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LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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63:55

“DeepSeek: Lemon, It’s Wednesday” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/29

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 $5.5 Million Number. OpenAI Offers Its Congratulations. Scaling Laws Still Apply. Other r1 and DeepSeek News Roundup. People Love Free. Investigating How r1 Works. Nvidia Chips are Highly Useful. Welcome to the

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21:12

“Operator” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/28

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

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63:37

“DeepSeek Panic at the App Store” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/28

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

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131:58

“AI #100: Meet the New Boss” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/23

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

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67:47

“On DeepSeek’s r1” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/22

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

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34:04

“Sleep, Diet, Exercise and GLP-1 Drugs” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/21

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. What Passes for Skepticism on GLP-1s. The Joy of Willpower. Talking Supply. Talking Price. GLP-1 Inhibitors Help Solve All Your Problems. Dieting the Hard Way. Nutrients. Are Vegetables a Scam?. Government

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112:31

“AI #99: Farewell to Biden” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/16

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

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32:06

“NYC Congestion Pricing: Early Days” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/14

People have to pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. What happened so far?Table of Contents Congestion Pricing Comes to NYC. How Much Is Traffic Improving?. And That's Terrible?. You Mad, Bro. All Aboard. Time is Money. Solving For the Equilibrium. Enforcement and License Plates. Uber Eats the Traffic. We Can Do Even Better Via Congestion Tolls. Abundance Agenda Fever Dream. The Lighter Side. Congestion Pricing Comes to NYC We’ve now had over a week of congestion pricing in New York

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49:21

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s 4th Podcast With Tyler Cowen” by...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/10

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’

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72:23

“AI #98: World Ends With Six Word Story” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/09

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 Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. It knows where you

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75:37

“AI #97: 4” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/02

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

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29:38

“DeekSeek v3: The Six Million Dollar Model” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/12/31

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

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77:12

“o3, Oh My” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/12/30

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

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97:37

“AIs Will Increasingly Fake Alignment” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/12/24

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

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54:36

“Monthly Roundup #25: December 2024” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/12/23

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

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81:26

“AI #95: o1 Joins the API” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/12/23

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

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19:25

“A Matter of Taste” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/12/18

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

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21:04

“The Second Gemini” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/12/17

Table of ContentsTrust the Chef. Do Not Trust the Marketing Department. Mark that Bench. Going Multimodal. The Art of Deep Research. Project Mariner the Web Agent. Project Astra the Universal Assistant. Project Jules the Code Agent. Gemini Will Aid You on Your Quest. Reactions to Gemini Flash 2.0. 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

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51:07

“AIs Will Increasingly Attempt Shenanigans” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/12/16

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

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42:52

“AI #93: Happy Tuesday” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/12/04

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 Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. The price is fixed, so share and enjoy. Dare Not Speak Its Name. David Mayer. David Mayer! Guido Scorza? Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. It's a flop. Huh, Upgrades. Cohere, and reports on Claude writing

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