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LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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75:14

“AI #80: Never Have I Ever ” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/09/10

(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

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38:27

“Economics Roundup #3 ” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/09/10

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

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35:59

“On the UBI Paper ” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/09/03

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

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39:39

“SB 1047: Final Takes and Also AB 3211 ” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/08/27

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

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62:04

“AI #78: Some Welcome Calm ” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/08/22

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

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102:49

“Guide to SB 1047 ” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/08/20

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

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101:32

“AI #77: A Few Upgrades ” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/08/20

[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

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76:40

“Monthly Roundup #21: August 2024 ” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/08/20

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

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101:13

“Monthly Roundup #19: June 2024” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/06/25

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

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36:51

“The Gemini 1.5 Report” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/05/31

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

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81:01

“AI #65: I Spy With My AI” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/05/23

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: Schumer's AI report and proposal. This is definitely RTFB. Don’t assume anything until then. Tyler Cowen's rather bold claim that AI Safety died in

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71:55

“GPT-4o My and Google I/O Day” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/05/16

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

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86:38

“AI #64: Feel the Mundane Utility” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/05/16

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

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29:33

“I Got 95 Theses But a Glitch Ain’t One” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/05/09

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

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118:37

“AI #59: Model Updates” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/04/11

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)

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58:15

“On the 2nd CWT with Jonathan Haidt” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/04/05

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

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60:29

“Fertility Roundup #3” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/04/02

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

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122:57

“AI #57: All the AI News That’s Fit to Print” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/03/28

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

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43:48

“Economics Roundup #1” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/03/26

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

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10:00

“A Tale of Two Restaurant Types” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2024/02/21

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

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