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LessWrong

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17:55

“AGI Safety & Alignment @ Google DeepMind is hiring”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/17

The AGI Safety & Alignment Team (ASAT) at Google DeepMind (GDM) is hiring! Please apply to the Research Scientist and Research Engineer roles. Strong software engineers with some ML background should also apply (to the Research Engineer role). Our initial batch of hiring will focus more on hiring engineers, but we expect to continue to use the applications we receive for future hiring this year, which we expect will be more evenly split. Please do apply even if e.g. you’re only available in the

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142:39

“A History of the Future, 2025-2040” by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/17

This is an all-in-one crosspost of a scenario I originally published in three parts on my blog (No Set Gauge). Links to the originals: A History of the Future, 2025-2027A History of the Future, 2027-2030A History of the Future, 2030-2040 Thanks to Luke Drago, Duncan McClements, and Theo Horsley for comments on all three parts. 2025-2027Below is part 1 of an extended scenario describing how the future might go if current trends in AI continue. The scenario is deliberately extremely specific: it's

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2:17

“Thermodynamic entropy = Kolmogorov complexity” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/17

This is a link post.Direct PDF link for non-subscribersInformation theory must precede probability theory, and not be based on it. By the very essence of this discipline, the foundations of information theory have a finite combinatorial character.- Andrey KolmogorovMany alignment researchers borrow intuitions from thermodynamics: entropy relates to information, which relates to learning and epistemology. These connections were first revealed by Szilárd's resolution of Maxwell's famous thought

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4:35

“Celtic Knots on Einstein Lattice” by Ben

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/17

I recently posted about doing Celtic Knots on a Hexagonal lattice ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tgi3iBTKk4YfBQxGH/celtic-knots-on-a-hex-lattice ).There were many nice suggestions in the comments. @Shankar Sivarajan suggested that I could look at a Einstien lattice instead, which sounded especially interesting. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_problem . )The idea of the Einstein tile is that it can tile the plane (like a hexagon or square can), but it does so in a way where the pattern of

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4:41

“Gauging Interest for a Learning-Theoretic Agenda...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/16

I'm planning to organize a mentorship programme for people who want to become researchers working on the Learning-Theoretic Agenda (LTA). I'm still figuring out the detailed plan, the logistics and the funding, but here's an outline of how it would looks like. To express interest, submit this form. Why Apply?I believe that the risk of a global catastrophe due to unaligned artificial superintelligence is the most pressing problem of our time. I also believe that the LTA is our last best chance to

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1:55

“It’s been ten years. I propose HPMOR Anniversary...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/16

On March 14th, 2015, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality made its final post. Wrap parties were held all across the world to read the ending and talk about the story, in some cases sparking groups that would continue to meet for years. It's been ten years, and think that's a good reason for a round of parties. If you were there a decade ago, maybe gather your friends and talk about how things have changed. If you found HPMOR recently and you're excited about it (surveys suggest it's still

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28:43

“Microplastics: Much Less Than You Wanted To Know” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/16

Microplastics have been in the news and the local rationalist discord with increasing frequency over the past few months. Of note are Nat Friedman's PlasticList, and this 2024 preprint demonstrating that some human brains are now 0.5% plastic by weight. There was also an article on black plastic cookware that was quickly retracted[1]. The volume of discussion made it clear that few people seem to have a clear understanding of what we actually know about microplastics, so we had a meetup about it

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13:29

“A computational no-coincidence principle” by Eric...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/14

Audio note: this article contains 134 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. In a recent paper in Annals of Mathematics and Philosophy, Fields medalist Timothy Gowers asks why mathematicians sometimes believe that unproved statements are likely to be true. For example, it is unknown whether <span>_pi_</span> is a normal number (which, roughly speaking, means that every digit appears in

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3:44

“A short course on AGI safety from the GDM Alignment...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/14

This is a link post.We are excited to release a short course on AGI safety for students, researchers and professionals interested in this topic. The course offers a concise and accessible introduction to AI alignment, consisting of short recorded talks and exercises (75 minutes total) with an accompanying slide deck and exercise workbook. It covers alignment problems we can expect as AI capabilities advance, and our current approach to these problems (on technical and governance levels). If you

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24:37

“The Mask Comes Off: A Trio of Tales” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/14

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

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23:48

“Ambiguous out-of-distribution generalization on an...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/14

Audio note: this article contains 136 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. IntroductionIt's now well known that simple neural network models often "grok" algorithmic tasks. That is, when trained for many epochs on a subset of the full input space, the model quickly attains perfect train accuracy and then, much later, near-perfect test accuracy. In the former phase, the model memorizes the training set;

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31:56

“≤10-year Timelines Remain Unlikely Despite DeepSeek...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/14

Audio note: this article contains 32 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. [Thanks to Steven Byrnes for feedback and the idea for section §3.1. Also thanks to Justice from the LW feedback team.]Remember this? Or this? The images are from WaitButWhy, but the idea was voiced by many prominent alignment people, including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom. The argument is that the difference in brain

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86:58

“Self-dialogue: Do behaviorist rewards make scheming...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/14

IntroductionI have long felt confused about the question of whether brain-like AGI would be likely to scheme, given behaviorist rewards. …Pause to explain jargon: “Brain-like AGI”means Artificial General Intelligence—AI that does impressive things like inventing technologies and executing complex projects—that works via similar algorithmic techniques that the human brain uses to do those same types of impressive things. See Intro Series §1.3.2. I claim that brain-like AGI is a not-yet-invented

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3:59

“Murder plots are infohazards” by Chris Monteiro

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/13

Hi allI've been hanging around the rationalist-sphere for many years now, mostly writing about transhumanism, until things started to change in 2016 after my Wikipedia writing habit shifted from writing up cybercrime topics, through to actively debunking the numerous dark web urban legends.After breaking into what I believe to be the most successful ever fake murder for hire website ever created on the dark web, I was able to capture information about people trying to kill people all around the

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7:27

“How do we solve the alignment problem?” by Joe...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/13

(Audio version here (read by the author), or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.)We want the benefits that superintelligent AI agents could create. And some people are trying hard to build such agents. I expect efforts like this to succeed – and maybe, very soon. But superintelligent AI agents might also be difficult to control. They are, to us, as adults to children, except much more so. In the same direction, relative to us, as advanced aliens; as demi-gods; as humans relative to

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14:47

“Extended analogy between humans, corporations, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/13

There are three main ways to try to understand and reason about powerful future AGI agents: Using formal models designed to predict the behavior of powerful general agents, such as expected utility maximization and variants thereof (explored in game theory and decision theory).Comparing & contrasting powerful future AGI agents with their weak, not-so-general, not-so-agentic AIs that actually exist today.Comparing & contrasting powerful future AGI agents with currently-existing powerful

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8:00

“Virtue signaling, and the ‘humans-are-wonderful’...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/13

There's a common thread that runs through a lot of irrational human behavior that I've recognized: People often accept surface explanations of their own and others' habits when nefarious explanations would be better fitting.Our media generally depicts humans as being far more inclined to proactively help others (and avoid incentive traps) than humans are in real life, to a degree that seems unaccounted for even when you consider storytelling purposes.People tend to trust that organizations like

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12:31

“My model of what is going on with LLMs” by Cole Wyeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/13

Epistemic status: You probably already know if you want to read this kind of post, but in case you have not decided: my impression is that people are acting very confused about what we can conclude about scaling LLMs from the evidence, and I believe my mental model cuts through a lot of this confusion - I have tried to rebut what I believe to be misconceptions in a scattershot way, but will attempt to collect the whole picture here. I am a theoretical computer scientist and this is a theory. Soon I

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7:17

“Skepticism towards claims about the views of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/13

Introduction: some contemporary AI governance contextIt's a confusing time in AI governance. Several countries’ governments recently changed hands. DeepSeek and other technical developments have called into question certain assumptions about the strategic landscape. Political discourse has swung dramatically away from catastrophic risk and toward framings of innovation and national competitiveness.Meanwhile, the new governments have issued statements of policy, and AI companies (mostly) continue to

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15:21

“Why you maybe should lift weights, and How to.” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/02/13

Who this post is for? Someone who either: Wonders if they should start lifting weights, and could be convinced of doing so.Wants to lift weights, and doesn't know where to begin. If this is you, you can skip this first section, though I'm guessing you don't know all the benefits yet. The WHY Benefits of ANY EXERCISE: Great mental benefits. I personally have ADHD and lifting gives me an attention boost similar to my Adderall. I'm not talking about the long term abstract of being happy that you are

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