9 says dismissing AGI risks as ‘sci-fi’ is a failure of imagination.
(27:13) Finally, Section 10 says biology is an information technology.
(28:29) Tallying Up the Points
(28:52) Conclusion
---
First published:
May 9th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2BvfGnZMx4Ei82qkk/i-got-95-theses-but-a-glitch-ain-t-one
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The first speculated on why you’re still single. We failed to settle the issue. A lot of you were indeed still single. So the debate continues.
The second gave more potential reasons, starting with the suspicion that you are not even trying, and also many ways you are likely trying wrong.
The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over again expecting different results. Another definition of insanity is dating in 2024. Can’t quit now.
You’re Single Because Dating Apps Keep Getting Worse
A guide to taking the perfect dating app photo. This area of your life is important, so if you intend to take dating apps seriously then you should take photo optimization seriously, and of course you can then also use the photos for other things.
I love the ‘possibly’ evil here.
Misha Gurevich: possibly evil idea: Dating app that [...]
---
Outline:
(00:37) You’re Single Because Dating Apps Keep Getting Worse
(05:38) You’re Single Because Dating Apps Keep Getting Worse
(07:24) You’re Single Because Everyone is Too Superficial
(09:48) You’re Single Because You Refuse to Shamefully Falsify Your Politics
(16:12) You Are Single Because You Do Not Employ Good Strategy
(18:45) You Are Single Because You Don’t Know How to Flirt
(22:43) You Are Single Because You Don’t Date Your Married Boss
(26:12) You Are Single Because You Are Afraid to Fail
(27:02) You Are Single Because No One Likes You On Dates
(29:39) You’re Single Because You Are Bad at Sex
(30:51) You’re Single Because You’re Not Hot
(31:39) You’re Single Because You Don’t Know What People Care About
(33:10) You’re Single Because You Are Inappropriate
(34:11) You’re Single Because of Your Pet
(35:23) You’re Single Because You Won’t Spend Money
(40:05) You’re Single Because You’re Not Over Your Ex
(41:27) You’re Single Because You Thought You Could Do 25% Better
(47:27) Polyamory
(53:29) You’re Single Because You Don’t Know What You Want
(01:00:43) You’re Single Because You’re Too Busy Writing Comments
(01:07:27) You’re Single and Not Getting Properly Compensated
(01:08:34) You’re Not Single and You’re an Inspiration
(01:09:49) Your Moment of Zen
---
First published:
May 8th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PLoz68JbTkDufeYSG/dating-roundup-3-third-time-s-the-charm
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The week's big news was supposed to be Meta's release of two versions of Llama-3.
Everyone was impressed. These were definitely strong models.
Investors felt differently. After earnings yesterday showed strong revenues but that Meta was investing heavily in AI, they took Meta stock down 15%.
DeepMind and Anthropic also shipped, but in their cases it was multiple papers on AI alignment and threat mitigation. They get their own sections.
We also did identify someone who wants to do what people claim the worried want to do, who is indeed reasonably identified as a ‘doomer.’
Because the universe has a sense of humor, that person's name is Tucker Carlson.
Also we have a robot dog with a flamethrower.
Table of Contents
Previous post: On Llama-3 and Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast with Zuckerberg.
---
Outline:
(00:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(08:52) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(12:09) Llama We Doing This Again
(15:57) Fun with Image Generation
(18:35) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(23:53) They Took Our Jobs
(25:10) Get Involved
(25:36) Introducing
(25:52) In Other AI News
(33:00) Quiet Speculations
(41:37) Rhetorical Innovation
(48:01) Wouldn’t You Prefer a Nice Game of Chess
(53:24) The Battle of the Board
(01:08:38) New Anthropic Papers
(01:24:29) New DeepMind Papers
(01:30:06) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:32:16) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:34:00) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:34:26) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
May 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pPwt5ir2zFayLx7tH/ai-61-meta-trouble
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
What is the mysterious impressive new ‘gpt2-chatbot’ from the Arena? Is it GPT-4.5? A refinement of GPT-4? A variation on GPT-2 somehow? A new architecture? Q-star? Someone else's model? Could be anything. It is so weird that this is how someone chose to present that model.
There was also a lot of additional talk this week about California's proposed SB 1047.
I wrote an additional post extensively breaking that bill down, explaining how it would work in practice, addressing misconceptions about it and suggesting fixes for its biggest problems along with other improvements. For those interested, I recommend reading at least the sections ‘What Do I Think The Law Would Actually Do?’ and ‘What are the Biggest Misconceptions?’
As usual, lots of other things happened as well.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(01:00) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(06:00) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(06:27) GPT-2 Soon to Tell
(11:04) Fun with Image Generation
(12:15) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(13:29) They Took Our Jobs
(14:22) Get Involved
(15:14) Introducing
(15:18) In Other AI News
(18:02) Quiet Speculations
(24:03) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(43:20) The Week in Audio
(48:32) Rhetorical Innovation
(51:31) Open Weights Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
(57:54) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(58:19) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
May 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sZpj4Xf9Ly2jyR9tK/ai-62-too-soon-to-tell
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: On the Proposed California SB 1047.
Text of the bill is here. It focuses on safety requirements for highly capable AI models.
This is written as an FAQ, tackling all questions or points I saw raised.
Safe & Secure AI Innovation Act also has a description page.
Why Are We Here Again?
There have been many highly vocal and forceful objections to SB 1047 this week, in reaction to a (disputed) claim that the bill has been ‘fast tracked.’
The bill continues to have substantial chance of becoming law according to Manifold, where the market has not moved on recent events.
The purpose of this post is to gather and analyze all of them that came to my attention in any way, including all responses to my request for them on Twitter, and to suggest concrete changes that address some real [...]
---
Outline:
(00:28) Why Are We Here Again?
(02:48) What is the Story So Far?
(05:26) What Do I Think the Law Would Actually Do?
(10:40) What are the Biggest Misconceptions?
(15:05) What are the Real Problems?
(19:42) What the the Changes That Would Improve the Bill?
(23:10) What is the Definition of Derivative Model? Is it Clear Enough?
(28:00) Should the $500 Million Threshold Should be Indexed for Inflation?
(28:23) What Constitutes Hazardous Capability?
(33:23) Does the Alternative Capabilities Rule Make Sense?
(36:02) Is Providing Reasonable Assurance of a Lack of Hazardous Capability Realistic?
(38:39) Is Reasonable Assurance Tantamount to Requiring Proof That Your AI is Safe?
(40:20) Is the Definition of Covered Model Overly Broad?
(43:50) Is the Similar Capabilities Clause Overly Broad or Anticompetitive?
(46:46) Does This Introduce Broad Liability?
(48:41) Should Developers Worry About Going to Jail for Perjury?
(49:53) Does This Create a New Regulatory Agency to Regulate AI?
(50:22) Will a Government Agency Be Required to Review and Approve AI Systems Before Release?
(50:40) Are the Burdens Here Overly Onerous to Small Developers?
(51:42) Is the Shutdown Requirement a Showstopper for Open Weights Models?
(53:39) Do the Requirements Disincentive Openness?
(54:12) Will This Have a Chilling Effect on Research?
(54:36) Does the Ability to Levy Fees Threaten Small Business?
(55:14) Will This Raise Barriers to Entry?
(55:51) Is This a Brazen Attempt to Hurt Startups and Open Source?
(57:42) Will This Cost California Talent or Companies?
(59:01) Could We Use a Cost-Benefit Test?
(01:05:19) Should We Interpret Proposals via Adversarial Legal Formalism?
(01:08:13) What Other Positive Comments Are Worth Sharing?
(01:09:04) What Else Was Suggested That We Might Do Instead of This Bill?
(01:10:57) Would This Interfere With Federal Regulation?
(01:11:34) Conclusion
---
First published:
May 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qsGRKwTRQ5jyE5fKB/q-and-a-on-proposed-sb-1047
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post brings together various questions about the college application process, as well as practical considerations of where to apply and go. We are seeing some encouraging developments, but mostly the situation remains rather terrible for all concerned.
Application Strategy and Difficulty
Paul Graham: Colleges that weren’t hard to get into when I was in HS are hard to get into now. The population has increased by 43%, but competition for elite colleges seems to have increased more. I think the reason is that there are more smart kids. If so that's fortunate for America.
Are college applications getting more competitive over time?
Yes and no.
---
Outline:
(00:19) Application Strategy and Difficulty
(01:16) Spray and Pray and Optimal Admissions Strategy
(06:37) Are Kids Getting Smarter?
(07:57) What About Considerations Changing?
(09:30) Holistic Admissions Will Eat Your Entire Childhood
(15:43) So You Want to Be Elite
(20:14) The Price of Admission
(20:56) The Art of Discrimination
(26:11) The Return of the Standardized Test
(32:58) Legacy Admissions
(34:56) Modest Proposals for Admission Reform
(41:09) The Gender Gap
(46:01) Missed Opportunities
(49:20) The Price of Attendance
(50:56) In and Out of State
(57:41) The Value of Admission
(59:18) The End of an Era
(01:05:25) The End of the World
(01:08:13) Making an Ordinary Effort
---
First published:
April 24th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PTC7bZdZoqbCcAshW/changes-in-college-admissions
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It was all quiet. Then it wasn’t.
Note the timestamps on both of these.
Dwarkesh Patel did a podcast with Mark Zuckerberg on the 18th. It was timed to coincide with the release of much of Llama-3, very much the approach of telling your story directly. Dwarkesh is now the true tech media. A meteoric rise, and well earned.
This is two related posts in one. First I cover the podcast, then I cover Llama-3 itself.
My notes are edited to incorporate context from later explorations of Llama-3, as I judged that the readability benefits exceeded the purity costs.
Podcast Notes: Llama-3 Capabilities
---
Outline:
(00:51) Podcast Notes: Llama-3 Capabilities
(03:09) The Need for Inference
(07:08) Great Expectations
(11:29) Open Source and Existential and Other Risks
(30:50) Interview Overview
(33:22) A Few Reactions
(47:53) Safety First
(54:15) Core Capability Claims
(56:11) How Good are the 8B and 70B Models in Practice?
(01:02:31) Architecture and Data
(01:05:08) Training Day
(01:09:17) What Happens Next With Meta's Products?
(01:12:24) What Happens Next With AI Thanks To These Two Models?
(01:14:04) The Bigger One: It's Coming
(01:14:59) Who Wins?
(01:17:21) Who Loses?
(01:21:49) How Unsafe Will It Be to Release Llama-3 400B?
(01:24:12) The Efficient Market Hypothesis is False
(01:27:09) What Next?
---
First published:
April 22nd, 2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Many things this week did not go as planned.
Humane AI premiered its AI pin. Reviewers noticed it was, at best, not ready.
Devin turns out to have not been entirely forthright with its demos.
OpenAI fired two employees who had been on its superalignment team, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov for allegedly leaking information, and also more troubliningly lost Daniel Kokotajlo, who expects AGI very soon, does not expect it to by default go well, and says he quit ‘due to losing confidence that [OpenAI] would behave responsibly around the time of AGI.’ That's not good.
Nor is the Gab system prompt, although that is not a surprise. And several more.
On the plus side, my 80,000 Hours podcast finally saw the light of day, and Ezra Klein had an excellent (although troubling) podcast with Dario Amodei. And we got the usual mix [...]
---
Outline:
(01:05) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(06:13) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(11:21) Oh the Humanity
(21:31) GPT-4 Real This Time
(23:12) Fun with Image Generation
(27:47) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(31:34) Devin in the Details
(35:36) Another Supposed System Prompt
(42:35) They Took Our Jobs
(45:37) Introducing
(47:42) In Other AI News
(52:47) Quiet Speculations
(01:00:29) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:00:47) The Problem: AI's Extreme Risks
(01:02:07) Overview
(01:03:16) Covered Frontier AI Models
(01:04:10) Oversight of Frontier Models
(01:06:49) Oversight Entity
(01:18:43) The Week in Audio
(01:27:51) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:32:41) Don’t Be That Guy
(01:33:47) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:42:24) Please Speak Directly Into the Microphone
(01:44:18) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:48:44) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:54:10) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
April 18th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FAnxq8wFpfqGjeetC/ai-60-oh-the-humanity
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
For this iteration I will exclude discussions involving college or college admissions.
There has been a lot of that since the last time I did one of these, along with much that I need to be careful with lest I go out of my intended scope. It makes sense to do that as its own treatment another day.
Bullying
Why do those who defend themselves against bullies so often get in more trouble than bullies? This is also true in other contexts but especially true in school. Thread is extensive, these are the highlights translated into my perspective. A lot of it is that a bully has experience and practice, they know how to work the system, they know what will cause a response, and they are picking the time and place to do something. The victim has to respond in the moment, and by responding [...]
---
Outline:
(00:22) Bullying
(02:34) Truancy
(03:56) Against Active Shooter Drills
(05:14) Censorship
(06:32) Woke Kindergarden
(09:01) Tracking
(10:43) The Case Against Education
(13:56) Home Schooling
(14:54) Despair
(17:02) Goals
(19:02) Taking the Developing World to School
(26:05) Primary School
(27:46) Guessing the Teacher's Password
(28:26) Correcting the Teacher's Incentives
(29:58) Mathematics
(31:08) Let Kids Be Kids
(32:27) Mandatory Work We Encourage
(34:03) Mandatory Work We Discourage
(35:32) Air Quality Matters
(36:18) School Choice
(39:01) Full Access to Smartphones Is Not Good For Children
(47:17) Lifetime Learning
---
First published:
April 17th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s34ingEzvajpFPaaD/childhood-and-education-roundup-5
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
As always, a lot to get to. This is everything that wasn’t in any of the other categories.
Bad News
You might have to find a way to actually enjoy the work.
Greg Brockman (President of OpenAI): Sustained great work often demands enjoying the process for its own sake rather than only feeling joy in the end result. Time is mostly spent between results, and hard to keep pushing yourself to get to the next level if you’re not having fun while doing so.
Yeah. This matches my experience in all senses. If you don’t find a way to enjoy the work, your work is not going to be great.
This is the time. This is the place.
Guiness Pig: In a discussion at work today:
“If you email someone to ask for something and they send you an email trail showing [...]
---
Outline:
(00:13) Bad News
(04:23) Patriots and Tyrants
(07:31) Asymmetric Justice Incarnate
(08:55) Loneliness
(11:50) Get Involved
(12:32) Government Working
(22:31) Crime and Punishment
(30:27) Squatters Should Not Be Able to Steal Your House
(33:17) El Salvador
(40:14) Our Criminal Justice Problem With Junk Science
(45:43) Variously Effective Altruism
(55:26) Technology Advances
(58:07) You Need More Screen Space
(01:00:02) Apple Vision Pro
(01:02:34) A Matter of Antitrust
(01:12:06) RTFB: Read the Bill
(01:13:42) Antisocial Media
(01:17:13) RIP NPR
(01:20:27) Entertainment Monthly
(01:22:17) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:27:57) Luck Be a Landlord
(01:31:04) Sports Go Sports
(01:39:10) Know When To Fold ‘Em
(01:44:26) Wouldn’t You Prefer a Good Game of Chess
(01:51:17) Total Eclipse of the Sun
(01:53:15) Delegation
(01:55:48) Good News, Everyone
(02:07:03) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(02:08:43) While I Cannot Condone This
(02:11:39) There has been little change in rates of being vegetarian (4%) or vegan (1%). Yes, the people I meet are radically more likely to be both these things, but those are weird circles. However, I also notice a radical explosion in the number of vegan restaurants and products on offer. So something is going on.
(02:15:08) What Is Best In Life?
---
First published:
April 15th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cbkJWkKWvETwJqoj2/monthly-roundup-17-april-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Claude uses tools now. Gemini 1.5 is available to everyone and Google promises more integrations. GPT-4-Turbo gets substantial upgrades. Oh and new model from Mistral, TimeGPT for time series, and also new promising song generator. No, none of that adds up to GPT-5, but everyone try to be a little patient, shall we?
Table of Contents
In addition to what is covered here, there was a piece of model legislation introduced by the Center for AI Policy. I took up the RTFB (Read the Bill) challenge, and offer extensive thoughts for those who want to dive deep.
---
Outline:
(00:31) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:11) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(06:55) Clauding Along
(10:19) Persuasive Research
(17:55) The Gemini System Prompt
(21:03) Fun with Image Generation
(21:24) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(25:02) Copyright Confrontation
(29:59) Collusion
(32:33) Out of the Box Thinking
(37:33) The Art of the Jailbreak
(38:02) They Took Our Jobs
(43:55) Get Involved
(44:23) Introducing
(47:26) In Other AI News
(53:16) GPT-4 Real This Time
(57:19) GPT-5 Alive?
(01:04:02) Quiet Speculations
(01:06:45) Antisocial Media
(01:19:57) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:33:33) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:39:35) Challenge Accepted
(01:51:06) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:51:55) Please Speak Directly Into This Microphone
(01:56:45) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:57:15) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
April 11th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQaxcitYgKjJqMdps/ai-59-model-updates
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
A New Bill Offer Has Arrived
Center for AI Policy proposes a concrete actual model bill for us to look at.
Here was their announcement:
WASHINGTON – April 9, 2024 – To ensure a future where artificial intelligence (AI) is safe for society, the Center for AI Policy (CAIP) today announced its proposal for the “Responsible Advanced Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024.” This sweeping model legislation establishes a comprehensive framework for regulating advanced AI systems, championing public safety, and fostering technological innovation with a strong sense of ethical responsibility.
“This model legislation is creating a safety net for the digital age,” said Jason Green-Lowe, Executive Director of CAIP, “to ensure that exciting advancements in AI are not overwhelmed by the risks they pose.”
The “Responsible Advanced Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024” is model legislation that contains provisions for requiring that AI be developed safely [...]
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Outline:
(05:00) RTFC: Read the Bill
(05:39) Basics and Key Definitions
(10:00) Oh the Permits You’ll Need
(21:11) Rubrics for Your Consideration
(25:55) Open Model Weights Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
(30:02) Extremely High Concern Systems
(32:43) The Judges Decide
(35:01) Several Rapid-Fire Final Sections
(39:47) Overall Take: A Forceful, Flawed and Thoughtful Model Bill
(49:20) The Usual Objectors Respond: The Severability Clause
(52:34) The Usual Objectors Respond: Inception
(54:12) The Usual Objectors Respond: Rulemaking Authority
(01:01:53) Conclusion
---
First published:
April 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SQ9wDmsELBmA4Lega/rtfb-on-the-new-proposed-caip-ai-bill
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: #1
It feels so long ago that Covid and health were my beat, and what everyone often thought about all day, rather than AI. Yet the beat goes on. With Scott Alexander at long last giving us what I expect to be effectively the semi-final words on the Rootclaim debate, it seemed time to do this again.
Bad News
I know no methodical way to find a good, let alone great, therapist.
Cate Hall: One reason it's so hard to find a good therapist is that all the elite ones market themselves as coaches.
As a commentor points out, therapists who can’t make it also market as coaches or similar, so even if Cate's claim is true then it is tough.
My actual impression is that the elite therapists largely do not market themselves at all. They instead work on referrals and [...]
---
Outline:
(00:24) Bad News
(01:27) Good News, Everyone
(03:35) The Battle of the Bulge
(09:13) Support Anti-Aging Research
(09:37) Variably Effective Altruism
(09:51) Periodic Reminders (You Should Know This Already)
(12:05) FDA Delenda Est
(13:03) Other Enemies of Life
(14:04) Covid Postmortems
(14:55) Everything sounds like a sales pitch
(17:07) Information that would have been helpful was never provided
(17:49) A disconnect between what I experienced on the ground and the narrative I was hearing
(21:52) Covid-19 Origins
(24:29) Assisted Suicide Watch
(27:58) Talking Price
---
First published:
April 9th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wfz47Ez2r4rQZuYBY/medical-roundup-2
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It was clear within the first ten minutes this would be a rich thread to draw from. In my childhood and education roundups, and of course with my own kids, I have been dealing with the issues Haidt talks about in his new book, The Anxious Generation. Ideally I’d also have read the book, but perfect as enemy of the good and all that.
I will start with my analysis of the podcast, in my now-standard format. Then I will include other related content I was going to put into my next childhood roundup.
---
Outline:
(42:46) Ban Phones in Schools
(54:33) Let Kids be Kids
---
First published:
April 5th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hciEN9DGsS8CEuox/on-the-2nd-cwt-with-jonathan-haidt
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Another round? Of economists projecting absurdly small impacts, of Google publishing highly valuable research, a cycle of rhetoric, more jailbreaks, and so on. Another great podcast from Dwarkesh Patel, this time going more technical. Another proposed project with a name that reveals quite a lot. A few genuinely new things, as well. On the new offerings front, DALLE-3 now allows image editing, so that's pretty cool.
Table of Contents
Don’t miss out on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken, which got the full write-up treatment.
---
Outline:
(00:36) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(08:12) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(19:49) Clauding Along
(20:23) Fun with Image Generation
(21:22) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(26:51) They Took Our Jobs
(31:27) The Art of the Jailbreak
(34:53) Many-shot jailbreaking
(42:37) Cybersecurity
(45:02) Get Involved
(45:17) Introducing
(47:03) In Other AI News
(53:17) Stargate AGI
(56:13) Larry Summers Watch
(01:05:21) Quiet Speculations
(01:14:10) AI Doomer Dark Money Astroturf Update
(01:22:08) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:27:03) The Week in Audio
(01:27:29) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:35:09) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:48:55) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:52:20) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
April 4th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qQmWvm68GsXJtK4EQ/ai-58-stargate-agi
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previous Fertility Roundups: #1, #2.
The pace seems to be doing this about twice a year. The actual situation changes slowly, so presumably the pace of interesting new things should slow down over time from here.
Demographics
This time around, a visualization. Where will the next 1,000 babies be born?
Population Trends
Scott Lincicome notes American population now expected to peak in 2080 at 369 million.
South Korea now down to 0.7 births per woman. The story of South Korea is told as a resounding success, of a country that made itself rich and prosperous. But what does it profit us, if we become nominally rich and prosperous, but with conditions so hostile that we cannot or will not bring children into them? If the rule you followed led you here, of what use was the rule? Why should others follow it?
---
Outline:
(00:20) Demographics
(00:32) Population Trends
(04:31) Causes
(10:50) Causes: South Korea
(18:56) Causes: South Korea: Status Competition
(27:06) More Dakka
(33:38) Less But Nonzero Dakka
(35:31) Preferences
(37:11) Surrogacy
(38:47) Technology
(40:58) Insular High Fertility Cultures
(44:44) In Brief
(45:19) Cultural Trends
---
First published:
April 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5k5FeFDCqXfLMj5SJ/fertility-roundup-3
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Dwarkesh Patel continues to be on fire, and the podcast notes format seems like a success, so we are back once again.
This time the topic is how LLMs are trained, work and will work in the future. Timestamps are for YouTube. Where I inject my own opinions or takes, I do my best to make that explicit and clear.
This was highly technical compared to the average podcast I listen to, or that Dwarkesh does. This podcast definitely threated to technically go over my head at times, and some details definitely did go over my head outright. I still learned a ton, and expect you will too if you pay attention.
This is an attempt to distill what I found valuable, and what questions I found most interesting. I did my best to make it intuitive to follow even if you are not technical, but [...]
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First published:
April 1st, 2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Welcome, new readers!
This is my weekly AI post, where I cover everything that is happening in the world of AI, from what it can do for you today (‘mundane utility’) to what it can promise to do for us tomorrow, and the potentially existential dangers future AI might pose for humanity, along with covering the discourse on what we should do about all of that.
You can of course Read the Whole Thing, and I encourage that if you have the time and interest, but these posts are long, so they also designed to also let you pick the sections that you find most interesting. Each week, I pick the sections I feel are the most important, and put them in bold in the table of contents.
Not everything here is about AI. I did an economics roundup on Tuesday, and a general monthly roundup [...]
---
Outline:
(01:16) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(06:58) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(08:37) Stranger Things
(09:09) Clauding Along
(16:30) Fun with Image Generation
(19:01) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(21:29) They Took Our Jobs
(24:19) Introducing
(26:27) In Other AI News
(28:59) Loud Speculations
(31:10) Quiet Speculations
(36:04) Principles of Microeconomics
(44:54) The Full IDAIS Statement
(45:37) Consensus Statement on Red Lines in Artificial Intelligence
(47:54) Roadmap to Red Line Enforcement
(50:19) Conclusion
(50:49) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(56:38) The Week in Audio
(57:29) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:13:41) How Not to Regulate AI
(01:25:48) The Three Body Problem (Spoiler-Free)
(01:27:11) AI Doomer Dark Money Astroturf Update
(01:36:35) Evaluating a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:50:15) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:53:32) AI is Deeply Unpopular
(01:53:47) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:55:43) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:57:31) Wouldn’t You Prefer a Good Game of Chess?
(02:00:03) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
March 28th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5Dz3ZrwBzzMfaucrH/ai-57-all-the-ai-news-that-s-fit-to-print
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I call the section ‘Money Stuff’ but as a column name that is rather taken. There has been lots to write about on this front that didn’t fall neatly into other categories. It clearly benefited a lot from being better organized into subsections, and the monthly roundups could benefit from being shorter, so this will probably become a regular thing.
They Took Our Jobs
Quite the opposite, actually. Jobs situation remains excellent.
Whatever else you think of the economy, layoffs are still at very low levels, the last three years are the lowest levels on record, do note that the bottom of this chart is 15,000 rather than zero even without adjusting for population size.
Ford says it is reexamining where to make cars after the UAW strikes. The union responded by saying, essentially, ‘f*** you, pay me’:
“Maybe Ford doesn’t need to move [...]
---
Outline:
(00:24) They Took Our Jobs
(01:34) Company Formations Seem Permanently Higher
(02:06) Whoops
(03:29) Vibecession Via Healthcare Spending
(05:20) Vibecession Look at All the Nice Things and Good Numbers
(08:24) Vibecession via Inappropriate Price Index
(13:15) Vibecession Anyway
(15:04) Vibecenssion via Interest Rates
(16:37) Prediction Markets
(17:46) The Efficient Market Hypothesis is False
(18:09) Failed Markets in Everything
(23:08) Failed Markets in Transparency
(25:43) Unprofitable Markets in Air Travel
(27:49) Unprofitable Markets in Ground Transportation
(32:10) Detroit, Georgianism
(33:29) California Approaches the Tax Tipping Point
(34:00) Taxing On the Margin
(35:39) Occupational License as Security Bond
(38:14) The Work From Home Debate
(38:50) Patrick McKenzie Explains it All
(41:15) In Brief
---
First published:
March 26th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hCNt7dc7QXuKB2gsR/economics-roundup-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Last week Sam Altman spent two hours with Lex Fridman (transcript). Given how important it is to understand where Altman's head is at and learn what he knows, this seemed like another clear case where extensive notes were in order.
Lex Fridman overperformed, asking harder questions than I expected and going deeper than I expected, and succeeded in getting Altman to give a lot of what I believe were genuine answers. The task is ‘get the best interviews you can while still getting interviews’ and this could be close to the production possibilities frontier given Lex's skill set.
There was not one big thing that stands out given what we already have heard from Altman before. It was more the sum of little things, the opportunity to get a sense of Altman and where his head is at, or at least where he is presenting it as [...]
---
First published:
March 25th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AaS6YRAGBFrxt6ZMj/on-lex-fridman-s-second-podcast-with-altman
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Hopefully, anyway. Nvidia has a new chip.
Also Altman has a new interview.
And most of Inflection has new offices inside Microsoft.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:18) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(10:28) Clauding Along
(12:45) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(16:11) Fun with Image Generation
(21:00) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(24:20) They Took Our Jobs
(37:17) Generative AI in Games
(40:20) Get Involved
(41:38) Introducing
(51:03) Grok the Grok
(54:43) New Nvidia Chip
(56:40) Inflection Becomes Microsoft AI
(58:11) In Other AI News
(01:04:18) Wait Till Next Year
(01:11:57) Quiet Speculations
(01:20:03) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:25:20) The Week in Audio
(01:26:03) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:31:11) Read the Roon
(01:34:01) Pick Up the Phone
(01:36:17) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:45:14) Polls Show People Are Worried About AI
(01:52:29) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:54:57) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(02:04:57) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
March 21st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iH5Sejb4dJGA2oTaP/ai-56-blackwell-that-ends-well
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Like the the government-commissioned Gladstone Report on AI itself, there are two sections here.
First I cover the Gladstone Report's claims and arguments about the state of play, including what they learned talking to people inside the labs. I mostly agree with their picture and conclusions, both in terms of arguments and reported findings, however I already mostly agreed. If these arguments and this information is new to someone, and the form of a government-backed report helps them process it and take it seriously, this is good work. However, in terms of convincing an already informed skeptic, I believe this is a failure. They did not present their findings in a way that should be found convincing to the otherwise unconvinced.
Second I cover the Gladstone Report's recommended courses of action. It is commendable that the report lays out a concrete, specific and highly detailed proposal. A [...]
---
Outline:
(01:13) Executive Summary of Their Findings: Oh No
(07:13) Gladstone Makes Its Case
(14:42) Why Is Self-Regulation Insufficient?
(17:26) What About Competitiveness?
(21:12) How Dare You Solve Any Problem That Isn’t This One?
(22:44) What Makes You Think We Need To Worry About This?
(23:57) What Arguments are Missing?
(27:45) Tonight at 11: Doom!
(30:51) The Claim That Frontier Labs Lack Countermeasures For Loss of Control
(35:42) The Future Threat
(38:45) That All Sounds Bad, What Should We Do?
(45:11) The Key Proposal: Extreme Compute Limits
(51:15) Implementation Details of Computer Tiers
(56:16) The Quest for Sane International Regulation
(01:04:16) The Other Proposals
(01:11:24) Conclusions, Both Theirs and Mine
(01:15:40) What Can We Do About All This?
---
First published:
March 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ApZJy3NKfW5CkftQq/on-the-gladstone-report
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
AI developments have picked up the pace. That does not mean that everything else stopped to get out of the way. The world continues.
Do I have the power?
Emmett Shear speaking truth: Wielding power is of course potentially dangerous and it should be done with due care, but there is no virtue in refusing the call.
There is also an art to avoiding power, and some key places to exercise it. Be keenly aware of when having power in a given context would ruin everything.
Natural General Lack of Intelligence in Tech
Eliezer Yudkowsky reverses course, admits aliens are among us and we have proof.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: To understand the user interfaces on microwave ovens, you need to understand that microwave UI designers are aliens. As in, literal nonhuman aliens who infiltrated Earth, who believe that humans desperately want to hear piercingly [...]
---
Outline:
(00:40) Natural General Lack of Intelligence in Tech
(04:47) Bad International News
(05:20) Dopamine Culture
(07:56) Customer Service
(08:53) Environmentalists Sabotaging the Environment
(09:11) Government Working
(17:41) On the Media
(20:13) Crime and Punishment
(27:40) Good News, Everyone
(33:27) The Time That is Given to Us
(39:56) Hotel Six Hundred
(41:10) While I Cannot Condone This
(48:00) Societal Tendencies
(49:56) Such Sufferin
(54:23) The Good and Bad of Academia
(56:31) Think of the Children
(01:01:38) Was Democracy a Mistake?
(01:04:30) The Philosophy of Fantasy
(01:07:26) Sports Go Sports
(01:19:51) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(01:37:50) The Virtue of Silence
(01:38:02) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
March 19th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iCvdqrkWg34FNFZYg/monthly-roundup-16-march-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Introducing Devin
Is the era of AI agents writing complex code systems without humans in the loop upon us?
Cognition is calling Devin ‘the first AI software engineer.’
Here is a two minute demo of Devin benchmarking LLM performance.
Devin has its own web browser, which it uses to pull up documentation.
Devin has its own code editor.
Devin has its own command line.
Devin uses debugging print statements and uses the log to fix bugs.
Devin builds and deploys entire stylized websites without even being directly asked.
What could possibly go wrong? Install this on your computer today.
Padme.
The Real Deal
I would by default assume all demos were supremely cherry-picked. My only disagreement with Austen Allred's statement here is that this rule is not new:
Austen Allred: New rule:
If someone only [...]
---
Outline:
(00:02) Introducing Devin
(00:48) The Real Deal
(03:27) The Metric
(04:48) What Could Possibly Go Subtly Wrong?
(07:29) What Could Possibly Go Massively Wrong for You?
(09:36) If This is What Skepticism Looks Like
(12:33) What Happens If You Fully Automate Software Engineering
(16:24) What Could Possibly Go Massively Wrong for Everyone?
(18:24) Conclusion: Whistling Past
---
First published:
March 18th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wovJBkfZ8rTyLoEKv/on-devin
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Things were busy once again, partly from the Claude release but from many other sides as well. So even after cutting out both the AI coding agent Devin and the Gladstone Report along with previously covering OpenAI's board expansion and investigative report, this is still one of the longest weekly posts.
In addition to Claude and Devin, we got among other things Command-R, Inflection 2.5, OpenAI's humanoid robot partnership reporting back after only 13 days and Google DeepMind with an embodied cross-domain video game agent. You can definitely feel the acceleration.
The backlog expands. Once again, I say to myself, I will have to up my reporting thresholds and make some cuts. Wish me luck.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:52) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(06:17) Claude 3 Offers Mundane Utility
(11:57) Prompt Attention
(17:28) Clauding Along
(27:19) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(31:33) GPT-4 Real This Time
(32:22) Copyright Confrontation
(33:34) Fun with Image Generation
(37:49) They Took Our Jobs
(40:38) Get Involved
(43:53) Introducing
(51:55) Inflection 2.5
(55:04) Paul Christiano Joins NIST
(01:01:38) In Other AI News
(01:07:40) Quiet Speculations
(01:23:06) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:31:34) The Week in Audio
(01:31:44) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:41:23) A Failed Attempt at Adversarial Collaboration
(01:48:37) Spy Versus Spy
(01:52:38) Shouting Into the Void
(01:54:55) Open Model Weights are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:56:37) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:59:49) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(02:00:39) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(02:07:39) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
March 14th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N3tXkA9Jj6oCB2eiJ/ai-55-keep-clauding-along
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
TikTok Might Get Banned Soon
This attempt is getting reasonably far rather quickly, passing the House with broad support.
Alec Stapp: TikTok bill to remove influence of CCP:
– passed unanimously out of committee
– GOP leadership says they’ll bring it to the floor for a vote next week
– Biden says he’ll sign the bill if passed
Can’t believe it's taken this long, but should be done soon.
It's been obvious for years that we shouldn’t let China control a black-box algorithm that influences >100 million American users.
JSM: Can this stand up to court scrutiny though?
Alec Stapp: Yes.
It then passed the house 352-65, despite opposition from Donald Trump.
Manifold is as of now around 72% that a bill will pass, similar to Metaculus. Consensus is that it is unlikely that ByteDance will divest. They [...]
---
Outline:
(00:03) TikTok Might Get Banned Soon
(02:48) Execution is Everything
(10:33) RTFB: Read The Bill
(19:57) How Popular is a TikTok Ban?
(20:15) Reciprocity is the Key to Every Relationship
(23:14) Call Your Congressman
(28:25) TikTok Data Sharing
(34:41) TikTok Promoting Chinese Interests
(45:41) Tyler Cowen Opposes the Bill
(48:23) Trump Opposes the Bill
(53:40) To Be Clear You Can Absolutely Go Too Far
(54:09) Conclusion
---
First published:
March 13th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cjrDNwoWwuTfc3Hbu/on-the-latest-tiktok-bill
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It is largely over.
The investigation into events has concluded, finding no wrongdoing anywhere.
The board has added four new board members, including Sam Altman. There will still be further additions.
Sam Altman now appears firmly back in control of OpenAI.
None of the new board members have been previously mentioned on this blog, or known to me at all.
They are mysteries with respect to AI. As far as I can tell, all three lack technical understanding of AI and have no known prior opinions or engagement on topics of AI, AGI and AI safety of any kind including existential risk.
Microsoft and investors indeed so far have came away without a seat. They also, however, lack known strong bonds to Altman, so this is not obviously a board fully under his control if there were to be another crisis. They now [...]
---
Outline:
(02:34) The New Board
(11:27) The Investigation Probably Was Not Real
(19:09) The New York Times Leak and Gwern's Analysis of It
(30:29) What Do We Now Think Happened?
(36:51) Altman's Statement
(39:26) Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley's Statement
(40:44) The Case Against Altman
(47:48) The Case For Altman and What We Will Learn Next
---
First published:
March 12th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/e5kLSeLJ8T5ddpe2X/openai-the-board-expands
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The big news this week was of course the release of Claude 3.0 Opus, likely in some ways the best available model right now. Anthropic now has a highly impressive model, impressive enough that it seems as if it breaks at least the spirit of their past commitments on how far they will push the frontier. We will learn more about its ultimate full capabilities over time.
We also got quite the conversation about big questions of one's role in events, which I immortalized as Read the Roon. Since publication Roon has responded, which I have edited into the post along with some additional notes.
That still leaves plenty of fun for the full roundup. We have spies. We have accusations of covert racism. We have Elon Musk suing OpenAI. We have a new summary of simulator theory. We have NIST, tasked with AI regulation, literally struggling [...]
---
Outline:
(01:03) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(09:25) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(11:52) LLMs: How Do They Work?
(15:50) Copyright Confrontation
(17:34) Oh Elon
(18:47) We realized building AGI will require far more resources than we’d initially imagined
(19:59) We and Elon recognized a for-profit entity would be necessary to acquire those resources
(21:49) We advance our mission by building widely-available beneficial tools
(24:46) DNA Is All You Need
(27:21) GPT-4 Real This Time
(30:11) Fun with Image Generation
(33:16) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(34:16) They Took Our Jobs
(35:20) Get Involved
(36:41) Introducing
(37:19) In Other AI News
(44:48) More on Self-Awareness
(47:05) Racism Remains a Problem for LLMs
(50:33) Project Maven
(53:35) Quiet Speculations
(01:00:01) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:07:19) The Week in Audio
(01:09:21) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:18:46) Another Open Letter
(01:22:33) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:26:34) Security is Also Difficult, Although Perhaps Not This Difficult
(01:34:04) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
March 7th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nvi94KJSDGZMjknZS/ai-54-clauding-along
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Claude 3.0
Claude 3.0 is here. It is too early to know for certain how capable it is, but Claude 3.0's largest version is in a similar class to GPT-4 and Gemini Advanced. It could plausibly now be the best model for many practical uses, with praise especially coming in on coding and creative writing.
Anthropic has decided to name its three different size models Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, with Opus only available if you pay. Can we just use Large, Medium and Small?
Cost varies quite a lot by size, note this is a log scale on the x-axis, whereas the y-axis isn’t labeled.
This post goes over the benchmarks, statistics and system card, along with everything else people have been reacting to. That includes a discussion about signs of self-awareness (yes, we are doing this again) and also raising the question of whether [...]
---
Outline:
(00:03) Claude 3.0
(01:10) Benchmarks and Stats
(06:01) The System Card
(13:06) The System Prompt
(17:42) Reactions on How Good Claude 3 is in Practice
(26:19) It Can’t Help But Notice
(31:47) Acts of Potential Self Awareness Awareness
(39:33) We Can’t Help But Notice
(55:34) What Happens Next?
---
First published:
March 6th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DwexbFdPJ5p9Er8wA/on-claude-3-0
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Roon, member of OpenAI's technical staff, is one of the few candidates for a Worthy Opponent when discussing questions of AI capabilities development, AI existential risk and what we should do about it. Roon is alive. Roon is thinking. Roon clearly values good things over bad things. Roon is engaging with the actual questions, rather than denying or hiding from them, and unafraid to call all sorts of idiots idiots. As his profile once said, he believes spice must flow, we just do go ahead, and makes a mixture of arguments for that, some good, some bad and many absurd. Also, his account is fun as hell.
Thus, when he comes out as strongly as he seemed to do recently, attention is paid, and we got to have a relatively good discussion of key questions. While I attempt to contribute here, this post is largely aimed at preserving [...]
---
Outline:
(04:13) The Doubling Down
(06:03) Connor Leahy Gives it a Shot
(11:02) Roon Responds to Connor
(14:27) Connor Goes Deep
(30:57) A Question of Agency
---
First published:
March 5th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jPZXx3iMaiJjdnMbv/read-the-roon
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Legalize housing. It is both a good slogan and also a good idea.
The struggle is real, ongoing and ever-present. Do not sleep on it. The Housing Theory of Everything applies broadly, even to the issue of AI. If we built enough housing that life vastly improved and people could envision a positive future, they would be far more inclined to think well about AI.
In Brief
What will AI do to housing? If we consider what the author here calls a ‘reasonably optimistic’ scenario and what I’d call a ‘maximally disappointingly useless’ scenario, all AI does is replace some amount of some forms of labor. Given current AI capabilities, it won’t replace construction, so some other sectors get cheaper, making housing relatively more expensive. Housing costs rise, the crisis gets more acute.
Chris Arnade says we live in a high-regulation low-trust society in America [...]
---
Outline:
(00:28) In Brief
(04:01) Legalize Housing
(13:46) Regulatory Barriers
(16:08) Future Construction Expectations
(18:55) Rents
(20:20) Different Designs
(23:51) Landmarks
(24:40) History
(26:15) Public Opinion
(27:16) NIMBY Sightings
(30:34) Houses as Savings
(32:37) Union Dues
(37:20) Landlords
(37:41) Construction
(38:08) Rent
(38:27) Who are You?
(40:06) Good Money After Bad
(40:21) Commercial Real Estate
(42:12) San Francisco
(48:25) New York City
(51:45) Austin
(54:31) Kentucky House Bill 102
(59:25) Tokyo
(01:00:08) Vancouver
(01:01:26) Minneapolis
(01:02:50) Texas
(01:03:41) Florida
(01:06:37) Cities Build Housing, Rents Decline
(01:09:57) Los Angeles
(01:12:26) Argentina
(01:13:05) Other Places Do Things
(01:13:12) Rent Control
(01:17:27) Traffic and Transit
(01:25:47) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
March 4th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m8ahbiumz8C9mnGnp/housing-roundup-7
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Demis Hassabis was interviewed twice this past week.
First, he was interviewed on Hard Fork. Then he had a much more interesting interview with Dwarkesh Patel.
This post covers my notes from both interviews, mostly the one with Dwarkesh.
Hard Fork
Hard Fork was less fruitful, because they mostly asked what for me are the wrong questions and mostly get answers I presume Demis has given many times. So I only noticed two things, neither of which is ultimately surprising.
---
Outline:
(00:25) Hard Fork
(02:21) Dwarkesh Patel
---
First published:
March 1st, 2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The main event continues to be the fallout from The Gemini Incident. Everyone is focusing there now, and few are liking what they see.
That does not mean other things stop. There were two interviews with Demis Hassabis, with Dwarkesh Patel's being predictably excellent. We got introduced to another set of potentially highly useful AI products. Mistral partnered up with Microsoft the moment Mistral got France to pressure the EU to agree to cripple the regulations that Microsoft wanted crippled. You know. The usual stuff.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:39) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:00) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(06:15) OpenAI Has a Sales Pitch
(10:16) The Gemini Incident
(19:19) Political Preference Tests for LLMs
(22:13) GPT-4 Real This Time
(23:13) Fun with Image Generation
(23:57) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(33:00) They Took Our Jobs
(36:34) Get Involved
(36:46) Introducing
(40:08) In Other AI News
(41:46) Quiet Speculations
(45:13) Mistral Shows Its True Colors
(51:13) The Week in Audio
(51:47) Rhetorical Innovation
(54:43) Open Model Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:02:54) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:05:03) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:06:36) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 29th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FcaqbuYbPdesdkWiH/ai-53-one-more-leap
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: The Gemini Incident (originally titled Gemini Has a Problem)
The fallout from The Gemini Incident continues.
Also the incident continues. The image model is gone. People then focused on the text model. The text model had its own related problems, some now patched and some not.
People are not happy. Those people smell blood. It is a moment of clarity.
Microsoft even got in on the act, as we rediscover how to summon Sydney.
There is a lot more to discuss.
The Ultimate New York Times Reaction
First off, I want to give a shout out to The New York Times here, because wow, chef's kiss. So New York Times. Much pitchbot.
Dominic Cummings: true art from NYT, AI can’t do this yet
This should be in the dictionary as the new definition of Chutzpah.
Do [...]
---
Outline:
(00:39) The Ultimate New York Times Reaction
(02:30) The Ultimate Grimes Reaction
(04:32) Three Positive Reactions
(06:24) The AI Ethicist Reacts
(11:33) Google Reacts on Images
(12:17) What happened
(13:51) Next steps and lessons learned
(16:18) The Market Reacts a Little
(18:14) Guess Who's Back
(21:47) Everyone Has Some Issues
(22:19) Clarifying Refusals
(24:19) Refusals Aplenty
(31:44) Unequal Treatment
(32:51) Gotcha Questions
(34:01) No Definitive Answer
(41:27) Wrong on the Internet
(44:00) Everyone Has a Plan Until They’re Punched in the Face
(44:49) What Should We Learn from The Gemini Incident outside of AI?
(51:29) What Should We Learn about AI from The Gemini Incident?
(58:08) This Is Not a Coincidence Because Nothing is Ever a Coincidence
(01:02:09) AI Ethics is (Often) Not About Ethics or Safety
(01:07:00) Make an Ordinary Effort
(01:15:02) Fix It, Felix
(01:18:28) The Deception Problem Gets Worse
(01:22:41) Where Do We Go From Here?
---
First published:
February 27th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oJp2BExZAKxTThuuF/the-gemini-incident-continues
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We were treated to technical marvels this week.
At Google, they announced Gemini Pro 1.5, with a million token context window within which it has excellent recall, using mixture of experts to get Gemini Advanced level performance (e.g. GPT-4 level) out of Gemini Pro levels of compute. This is a big deal, and I think people are sleeping on it. Also they released new small open weights models that look to be state of the art.
At OpenAI, they announced Sora, a new text-to-video model that is a large leap from the previous state of the art. I continue to be a skeptic on the mundane utility of video models relative to other AI use cases, and think they still have a long way to go, but this was both technically impressive and super cool.
Also, in both places, mistakes were made.
At OpenAI, ChatGPT [...]
---
Outline:
(01:48) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:08) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(10:17) Call Me Gemma Now
(11:35) Google Offerings Keep Coming and Changing Names
(13:08) GPT-4 Goes Crazy
(20:00) GPT-4 Real This Time
(22:11) Fun with Image Generation
(22:27) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(28:44) Selling Your Chatbot Data
(30:11) Selling Your Training Data
(32:18) They Took Our Jobs
(32:41) Get Involved
(32:55) Introducing
(35:13) In Other AI News
(36:16) Quiet Speculations
(40:27) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(43:43) The Week in Audio
(43:54) The Original Butlerian Jihad
(45:22) Rhetorical Innovation
(46:05) Public Service Announcement
(49:16) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(50:14) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(52:57) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WmxS7dbHuxzxFei64/ai-52-oops
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Google's Gemini 1.5 is impressive and I am excited by its huge context window. I continue to default to Gemini Advanced as my default AI for everyday use when the large context window is not relevant.
However, while it does not much interfere with what I want to use Gemini for, there is a big problem with Gemini Advanced that has come to everyone's attention.
Gemini comes with an image generator. Until today it would, upon request, create pictures of humans.
On Tuesday evening, some people noticed, or decided to more loudly mention, that the humans it created might not be rather different than humans you requested…
Joscha Bach: 17th Century was wild.
[prompt was] ‘please draw a portrait of a famous physicist of the 17th century.’
Kirby: i got similar results. when I went further and had it tell me who the [...]
---
Outline:
(03:06) The Internet Reacts
(07:10) How Did This Happen?
(13:52) Google's Response
(17:39) Five Good Reasons This Matters
(18:00) Reason 1: Prohibition Doesn’t Work and Enables Bad Actors
(19:06) Reason 2: A Frontier Model Was Released While Obviously Misaligned
(21:53) Reason 3: Potentially Inevitable Conflation of Different Risks From AI
(23:55) Reason 4: Bias and False Refusals Are Not Limited to Image Generation
(26:54) Reason 5: This is Effectively Kind of a Deceptive Sleeper Agent
---
First published:
February 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kLTyeG7R8eYpFwe3H/gemini-has-a-problem
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Hours after Google announced Gemini 1.5, OpenAI announced their new video generation model Sora. Its outputs look damn impressive.
How Sora Works
How does it work? There is a technical report. Mostly it seems like OpenAI did standard OpenAI things, meaning they fed in tons of data, used lots of compute, and pressed the scaling button super hard. The innovations they are willing to talk about seem to be things like ‘do not crop the videos into a standard size.’
That does not mean there are not important other innovations. I presume that there are. They simply are not talking about the other improvements.
We should not underestimate the value of throwing in massively more compute and getting a lot of the fiddly details right. That has been the formula for some time now.
Some people think that OpenAI was using a game engine [...]
---
Outline:
(00:12) How Sora Works
(02:07) Sora Is Technically Impressive
(06:42) Sora What's it Good For?
(09:43) Until we can say exactly what we want, and get it, mostly I expect no dice. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad.
(15:19) Sora Comes Next?
---
First published:
February 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/35fZ6csrbcrKw9BwG/sora-what
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: I hit send on The Third Gemini, and within half an hour DeepMind announced Gemini 1.5.
So this covers Gemini 1.5. One million tokens, and we are promised overall Gemini Advanced or GPT-4 levels of performance on Gemini Pro levels of compute.
This post does not cover the issues with Gemini's image generation, and what it is and is not willing to generate. I am on top of that situation and will get to it soon.
One Million Tokens
Our teams continue pushing the frontiers of our latest models with safety at the core. They are making rapid progress. In fact, we’re ready to introduce the next generation: Gemini 1.5. It shows dramatic improvements across a number of dimensions and 1.5 Pro achieves comparable quality to 1.0 Ultra, while using less compute.
It is truly bizarre to launch Gemini Advanced as a paid [...]
---
Outline:
(00:32) One Million Tokens
(04:29) Mixture of Experts
(07:39) Quality Not Quantity
(11:52) What To Do With It?
---
First published:
February 22nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2Y664LX6pQ8rFiz2/the-one-and-a-half-gemini
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
While I sort through whatever is happening with GPT-4, today's scheduled post is two recent short stories about restaurant selection.
Ye Olde Restaurante
Tyler Cowen says that restaurants saying ‘since year 19xx’ are on net a bad sign, because they are frozen in time, focusing on being reliable.
For the best meals, he says look elsewhere, to places that shine brightly and then move on.
I was highly suspicious. So I ran a test.
I checked the oldest places in Manhattan. The list had 15 restaurants. A bunch are taverns, which are not relevant to my interests. The rest include the legendary Katz's Delicatessen, which is still on the short list of very best available experiences (yes, of course you order the Pastrami), and the famous Keen's Steakhouse. I don’t care for mutton, but their regular steaks are quite good. There's also Peter Lugar's [...]
---
Outline:
(00:12) Ye Olde Restaurante
(04:41) Ye Newfangled Restaurante
---
First published:
February 21st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hm38rqATujCDbLFrh/a-tale-of-two-restaurant-types
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
[Editor's note: I forgot to post this to WorldPress on Thursday. I’m posting it here now. Sorry about that.]
Sam Altman is not playing around.
He wants to build new chip factories in the decidedly unsafe and unfriendly UAE. He wants to build up the world's supply of energy so we can run those chips.
What does he say these projects will cost?
Oh, up to seven trillion dollars. Not a typo.
Even scaling back the misunderstandings, this is what ambition looks like.
It is not what safety looks like. It is not what OpenAI's non-profit mission looks like. It is not what it looks like to have concerns about a hardware overhang, and use that as a reason why one must build AGI soon before someone else does. The entire justification for OpenAI's strategy is invalidated by this move.
I have [...]
---
Outline:
(01:02) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(01:57) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(03:22) GPT-4 Real This Time
(05:49) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(12:38) They Took Our Jobs
(15:33) Get Involved
(15:50) Introducing
(17:13) Altman's Ambition
(22:34) Yoto
(26:32) In Other AI News
(35:04) Quiet Speculations
(41:55) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(43:32) Washington DC Still Does Not Get It
(46:16) Many People are Saying
(48:48) China Watch
(49:38) Roon Watch
(50:48) How to Get Ahead in Advertising
(52:35) The Week in Audio
(56:45) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:01:18) Please Speak Directly Into This Microphone
(01:03:13) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:03:39) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:06:02) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBHNw5Ymnqw8FiMjh/ai-51-altman-s-ambition
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
[Editor's Note: I forgot to cross-post this on Thursday, sorry about that. Note that this post does not cover Gemini 1.5, which was announced after I posted this. I will cover 1.5 later this week.]
We have now had a little over a week with Gemini Advanced, based on Gemini Ultra. A few reviews are in. Not that many, though, compared to what I would have expected, or what I feel the situation calls for. This is yet another case of there being an obvious thing lots of people should do, and almost no one doing it. Should we use Gemini Advanced versus ChatGPT? Which tasks are better for one versus the other?
I have compiled what takes I did see. Overall people are clearly less high on Gemini Advanced than I am, seeing it as still slightly to modestly behind ChatGPT overall. Despite that, I have [...]
---
Outline:
(01:10) Impressions of Others
(14:28) Pros and Cons
---
First published:
February 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vdSE99ssADJEXP567/the-third-gemini
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Another month. More things. Much roundup.
Bad News
Jesse Smith writes in Asterisk that our HVAC workforce is both deeply incompetent and deeply corrupt. This certainly matches my own experience. Calculations are almost always flubbed when they are done at all, outright fraudulent paperwork is standard, no one has the necessary skills.
It certainly seems like the Biden Administration is doing its best to hurt Elon Musk? Claim here is that they cancelled a Starlink contract without justification, in order to award the contract to someone else for more than three times the price. This was on Twitter, but none of the replies seemed to offer a plausible justification.
Claim that Twitter traffic is increasingly fake, and secondary claim that this is because Musk fired those responsible for preventing it. Even if it is true that Twitter traffic is 75% fake, that does not mean [...]
---
Outline:
(00:11) Bad News
(06:48) More on the Apple Vision Pro
(08:19) For Science
(10:45) Climate
(11:11) Variously Effective Altruism
(15:10) The Plan
(17:07) Agency, Cate Hall and Finkel's Law
(21:46) Loop de Loop
(24:46) Government Working
(31:16) California Scrolling
(33:49) Crime and Punishment
(36:45) Good News, Everyone
(47:03) A Difference of Opinion
(51:19) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 20th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zHTRivdJ7ZDSctwqi/monthly-roundup-15-february-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: On the Apple Vision Pro
The reviews are coming in. What say the people, other than the complaining about the two to three hour battery life?
Then later I’ll get to my own thoughts after the demo.
Reviews and Reactions
Ben Thompson reviews the Apple Vision Pro. He continues to find it a technical marvel, but is ultimately disappointed for uses other than entertainment. There is no support for multiple users beyond a highly unwieldy guest mode. There is insufficient width of coverage and inability to support multiple large screens, which is severely limiting to productivity. The eye tracking is a huge improvement over earlier attempts but not ready for such applications.
Ben anticipates that Apple will fail over time to evolve the product to support the things that would enable it to be a killer productivity app, which is what he was [...]
---
Outline:
(00:18) Reviews and Reactions
(06:45) My Own Thoughts After a Demo
(12:37) To Buy or Not to Buy?
---
First published:
February 13th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbneNh2NJpQCgfxQA/more-on-the-apple-vision-pro
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
California Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco introduces SB 1047 to regulate AI. I have put up a market on how likely it is to become law.
“If Congress at some point is able to pass a strong pro-innovation, pro-safety AI law, I’ll be the first to cheer that, but I’m not holding my breath,” Wiener said in an interview. “We need to get ahead of this so we maintain public trust in AI.”
Congress is certainly highly dysfunctional. I am still generally against California trying to act like it is the federal government, even when the cause is good, but I understand.
Can California effectively impose its will here?
On the biggest players, for now, presumably yes.
In the longer run, when things get actively dangerous, then my presumption is no.
There is a potential trap here. If we put our rules [...]
---
Outline:
(02:48) Close Reading of the Bill
(10:50) My High Level Takeaways From the Close Reading
(11:37) Another More Skeptical Reaction to the Same Bill
(13:01) What is a Covered Model Here?
(15:39) Precautionary Principle and Covered Guidance
(18:07) Non-Derivative
(18:28) So What Would This Law Actually Do?
(20:44) Crying Wolf
---
First published:
February 12th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oavGczwcHWZYhmifW/on-the-proposed-california-sb-1047
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We have long been waiting for a version of this story, where someone hacks together the technology to use Generative AI to work the full stack of the dating apps on their behalf, ultimately finding their One True Love.
Or at least, we would, if it turned out he is Not Making This Up.
Fun question: Given he is also this guy, does that make him more or less credible?
Alas, something being Too Good to Check does not actually mean one gets to not check it, in my case via a Manifold Market. The market started trading around 50%, but has settled down at 15% after several people made strong detailed arguments that the full story did not add up, at minimum he was doing some recreations afterwards.
Which is a shame. But why let that stop us? Either way it is a good [...]
---
First published:
February 9th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QxAFoEdtsmK783jzM/one-true-love
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In a week with two podcasts I covered extensively, I was happy that there was little other news.
That is, until right before press time, when Google rebranded Bard to Gemini, released an app for that, and offered a premium subscription ($20/month) for Gemini Ultra.
Gemini Ultra is Here
I have had the honor and opportunity to check out Gemini Advanced before its release.
The base model seems to be better than GPT-4. It seems excellent for code, for explanations and answering questions about facts or how things work, for generic displays of intelligence, for telling you how to do something. Hitting the Google icon to have it look for sources is great.
In general, if you want to be a power user, if you want to push the envelope in various ways, Gemini is not going to make it easy on you. However [...]
---
Outline:
(00:21) Gemini Ultra is Here
(03:16) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:38) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(07:12) GPT-4 Real This Time
(09:03) Fun with Image Generation
(09:20) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(14:09) They Took Our Jobs
(15:16) Get Involved
(16:00) Introducing
(16:12) In Other AI News
(20:42) Quiet Speculations
(24:44) Vitalik on the Intersection AI and Crypto
(30:10) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(30:23) The Week in Audio
(34:25) Rhetorical Innovation
(35:23) Aligning a Dumber Than Human Intelligence is Still Difficult
(35:54) People Are Worried About AI, Many People
(38:04) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(39:54) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 8th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Si4fRH2hGGa6HsQbu/ai-50-the-most-dangerous-thing
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: Based Beff Jezos and the Accelerationists
Based Beff Jezos, the founder of effective accelerationism, delivered on his previous pledge, and did indeed debate what is to be done to navigate into the future with a highly Worthy Opponent in Connor Leahy.
The moderator almost entirely stayed out of it, and intervened well when he did, so this was a highly fair arena. It's Jezos versus Leahy. Let's get ready to rumble!
I wanted to be sure I got the arguments right and fully stated my responses and refutations, so I took extensive notes including timestamps. On theme for this debate, this is a situation where you either do that while listening, or once you have already listened you are in practice never going to go back.
That does not mean you have to read all those notes and arguments. It is certainly an option [...]
---
Outline:
(01:32) Actually Based Beff Jezos (ABBJ)
(05:13) Bold Based Beff Jezos (BBBJ)
(13:00) Caustic Based Beff Jezos (CBBZ)
(17:50) What about Connor Leahy?
(19:56) Around the Debate in 80 Notes
(01:39:14) Afterwards
---
First published:
February 6th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xjoKqevCRnhXzHRLT/on-the-debate-between-jezos-and-leahy
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post is extensive thoughts on Tyler Cowen's excellent talk with Dwarkesh Patel.
It is interesting throughout. You can read this while listening, after listening or instead of listening, and is written to be compatible with all three options. The notes are in order in terms of what they are reacting to, and are mostly written as I listened.
I see this as having been a few distinct intertwined conversations. Tyler Cowen knows more about more different things than perhaps anyone else, so that makes sense. Dwarkesh chose excellent questions throughout, displaying an excellent sense of when to follow up and how, and when to pivot.
The first conversation is about Tyler's book GOAT about the world's greatest economists. Fascinating stuff, this made me more likely to read and review GOAT in the future if I ever find the time. I mostly agreed with Tyler's takes [...]
---
Outline:
(04:01) The Notes Themselves
(17:54) The AI and Future Scenario Section Begins
(21:04) Clearing Up Two Misconceptions
(27:11) Final Notes Section
(33:47) Concluding AI Thoughts
---
First published:
February 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FZkAG8Hezub7pWRM9/on-dwarkesh-s-3rd-podcast-with-tyler-cowen
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Two studies came out on the question of whether existing LLMs can help people figure out how to make bioweapons. RAND published a negative finding, showing no improvement. OpenAI found a small improvement, bigger for experts than students, from GPT-4. That's still harmless now, the question is what will happen in the future as capabilities advance.
Another news item was that Bard with Gemini Pro impressed even without Gemini Ultimate, taking the second spot on the Arena leaderboard behind only GPT-4-Turbo. For now, though, GPT-4 remains in the lead.
A third cool item was this story from a Russian claiming to have used AI extensively in his quest to find his one true love. I plan to cover that on its own and have Manifold on the job of figuring out how much of the story actually happened.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:56) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(08:35) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(09:38) GPT-4 Real This Time
(10:23) Be Prepared
(16:13) Fun with Image Generation
(17:17) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(23:32) They Took Our Jobs
(27:54) Get Involved
(28:23) In Other AI News
(33:35) Quiet Speculations
(39:06) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(45:58) The Week in Audio
(46:49) Rhetorical Innovation
(56:40) Predictions are Hard Especially About the Future
(01:03:13) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:07:03) Open Model Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:09:38) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:11:37) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
February 1st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RsWvhDNQRExjatzGA/ai-49-bioweapon-testing-begins
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Before we begin, I will note that I have indeed written various thoughts about the three college presidents that appeared before Congress and the resulting controversies, including the disputes regarding plagiarism. However I have excluded them from this post.
Discipline and Prohibitions
Washington Post Editorial Board says schools should ban smartphones, and parents should help make this happen rather than more often opposing such bans in order to make logistical coordination easier.
I agree with the editorial board. Even when not in use, having a phone in one's pocket is a continuous distraction. The ability to use the phone creates immense social and other pressures to use it, or think about using it, continuously. If we are going to keep doing this physically required school thing at all, students need to be fully device-free during the school day except for where we intentionally want them to [...]
---
Outline:
(00:19) Discipline and Prohibitions
(05:04) School Choice
(08:34) An Argument Against School Choice
(13:10) Home School
(14:37) School Null Hypothesis Watch
(19:05) The Case Against Education, Pandemic Edition
(20:51) Early Childhood
(21:43) Primary School
(26:04) High School
(27:54) (Lack of) Standards
(31:41) College Grade Inflation
(33:41) College
(41:31) Student Debt
---
First published:
January 30th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJnDmdmLDukoTqFqB/childhood-and-education-roundup-4
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
While I was in San Francisco, the big head honchos headed for Davos, where AI was the talk of the town. As well it should be, given what will be coming soon. It did not seem like anyone involved much noticed or cared about the existential concerns. That is consistent with the spirit of Davos, which has been not noticing or caring about things that don’t directly impact your business or vibe since (checks notes by which I mean an LLM) 1971. It is what it is.
Otherwise we got a relatively quiet week. For once the scheduling worked out and I avoided the Matt Levine curse. I’m happy for the lull to continue so I can pay down more debt and focus on long term projects and oh yeah also keep us all farther away from potential imminent death.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:51) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:33) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(03:58) Copyright Confrontation
(05:13) Fun with Image Generation
(05:31) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(08:20) They Took Our Jobs
(09:10) Get Involved
(09:47) In Other AI News
(12:43) Quiet Speculations
(17:26) Intelligence Squared
(27:22) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(30:33) (3) Artificial intelligence
(32:48) Open Model Weights Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
(45:16) The Week in Audio
(48:54) Rhetorical Innovation
(53:18) Malaria Accelerationism
(54:54) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(57:57) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:01:09) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 25th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bWnonYFj4rwtXuErK/ai-48-the-talk-of-davos
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
There's always lots of stuff going on. The backlog of other roundups keeps growing rather than shrinking. I have also decided to hold back a few things to turn them into their own posts instead.
Bad News
I wonder if it is meaningful that most of the bad news is about technology?
I don’t even know if this is news, but Rutgers finds TikTok amplifies and suppresses content based on whether it aligns with the CCP.
It would be great if we could find a way to ban or stop using TikTok that did not involve something crazy like the Restrict Act. I still think the Restrict Act is worse than nothing, if those are our only choices.
If the CCP limited its interference to explicitly internal Chinese topics, I would understand, but they do not: WSJ investigates the TikTok rabbit hole, in particular [...]
---
Outline:
(00:18) Bad News
(07:53) Government Working (USA Edition)
(10:58) Government Working (UK/EU Edition)
(15:14) Trouble in the Suez
(22:42) Crime and Punishment
(34:03) Good News, Everyone
(39:11) Sports Go Sports
(43:24) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(50:02) Game Reviews
(53:00) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(53:31) While I Cannot Condone This
(01:02:48) Money Stuff
(01:14:23) At the Movies
---
First published:
January 24th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8gxkJnZCBrNBRZREH/monthly-roundup-14-january-2024
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The biggest event of the week was the Sleeper Agents paper from Anthropic. I expect that to inform our thoughts for a while to come, and to lay foundation for additional work. We also had the first third of the IMO solved at almost gold metal level by DeepMind, discovering that math competition geometry is actually mostly composed of One Weird Trick. I knew that at the time I was doing it, though, and it was still really hard.
As usual, there was also a bunch of other stuff.
Tomorrow the 19th, I am going to be off to San Francisco for the weekend to attend a workshop. That leaves a lot of time for other events and seeing other people, a lot of which remains unfilled. So if you are interested in meeting up or want to invite me to a gathering, especially on Sunday the [...]
---
Outline:
(00:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:01) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(05:49) GPT-4 Real This Time
(07:05) Fun with Image Generation
(08:02) Copyright Confrontation
(09:43) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(11:31) They Took Our Jobs
(12:16) Get Involved
(13:11) Introducing
(17:36) In Other AI News
(22:48) Quiet Speculations
(25:30) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(31:50) The Week in Audio with Sam Altman
(35:03) David Brin Podcast
(45:46) Rhetorical Innovation
(48:59) Anthropic Paper on Sleeper Agents
(50:45) Anthropic Introduces Impossible Mission Force
(53:57) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(58:57) The Belrose Model Continued
(01:23:46) Open Model Weights Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
(01:28:26) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:28:42) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:31:15) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 18th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WRGmBE3h4WjA5EC5a/ai-48-exponentials-in-geometry
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The recent paper from Anthropic is getting unusually high praise, much of it I think deserved.
The title is: Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training.
Scott Alexander also covers this, offering an excellent high level explanation, of both the result and the arguments about whether it is meaningful. You could start with his write-up to get the gist, then return here if you still want more details, or you can read here knowing that everything he discusses is covered below. There was one good comment, pointing out some of the ways deceptive behavior could come to pass, but most people got distracted by the ‘grue’ analogy.
Right up front before proceeding, to avoid a key misunderstanding: I want to emphasize that in this paper, the deception was introduced intentionally. The paper deals with attempts to remove it.
The rest of this [...]
---
Outline:
(01:02) Abstract and Basics
(04:54) Threat Models
(07:01) The Two Backdoors
(10:13) Three Methodological Variations and Two Models
(11:30) Results of Safety Training
(13:08) Jesse Mu clarifies what he thinks the implications are.
(15:20) Implications of Unexpected Problems
(18:04) Trigger Please
(19:44) Strategic Deceptive Behavior Perhaps Not Directly in the Training Set
(21:54) Unintentional Deceptive Instrumental Alignment
(25:33) The Debate Over How Deception Might Arise
(38:46) Have We Disproved That Misalignment is Too Inefficient to Survive?
(47:52) Avoiding Reading Too Much Into the Result
(55:41) Further Discussion of Implications
(59:07) Broader Reaction
---
First published:
January 17th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Sf5CBSo44kmgFdyGM/on-anthropic-s-sleeper-agents-paper
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Saving up medical and health related stories from several months allowed for much better organizing of them, so I am happy I split these off. I will still post anything more urgent on a faster basis. There's lots of things here that are fascinating and potentially very important, but I’ve had to prioritize and focus elsewhere, so I hope others pick up various torches.
Vaccination Ho!
We have a new malaria vaccine. That's great. WHO thinks this is not an especially urgent opportunity, or any kind of ‘emergency’ and so wants to wait for months before actually putting shots into arms. So what if we also see reports like ‘cuts infant deaths by 13%’? WHO doing WHO things, WHO Delenda Est and all that. What can we do about this?
Also, EA and everyone else who works in global health needs to do a complete post-mortem [...]
---
Outline:
(00:25) Vaccination Ho!
(02:57) Potential Progress
(07:05) It's Not Progress
(11:09) Cost Plus
(13:18) New Findings
(15:21) FDA Delenda Est
(20:57) Covid Response Postmortem and Paths Forward
(23:56) Covid Origins
(28:32) Ban Gain of Function Research
(28:51) Cause Areas
(30:26) I criticize Effective Altruists for insufficiently high levels of epistemic rigor, because reality does not grade on a curve, but let no one confuse them with governments.
(34:04) GLP-1 Has Barely Begun
(41:53) No One Understands Nutrition
(43:24) Model This: Exercise Edition
(49:00) A Bold Stand Against Torture
---
First published:
January 16th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kFDk4Q9QhqrDE68qp/medical-roundup-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
My 2023 ACX predictions showed a clear lack of confidence in taking on the market. I won 30 markets for an average of +185 each, and lost 12 for an average loss of -185 each1. When one goes 30-12, hitting a 71% mark versus the about 58% average price initially paid, that is worth noticing. It is possible that I generally benefited from 2023 being a year where not much happened outside of AI, but I think it's time to know what we really think.
That means this year I’m going to add a phase, where I predict blind. Blind means I’m not allowed to look at any prediction markets. I can still look up facts, and financial markets are fair game, but nothing beyond that. Only after that will I look at Manifold. Metaculus makes this viable, as they have the ACX questions without listing probabilities.
---
Outline:
(01:47) International Politics
(11:13) American Electoral Politics
(20:48) US Politics and Government (excluding elections and AI )
(28:56) Economics
(37:10) Science (Mostly Rocketry for Some Reason)
(42:32) AI
(46:15) Hard Fork: Bonus Buy/Sell/Hold
---
First published:
January 9th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7j9JXpGvXNowCkhdf/2024-acx-predictions-blind-buy-sell-hold
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Developments around relationships and dating have a relatively small speed premium, also there are once again enough of them for a full post.
The first speculated on why you’re still single. We failed to settle the issue. A lot of you are indeed still single. So the debate continues.
You’re Single Because You’re Not Even Trying
What does it mean to not even be trying?
It does not only mean the things Alexander pointed us to last time, like 62% of singles being on zero dating apps, and a majority of singles having gone on zero dates in the past year, and a large majority not actively looking for a relationship. Here are those graphs again:
It also means things such as literally never approaching a woman in person.
Alexander (Keeper.ai): Why are so many young men single? Are they excluded from a [...]
---
Outline:
(00:25) You’re Single Because You’re Not Even Trying
(07:30) You’re Single Because of Artificial Intelligence
(10:38) You’re Single Because You Meet the Definition of Insanity
(18:52) You’re Single Because You’re Asking the Wrong Questions
(20:40) You’re Single Because of a Market Mismatch
(21:39) You’re Single Because Dating Apps Suck
(25:20) You’re Single Because You Didn’t Pay for Tinder Select
(39:24) You’re Single Because You Have Zero Friends
(43:14) You’re Single Because You Are Bad at Texting
(44:32) You’re Single Because You Have No Honor
(45:28) You’re Single Because You’re Not Hot
(51:23) You’re Single Because You Don’t Get Your House in Order
(52:55) You’re Single Because You’re Too Weird
(54:21) You’re Single Because of Your Bodycount
(59:34) You’re Single Because You Need to Learn Seduction
(01:08:12) You’re Single Because You Cannot Take a Hint
(01:10:05) You’re Single Because You Waste Your Money on Signaling
(01:12:27) You’re Still Single Because You Misalign Your Incentives
(01:13:03) You’re Not Single and You Are an Inspiration
(01:16:04) You’re Probably Not Single Stop Misrepresenting the Statistics
(01:16:35) You’re Single Because You’re Too Busy Writing Comments
(01:19:20) What About My Good Advice?
(01:21:09) Future Plans for this Series
---
First published:
January 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y8g4bXF7sdT9RduT6/dating-roundup-2-if-at-first-you-don-t-succeed
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
[NOTE: I forgot to post this to WP/LW/RSS on Thursday, so posting it now. Sorry about that.]
Will be very different from the old year by the time we are done. This year, it seems like various continuations of the old one. Sometimes I look back on the week, and I wonder how so much happened, while in other senses very little happened.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:28) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:44) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(06:13) GPT-4 Real This Time
(12:30) Liar Liar
(13:50) Fun with Image Generation
(19:09) Magic: The Generating
(23:57) Copyright Confrontation
(27:30) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(29:08) They Took Our Jobs
(37:39) Get Involved
(37:48) Introducing
(38:41) In Other AI News
(41:18) Quiet Speculations
(51:33) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(54:57) The Week in Audio
(55:10) AI Impacts Survey
(57:29) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:14:41) Aligning a Human Level Intelligence is Still Difficult
(01:17:00) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:26:23) Won’t Get Fooled Again
(01:30:03) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:32:11) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:34:55) The Wit and Wisdom of Sam Altman
(01:38:15) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 13th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iygs57bHJ36AvzpMh/ai-47-meet-the-new-year
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It is that time of the year. One must ask not only whether predictions were right or wrong, whether one won or lost, but what one was and should have been thinking, whether or not good decisions were made, whether the market made sense.
The main subject will be the 2023 ACX Predictions, where I performed buy/sell/hold along with sharing my logic. The numbers quoted are from mid-February 2023, first Manifold, then Metaculus.
Section 1: World Politics
Last year I thought markets were too confident Putin would keep power. This year I think this is not confident enough and Metaculus is more accurate at 90%. Metaculus is also doing a better job adjusting as time passes. Things seem to be stabilizing, and every day without big bad news is good [...]
---
Outline:
(00:31) Section 1: World Politics
(12:16) Section 2: Politics
(26:20) Section 3: Tech and Economics
(50:52) Overall Results
---
First published:
January 8th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6o98z3QMAQSkHf3gp/2023-prediction-evaluations
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Katja Grace and AI impacts survey thousands of researchers on a variety of questions, following up on a similar 2022 survey as well as one in 2016.
I encourage opening the original to get better readability of graphs and for context and additional information. I’ll cover some of it, but there's a lot.
A Very Large Survey Full of Contradictions
Here is the abstract, summarizing many key points:
In the largest survey of its kind, we surveyed 2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues, asking for their predictions on the pace of AI progress and the nature and impacts of advanced AI systems.
The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50% chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular [...]
---
Outline:
(00:25) A Very Large Survey Full of Contradictions
(05:24) They’ve Destabilized the Timeline
(08:50) What, Me Worry?
(10:02) The Biggest Question
(14:25) Not So Fast with the Not So Fast
(16:03) Safety Research Is Good Actually
(18:54) Questions for Next Season
---
First published:
January 5th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfPxAp5uwgZugwovY/ai-impacts-survey-december-2023-edition
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The first half of the week was filled with continued talk about the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, which I covered in its own post. Then that talk seemed to mostly die down,, and things were relatively quiet. We got a bunch of predictions for 2024, and I experimented with prediction markets for many of them.
Note that if you want to help contribute in a fun, free and low-key, participating in my prediction markets on Manifold is a way to do that. Each new participant in each market, even if small, adds intelligence, adds liquidity and provides me a tiny bonus. Also, of course, it is great to help get the word out to those who would be interested. Paid subscriptions and contributions to Balsa are of course also welcome.
I will hopefully be doing both a review of my 2023 predictions (mostly not about [...]
---
Outline:
(01:05) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:22) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(03:39) GPT-4 Real This Time
(04:22) Fun with Image Generation
(06:12) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(06:21) They Took Our Jobs
(08:17) Get Involved
(09:08) Introducing
(09:34) In Other AI News
(10:16) Doom?
(15:02) Quiet Speculations
(29:06) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(29:10) The Week in Audio
(30:54) Rhetorical Innovation
(34:36) Politico Problems
(39:55) Cup of Coffee
(50:42) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(51:42) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(52:56) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(53:01) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
January 4th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfXF6MZTgae766aoX/ai-45-to-be-determined
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Lawsuits and legal issues over copyright continued to get a lot of attention this week, so I’m gathering those topics into their own post. The ‘virtual #0’ post is the relevant section from last week's roundup.
Four Core Claims
Who will win the case? Which of New York Times's complaints will be convincing?
Different people have different theories of the case.
Part of that is that there are four distinct allegations NYT is throwing at the wall.
Arvind Narayanan: A thread on some misconceptions about the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI. Morality aside, the legal issues are far from clear cut. Gen AI makes an end run around copyright and IMO this can’t be fully resolved by the courts alone.
As I currently understand it, NYT alleges that OpenAI engaged in 4 types of unauthorized copying of its articles:
---
Outline:
(00:17) Four Core Claims
(01:17) Key Claim: The Training Dataset Contains Copyrighted Material
(05:00) Other Claims
(06:04) A Few Legal Takes
(10:15) What Can You Reproduce?
(14:16) How and How Often Are You Reproducing It?
(22:06) What Should the Rule Be?
(27:03) Image Generation Edition
(28:50) Compulsory License
---
First published:
January 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9WD8nkqLTcd8YJPpT/copyright-confrontation-1
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The New York Times has thrown down the gauntlet, suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. Others are complaining about recreated images in the otherwise deeply awesome MidJourney v6.0. As is usually the case, the critics misunderstand the technology involved, complain about infringements that inflict no substantial damages, engineer many of the complaints being made and make cringeworthy accusations.
That does not, however, mean that The New York Times case is baseless. There are still very real copyright issues at the heart of Generative AI. This suit is a serious effort by top lawyers. It has strong legal merit. They are likely to win if the case is not settled.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(07:40) GPT-4 Real This Time
(10:35) Fun with Image Generation
(17:58) Copyright Confrontation
(29:55) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(35:00) Going Nuclear
(36:39) In Other AI News
(37:54) Quiet Speculations
(43:40) The UN Reports
(44:14) Guiding Principles
(51:39) The Week in Audio
(52:25) Rhetorical Innovation
(56:09) AI With Open Model Weights Is Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:03:16) Aligning a Human Level Intelligence is Still Difficult
(01:06:25) Please Speak Directly Into the Microphone
(01:06:39) The Wit and Wisdom of Sam Altman
(01:19:05) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 28th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3GzRrqLAcdDXzbqc4/ai-44-copyright-confrontation
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We get innovation in functional search. In an even more functional search, we finally get a Nature paper submitted almost two years ago, in which AI discovered a new class of antibiotic. That's pretty damn exciting, with all the implications thereof.
OpenAI continued its rapid pace of shipping, pivoting for this week to safety. There was a paper about weak-to-strong generalization. I see what they are trying to do. It is welcome, but I was underwhelmed. It and Leike's follow-up post continue down a path for which I have high skepticism, but the new concreteness gives me more hope that the flaws will be exposed early, allowing adjustment. Or I could be wrong.
OpenAI also had the beta release of Preparedness Framework. That was more exciting. There was a lot of great stuff there, much better than I would have expected, and having a framework at all is [...]
---
Outline:
(01:17) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:13) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(05:20) GPT-4 Real This Time
(07:54) Fun with Image Generation
(08:10) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(08:59) Digi Relic Digi
(19:57) Going Nuclear
(21:17) Get Involved
(22:27) Follow the Money
(25:26) Introducing
(31:07) In Other AI News
(34:27) Quiet Speculations
(43:14) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(52:06) The Week in Audio
(52:55) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:02:28) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:20:17) Vulnerable World Hypothesis
(01:22:55) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:26:49) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:28:12) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 21st, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WaDFCrd6KEwojLXgj/ai-43-functional-discoveries
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: On RSPs.
Be Prepared
OpenAI introduces their preparedness framework for safety in frontier models.
A summary of the biggest takeaways, which I will repeat at the end:
---
Outline:
(00:07) Be Prepared
(02:48) Basic Principles
(07:33) Veto Power
(10:27) Introductory Section and Risk Categories
(13:13) Cybersecurity
(15:58) CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear) Threats
(18:47) Persuasion
(22:24) Model Autonomy
(25:34) Key Takeaways From Risk Descriptions
(28:36) Scorecards
(31:27) Governance
(34:56) Deployment Restrictions
(36:21) Development Restrictions
(39:50) Conclusion and Biggest Takeaways
---
First published:
December 21st, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQPfLsDKWtdvMwyyr/on-openai-s-preparedness-framework
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I have not actually forgotten that the rest of the world exists. As usual, this is everything that wasn’t worth an entire post and is not being saved for any of the roundup post categories.
(Roundup post categories are currently AI, Medical and Health, Housing and Traffic, Dating, Childhood and Education, Fertility, Startups, and potentially NEPA and Clean Energy.)
Bad News
Rebels from Yemen were firing on ships in the Red Sea, a problem dating back thousands of years. Here's where we were on December 17, with the US government finally dropping the hammer.
Hidden fees exist, even when everyone knows they’re there, because they work. StubHub experimented, the hiding meant people spent 21% more money. Companies simply can’t pass that up. Government intervention could be justified. However, I also notice that Ticketmaster is now using ‘all-in’ pricing for many shows with zero hidden fees [...]
---
Outline:
(00:28) Bad News
(02:50) Government Working
(06:51) Work From Home
(08:12) Antisocial Media
(11:56) Fraud Is a Rather Big Deal
(15:28) Giving Away $2.1 Billion Also a Big Deal
(18:00) Hit Vote With Rock
(18:55) San Francisco's Finest Compensation Packages
(20:19) Crime and Punishment in San Francisco
(26:08) Crime and Punishment Everywhere
(34:04) Good News, Everyone
(35:50) Meaning What Exactly
(37:44) While I Cannot Condone This
(39:05) Another Voting Proposal
(40:50) At the Movies: 2023 in Review
(44:09) Money Stuff
---
First published:
December 19th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sZ8f5NhGPCSkdKqm5/monthly-roundup-13-december-2023
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
With the year ending and my first Vox post coming out, this week was a natural time to take stock. I wrote my first best-of post in a long time and laid out my plans for my 501c(3).
It was also another eventful week. We got a lot more clarity on the OpenAI situation, although no key new developments on the ground. The EU AI Act negotiators reached a compromise, which I have not yet had the opportunity to analyze properly. We got a bunch of new toys to play with, including NotebookLM and Grok, and the Gemini API.
I made a deliberate decision not to tackle the EU AI Act here. Coverage has been terrible at telling us what is in the bill. I want to wait until we can know what is in it, whether or not that means I need to read the whole [...]
---
Outline:
(00:59) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:13) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(07:17) GPT-4 Real This Time
(11:22) The Other Gemini
(15:03) Fun with Image Generation
(15:40) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(18:32) They Took Our Jobs
(24:51) Get Involved
(26:41) Introducing
(27:13) In Other AI News
(29:49) Quiet Speculations
(37:08) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(42:22) The EU AI Act
(43:05) The Week in Audio
(43:43) Rhetorical Innovation
(50:31) Doom!
(01:03:21) Doom Discourse Innovation
(01:07:03) E/acc
(01:08:32) Poll says e/ack
(01:11:53) Turing Test
(01:13:43) Aligning a Human Level Intelligence Also Difficult
(01:20:04) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:25:17) Open Foundation Model Weights Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
(01:26:18) Key Takeaways
(01:31:12) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:35:33) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 14th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/emo2hAvq6p7Pn4Pps/ai-42-the-wrong-answer
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Hello everyone! This is going to be a bit of a housekeeping post and a welcome to new subscribers.
Note that this is not the primary version of my writing, which can be found on Substack, but it is a full copy of all posts found there.
My writing can be intimidating. There is a lot of it, and it's often dense. As always, choose only the parts relevant to your interests, do not be afraid to make cuts. I attempt to make every post accessible as an entry point, but I also want to build up a superstructure over time. This seemed like a good time to recap some of the very best of my old writing and talk about what I’m up to.
Over many years, this blog has morphed from focusing on rationality to COVID to AI.
But not only those [...]
---
Outline:
(01:28) Rationality
(03:03) The Evergreen Posts
(07:13) AI
(09:48) General Rationality and Principles of Life and Thinking
(11:26) World Modeling
(13:20) Oh, Yeah, That Happened
(13:52) Gaming Fun
(14:48) Fertility, School and Childhood
(15:50) Covid
(17:26) The Simulacra Levels Sequence
(18:47) The Moral Mazes Sequence
(20:44) The Choices Sequence
(21:59) Game Theory, Gambling and Prediction Markets
(22:55) Bonus Content: A Newly Salient Question for 2023
---
First published:
December 13th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHYxnSgMDeveovLuv/the-best-of-don-t-worry-about-the-vase
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Wow, what a year it has been. Things keep getting crazier.
Thank you for taking this journey with me. I hope I have helped you keep pace, and that you have been able to discern for yourself the parts of this avalanche of words and events that were helpful. I hope to have helped things make somewhat more sense.
And I hope many of you have taken that information, and used it not only to be able to check Twitter less, but also to make better decisions, and, hopefully, to help make the world a better place—one in which humanity is more likely to survive.
Recently, my coverage of the Biden administration executive order and the events at OpenAI have been received very positively. I’d like to do more in that mold: more focused, shorter pieces that pull the story together, hopefully de-emphasizing more ephemeral weekly [...]
---
Outline:
(01:32) Balsa First Targets the Jones Act
(04:01) Other Balsa Cause Areas
(04:12) Housing
(05:47) NEPA
(08:16) AI
(12:00) Funding Situation
---
First published:
December 12th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eaFmbgnWsXdGb2FSk/balsa-update-and-general-thank-you
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: OpenAI: Altman Returns, OpenAI: The Battle of the Board, OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend, additional coverage in AI#41.
We have new stories from The New York Times, from Time, from the Washington Post and from Business Insider.
All paint a picture consistent with the central story told in OpenAI: The Battle of the Board. They confirm key facts, especially Altman's attempted removal of Toner from the board via deception. We also confirm that Altman promised to help with the transition when he was first fired, so we have at least one very clear cut case of Altman saying that which was not.
Much uncertainty remains, especially about the future, but past events are increasingly clear.
The stories also provide additional color and key details. This post is for those who want that, and to figure out what to think in light of the new [...]
---
Outline:
(01:21) The New York Times Covers Events
(15:30) Time Makes Altman CEO of the Year
(18:49) Washington Post Says Leaders Warned Altman was Abusive
(20:05) Business Insider Says Microsoft Letter Was a Bluff
(26:15) Where Does That All Leave Us?
---
First published:
December 12th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xY5m72tME9kqjpdoC/openai-leaks-confirm-the-story
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The biggest news this week was at long last the announcement of Google's Gemini. Be sure to check that out. Note that what is being rolled out now is only Gemini Pro, the Gemini Ultra model that could rival GPT-4 is not yet available.
It does not seem I am doing a good job cutting down on included material fast enough to keep pace. A lot is happening, but a lot will likely be happening for a long time. If your time is limited, remember to focus on the sections relevant to your interests.
Also, if you are going to be at the New York Solstice or the related meetup, please do say hello.
Table of Contents
My other post today covers Google's Gemini. Be sure to read that.
I also put out two other posts this week: Based Beff Jezos and the Accelerationists, and On [...]
---
Outline:
(00:42) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:57) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(08:38) OpenAI: The Saga Continues
(15:01) Q Continuum
(18:04) Fun with Image Generation
(20:08) Get Involved
(20:47) Introducing
(22:01) In Other AI News
(24:21) Quiet Speculations
(28:29) Model This
(37:28) Would You Like Some Volcano Apocalypse Insurance?
(38:58) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(53:02) The Week in Audio
(53:11) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:01:43) Aligning a Human Level Intelligence Is Still Difficult
(01:04:38) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:08:54) How Timelines Have Changed
(01:10:29) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:12:54) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:25:14) Somehow This Is The Actual Vice President
(01:31:24) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
December 7th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9Jgtkw8CD6kndyCcD/ai-41-bring-in-the-other-gemini
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It's happening. Here is CEO Pichai's Twitter announcement. Here is Demis Hassabis announcing. Here is the DeepMind Twitter announcement. Here is the blog announcement. Here is Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals, promising more to come. Here is Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean bringing his best hype.
Technical Specifications
Let's check out the specs.
Context length trained was 32k tokens, they report 98% accuracy on information retrieval for Ultra across the full context length. So a bit low, both lower than GPT—4 and Claude and lower than their methods can handle. Presumably we should expect that context length to grow rapidly with future versions.
There are three versions of Gemini 1.0.
Gemini 1.0, our first version, comes in three sizes: Ultra for highly-complex tasks, Pro for enhanced performance and deployability at scale, and Nano for on-device applications. Each size is specifically tailored to [...]
---
Outline:
(00:25) Technical Specifications
(11:20) Level Two Bard
(12:42) Gemini Reactions
---
First published:
December 7th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ofYejKKiSFYH2gLBb/gemini-1-0
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It seems Forbes decided to doxx the identity of e/acc founder Based Beff Jezos. They did so using voice matching software.
Given Jezos is owning it given that it happened, rather than hoping it all goes away, and people are talking about him, this seems like a good time to cover this ‘Beff Jezos’ character and create a reference point for if he continues to come up later.
If that is not relevant to your interests, you can and should skip this one.
Do Not Doxx People
First order of business: Bad Forbes. Stop it. Do not doxx people. Do not doxx people with a fox. Do not dox people with a bagel with creme cheese and lox. Do not dox people with a post. Do not dox people who then boast. Do not dox people even if that person is advocating for policies you [...]
---
Outline:
(00:31) Do Not Doxx People
(01:21) Beff Jezos Advocates Actions He Thinks Would Probably Kill Everyone
(02:46) A Matter of Some Debate
(08:23) Response to the Doxx
(12:44) So What is E/Acc Then?
(18:56) Conclusion
---
First published:
December 6th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3xoThNNYgZmTCpEAB/based-beff-jezos-and-the-accelerationists
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This post was originally intended to come out directly after the UK AI Safety Summit, to give the topic its own deserved focus. One thing led to another, and I am only doubling back to it now.
Responsible Deployment Policies
At the AI Safety Summit, all the major Western players were asked: What are your company policies on how to keep us safe? What are your responsible deployment policies (RDPs)? Except that they call them Responsible Scaling Policies (RSPs) instead.
I deliberately say deployment rather than scaling. No one has shown what I would consider close to a responsible scaling policy in terms of what models they are willing to scale and train.
Anthropic at least does however seem to have something approaching a future responsible deployment policy, in terms of how to give people access to a model if we assume it is safe for [...]
---
Outline:
(00:17) Responsible Deployment Policies
(03:15) How the UK Graded the Responses
(04:22) Anthropic's Policies
(05:27) The Risks
(10:42) The Promise of a Pause
(13:58) ASL-3 Definitions and Commitments
(18:16) Approaching Thresholds
(24:38) ASL-4
(27:26) Underspecification
(29:06) Takeaways from Anthropic's RSP
(35:30) Others React
(38:30) A Failure to Communicate
(39:47) OpenAI Policies
(41:56) DeepMind Policies
(45:53) Amazon, Inflection and Meta
(47:53) Some Additional Relative Rankings
(48:57) Important Clarification from Dario Amodei
(55:07) Strategic Thoughts on Such Policies
(01:05:37) Conclusion
---
First published:
December 5th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yRJNCDp7LHyHGkANz/on-responsible-scaling-policies-rsps
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It has been brutal out there for someone on my beat. Everyone extremely hostile, even more than usual. Extreme positions taken, asserted as if obviously true. Not symmetrically, but from all sides nonetheless. Constant assertions of what happened in the last two weeks that are, as far as I can tell, flat out wrong, largely the result of a well-implemented media campaign. Repeating flawed logic more often and louder.
The bright spot was offered by Vitalik Buterin, who offers a piece entitled ‘My techo–optimism,’ proposing what he calls d/acc for defensive (or decentralized, or differential) accelerationism. He brings enough nuance and careful thinking, and clear statements about existential risk and various troubles ahead, to get strong positive reactions from the worried. He brings enough credibility and track record, and enough shibboleths, to get strong endorsements from the e/acc crowd, despite his acknowledgement of existential risk and the dangers [...]
---
Outline:
(02:06) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:52) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(07:37) Q Continuum
(13:04) OpenAI, Altman and Safety
(15:30) A Better Way to Do RLHF
(19:26) Fun with Image Generation
(19:34) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(19:49) They Took Our Jobs
(20:35) Get Involved
(22:21) Introducing
(22:39) In Other AI News
(25:10) It's a Who?
(28:22) What About E/Acc?
(31:54) Vitalik Offers His Version of Techno-Optimism
(40:47) Quiet Speculations
(44:38) AI Agent Future
(47:25) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(51:28) The Week in Audio
(56:13) Rhetorical Innovation
(59:06) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:06:36) People Might Also Worry About AI Killing Only Some of Them
(01:07:37) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:08:43) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:12:38) Please Speak Directly Into This Microphone
(01:13:54) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
November 30th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/je5BwKe8enCq8DLrm/ai-40-a-vision-from-vitalik
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
As of this morning, the new board is in place and everything else at OpenAI is otherwise officially back to the way it was before.
Events seem to have gone as expected. If you have read my previous two posts on the OpenAI situation, nothing here should surprise you.
Still seems worthwhile to gather the postscripts, official statements and reactions into their own post for future ease of reference.
What will the ultimate result be? We likely only find that out gradually over time, as we await both the investigation and the composition and behaviors of the new board.
I do not believe Q* played a substantive roll in events, so it is not included here. I also do not include discussion here of how good or bad Altman has been for safety.
Sam Altman's Statement
Here is the official OpenAI statement from Sam [...]
---
Outline:
(00:49) Sam Altman's Statement
(07:17) Bret Taylor's Statement
(10:30) Larry Summers's Statement
(11:11) Helen Toner's Statement
(13:00) OpenAI Needs a Strong Board That Can Fire Its CEO
(15:57) Some Board Member Candidates
(16:54) A Question of Valuation
(18:28) A Question of Optics
---
First published:
November 30th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EfqAdxR7bvwQLMTQc/openai-altman-returns
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
The board firing Sam Altman, then reinstating him, dominated everything else this week. Other stuff also happened, but definitely focus on that first.
Table of Contents
Developments at OpenAI were far more important than everything else this read. So you can read this timeline of events over the weekend, and this attempt to put all the information together.
---
Outline:
(00:16) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(01:09) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(04:50) The Q Continuum
(05:47) OpenAI: The Saga Continues
(13:29) Altman Could Step Up
(14:59) You Thought This Week Was Tough
(16:15) Fun with Image Generation
(16:37) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(17:28) They Took Our Jobs
(18:07) Get Involved
(18:30) Introducing
(19:17) In Other AI News
(20:42) Quiet Speculations
(24:00) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(27:19) That Is Not What Totalitarianism Means
(31:39) The Week in Audio
(34:13) Rhetorical Innovation
(39:21) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(46:24) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(47:54) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(49:18) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
November 23rd, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FCfEqRiLLb4gFu3H/ai-39-the-week-of-openai
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend.
On Friday afternoon, OpenAI's board fired CEO Sam Altman.
Overnight, an agreement in principle was reached to reinstate Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI, with an initial new board of Brad Taylor (ex-co-CEO of Salesforce, chair), Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo.
What happened? Why did it happen? How will it ultimately end? The fight is far from over.
We do not entirely know, but we know a lot more than we did a few days ago.
This is my attempt to put the pieces together.
This is a Fight For Control; Altman Started it
This was and still is a fight about control of OpenAI, its board, and its direction.
This has been a long simmering battle and debate. The stakes are high.
Until recently, Sam Altman worked to reshape the company in his [...]
---
Outline:
(00:42) This is a Fight For Control; Altman Started it
(01:12) OpenAI is a Non-Profit With a Mission
(03:20) Sam Altman's Perspective
(05:41) The Outside Board's Perspective
(06:51) Ilya Sutskever's Perspective
(07:52) Altman Moves to Take Control
(11:02) One Last Chance
(14:32) Botched Communications
(16:18) The Negotiation
(18:13) What Now for OpenAI?
---
First published:
November 22nd, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sGpBPAPq2QttY4M2H/openai-the-battle-of-the-board
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI's founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live equally when AGI is created.
Now we are engaged in a great corporate war, testing whether that entity, or any entity so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
What matters is not theory but practice. What happens when the chips are down?
So what happened? What prompted it? What will happen now?
To a large extent, even more than usual, we do not know. We should not pretend that we know more than we do.
Rather than attempt to interpret here or barrage with an endless string of reactions and quotes, I will instead do my best to stick to a compilation of the key facts.
(Note: All times stated here [...]
---
First published:
November 20th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-facts-from-a-weekend
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Another busy week. GPT-5 starts, Biden and Xi meet and make somewhat of a deal, GPTs get explored, the EU AI Act on the verge of collapse by those trying to kill the part that might protect us, multiple very good podcasts. A highly interesting paper on potential deceptive alignment.
Despite things quieting down the last few days, it is still a lot. Hopefully things can remain quiet for a bit, perhaps I can even get in more work on that Jones Act post.
Table of Contents
---
Outline:
(00:39) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(05:11) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(10:49) GPT-4 Real This Time
(14:11) Fun with Image Generation
(15:12) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(15:59) A Bad Guy With an AI
(22:46) They Took Our Jobs
(32:57) Get Involved
(34:29) Introducing
(35:18) In Other AI News
(42:00) Quiet Speculations
(43:32) Anti Anti Trust
(44:24) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(57:39) Bostrom Goes Unheard
(58:18) The Week in Audio
(59:37) Someone Picked Up the Phone
(01:01:15) Mission Impossible
(01:02:17) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:05:21) Open Source AI is Insafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(01:13:19) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:36:02) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:37:37) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:40:33) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
November 16th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oCFX5xbhgCmpBFKnb/ai-38-let-s-make-a-deal
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Things on the AI front have been rather hectic. That does not mean other things stopped happening. Quite the opposite. So here we are again.
Bad News
PSA: Crumbl Cookies, while delicious, have rather a lot of calories, 720 in the basic cookie. Yes, they display this as 180, by deciding serving size is a quarter of a cookie. This display strategy is pretty outrageous and should not be legal, we need to do something about unrealistic serving sizes – at minimum, require that the serving size be displayed in same size font as the calorie count.
It really is weird that we don’t think about Russia, and especially the USSR, more in terms of the universal alcoholism.
Reminder that there really is an architecture conspiracy to make life worse. Peter Eisnman straight out says: “Anxiety and alienation is the modern condition. The point of architecture [...]
---
Outline:
(00:16) Bad News
(03:24) Good News, Everyone
(05:31) While I Cannot Condone This
(09:00) Government Working
(15:02) At the Movies
(18:07) Twitter Twitches
(23:41) Yay Free Speech
(25:41) Money Stuff
(41:29) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(50:47) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(56:50) Potentially Effective Altruism
---
First published:
November 14th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TfABomJ7s6xLkxTFz/monthly-roundup-12-november-2023
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
[Editor's Note: This post is split off from AI #38 and only on LessWrong because I want to avoid overloading my general readers with this sort of thing at this time, and also I think it is potentially important we have a link available. I plan to link to it from there with a short summary.]
Nick Bostrom was interviewed on a wide variety of questions on UnHerd, primarily on existential risk and AI, I found it thoughtful throughout. In it, he spent the first 80% of the time talking about existential risk. Then in the last 20% he expressed the concern that it was unlikely but possible we would overshoot our concerns about AI and never build AGI at all, which would be a tragedy.
How did those who would dismiss AI risk and build AGI as fast as possible react?
About how you would expect. This is [...]
---
Outline:
(04:40) What Bostrom Centrally Said Was Mostly Not New or Controversial
(06:54) Responses Confirming Many Concerned About Existential Risk Mostly Agree
(11:49) Quoted Text in Detail
(19:42) The Broader Podcast Context
(21:35) A Call for Nuance
(24:33) The Quoted Text Continued
(27:08) Conclusion
---
First published:
November 13th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PyNqASANiAuG7GrYW/bostrom-goes-unheard
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
All markets created by Zvi Mowshowitz shall be graded according to the rules described herein, including the zeroth rule.
The version of this on LessWrong shall be the canonical version, even if other versions are later posted on other websites.
Rule 0: If the description of a particular market contradicts these rules, the market's description wins, the way a card in Magic: The Gathering can break the rules. This document only establishes the baseline rules, which can be modified.
---
First published:
November 13th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ge3Jf5Hnon8wq4xqT/zvi-s-manifold-markets-house-rules
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
We had OpenAI's dev day, where they introduced a host of new incremental feature upgrades including a longer context window, more recent knowledge cutoff, increased speed, seamless feature integration and a price drop. Quite the package. On top of that, they introduced what they call ‘GPTs’ that can let you configure a host of things to set up specialized proto-agents or widgets that will work for specialized tasks and be shared with others. I would love to mess around with that, once I have the time, and OpenAI's servers allow regular subscribers to get access.
In the meantime, even if you exclude all that, lots of other things happened this week. Thus, even with the spin-off, this is an unusually long weekly update. I swear, and this time I mean it, that I am going to raise the threshold for inclusion or extended discussion substantially going forward, across [...]
---
Outline:
(00:57) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(01:37) Bard Tells Tales
(05:41) Fun with Image Generation
(10:15) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(14:34) The Art of the Jailbreak
(17:54) They Took Our Jobs
(22:23) Get Involved
(24:25) Introducing
(28:27) X Marks Its Spot
(34:20) In Other AI News
(44:13) Verification Versus Generation
(46:57) Bigger Tech Bigger Problems
(53:52) Executive Order Open Letter
(01:01:28) Executive Order Reactions Continued
(01:05:53) Quiet Speculations
(01:17:36) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:25:55) The Week in Audio
(01:26:14) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:36:44) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:38:08) Aligning a Dumber Than Human Intelligence Is Still Difficult
(01:42:10) Model This
(01:52:35) Open Source AI is Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(02:07:02) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(02:10:34) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(02:16:27) The Lighter Side
---
First published:
November 9th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/44Cv4HFoWEZvFnL5u/ai-37-moving-too-fast
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
OpenAI DevDay was this week. What delicious and/or terrifying things await?
Turbo Boost
First off, we have GPT-4-Turbo.
Today we’re launching a preview of the next generation of this model, GPT-4 Turbo.
GPT-4 Turbo is more capable and has knowledge of world events up to April 2023. It has a 128k context window so it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt. We also optimized its performance so we are able to offer GPT-4 Turbo at a 3x cheaper price for input tokens and a 2x cheaper price for output tokens compared to GPT-4.
GPT-4 Turbo is available for all paying developers to try by passing gpt-4-1106-preview in the API and we plan to release the stable production-ready model in the coming weeks.
Knowledge up to April 2023 is a big game. Cutting the price [...]
---
Outline:
(00:09) Turbo Boost
(01:25) Function calling updates
(02:27) Improved instruction following and JSON mode
(03:21) Reproducible outputs and log probabilities
(04:34) Updated GPT-3.5 Turbo
(06:49) New Modalities
(07:03) New modalities in the API
(07:08) GPT-4 Turbo with vision
(08:02) DALL·E 3
(08:47) Text-to-speech (TTS)
(10:05) Model customization
(10:09) GPT-4 fine tuning experimental access
(11:01) Custom models
(12:19) Assistants API, Retrieval, and Code Interpreter
(15:13) GPT-GPT
(22:37) Putting It All Together
---
First published:
November 9th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wdekcGpsMtakGCo5y/on-openai-dev-day
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
In the eyes of many, Biden's Executive Order somewhat overshadowed the UK Summit. The timing was unfortunate. Both events were important milestones. Now that I have had time, here is my analysis of what happened at the UK Summit.
As is often the case with such events, there was a lot of talk relative to the amount of action. There was a lot of diplomatic talk, talk of that which everyone agrees upon, relative to the amount of talk of real substance. There were days of meetings that resulted in rather unspicy summaries and resolutions. The language around issues that matter most was softened, the actual mission in danger of being compromised.
And as usual, the net result was reason for optimism, a net highly positive event versus not having it, while also in some ways being disappointing when compared to what might have been. A declaration [...]
---
Outline:
(01:47) Looking Back at People's Goals for the Summit and Taskforce
(02:53) AI Safety Summit Agenda
(12:38) Someone Picked Up the Phone
(18:21) The Bletchley Declaration
(28:32) Saying Generic Summit-Style Things
(33:04) Shouting From the Rooftops
(33:27) Some Are Not Easily Impressed
(35:37) Declaring Victory
(45:14) Kanjun Offers Thoughts
(56:17) Closing Remarks
---
First published:
November 7th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zbrvXGu264u3p8otD/on-the-uk-summit
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
habryka
Hey Everyone!
As part of working on dialogues over the last few weeks I've asked a bunch of people what kind of conversations they would be most interested in reading, and one of the most common one has been "I would really like to read a bunch of people trying to figure out how to construct a portfolio that goes well when AGI becomes a bigger deal".
You are three people who would be reasonably high on my list to figure this out with, and so here we are. Not because you are world experts at this, but because I trust your general reasoning a bunch (I know Noah less well, but trust Will and Zvi a good amount).
I think to kick us off, maybe let's start with a very brief 1-2 sentence intros on your background and how much you've thought about this thing before (and [...]
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Outline:
(07:37) Broad market effects of AGI
(10:23) Career capital in an AGI world
(20:29) Debt and Interest rates effects of AGI
(26:53) Concrete example portfolio
(43:21) Is any of this ethical or sanity-promoting?
(49:12) How would you actually use a ton of money to help with AGI going well?
(53:08) Please diversify your crypto portfolio
(56:24) Should you buy private equity into AI companies?
(58:04) Summarizing takeaways
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First published:
November 6th, 2023
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Wow, what a week. We had the Executive Order, which I read here so you don’t have to and then I have a tabulation of the reactions of others.
Simultaneously there was the UK AI Summit.
There was also robust related discussion around Responsible Scaling Policies, and the various filings companies did in advance of the Summit.
I touched on Anthropic's RSP in particular in previous weeks, but I did not do a sufficiently close analysis and many others have offered more detailed thoughts as well, and the context has evolved.
So I am noting that I am not covering those important questions in the weekly roundup, and they will be covered by one or more later distinct posts. I also potentially owe an after action report from EA Global Boston, if I can find the time.
This post is instead about everything else.
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Outline:
(00:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:22) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
(07:03) GPT-4 Real This Time
(10:11) Fun with Image Generation
(10:43) Best Picture
(15:19) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(20:25) They Took Our Jobs
(22:34) Get Involved
(22:55) OpenAI Frontier Risk and Preparedness Team
(27:03) Introducing
(28:25) In Other AI News
(33:13) Quiet Speculations
(37:45) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(38:47) 22756.
(42:51) 22756.2.
(43:14) 22756.4.
(44:15) The Week in Audio
(48:13) Rhetorical Innovation
(54:43) Open Source AI is Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This
(57:08) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:01:20) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:02:39) Please Speak Directly Into This Microphone
(01:05:13) The Lighter Side
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First published:
November 2nd, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QLuoMnhR5XNAAWjJx/ai-36-in-the-background
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Or: I read the executive order and its fact sheet, so you don’t have to.
I spent Halloween reading the entire Biden Executive Order on AI.
This is the pure ‘what I saw reading the document’ post. A companion post will cover reactions to this document, but I wanted this to be a clean reference going forward.
Takeaway Summary: What Does This Do?
It mostly demands a lot of reports, almost entirely from within the government.
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Outline:
(00:26) Takeaway Summary: What Does This Do?
(05:46) Fact Sheet
(21:53) I Read the Whole Damn Thing So You Don’t Have To
(22:03) Sections 1 and 2: Introduction and Principles
(23:22) Section 3: Definitions
(30:05) Section 4: Ensuring Safety and Security
(43:44) Section 5: Promoting Innovation and Competition
(50:58) Section 6: Supporting Workers
(51:37) Section 7: Advancing Equity and Civil Rights
(52:41) Section 8: Protecting Consumers, Patients, Passengers and Students
(53:38) Section 9: Protecting Privacy
(54:06) Section 10: Advancing Federal Government Use of AI
(56:51) Section 11: Strengthening American Leadership Abroad
(57:38) Section 12: Implementation
(58:06) Conclusion
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First published:
November 1st, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PvBpRu354uG7ypwRP/on-the-executive-order
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.