PODCAST

LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

All Episodes

39:18

“AI #29: Take a Deep Breath” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/09/14

It works for the AI. Take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step was the strongest AI-generated custom instruction. You, a human, even have lungs and the ability to take an actual deep breath. You can also think step by step. This week was especially friendly to such a proposal, allowing the shortest AI weekly to date and hopefully setting a new standard. It would be great to take some time for more long-term oriented posts on AI but also on things like the Jones Act, for catching my

en-gb

27:26

“Startup Roundup #1: Happy Demo Day” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/09/12

There were a bunch of discussions recently related to issues surrounding Y-Combinator, related as usual to their annual demo day. It seemed worth splitting them off into a post. Bidders at Auction Mostly Think Prices Are Too High YC is in session, so all the usual talk is back. Paul Graham: As happens every single YC batch, investors complain that the valuations are too high, and the startups raise anyway. Kush: Is there any specific reason why you think this happens? Paul Graham:

en-gb

81:04

“AI#28: Watching and Waiting” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/09/07

We are, as Tyler Cowen has noted, in a bit of a lull. Those of us ahead of the curve have gotten used to GPT-4 and Claude-2 and MidJourney. Functionality and integration are expanding, but on a relatively slow pace. Most people remain blissfully unaware, allowing me to try out new explanations on them tabula rosa, and many others say it was all hype. Which they will keep saying, until something forces them not to, most likely Gemini, although it is worth noting the skepticism I am seeing regarding

en-gb

101:24

“Monthly Roundup #10: September 2023” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/09/06

It’s that time again. Here’s all the news and items of interest that isn’t something else. Things that didn’t make it in to try and stand them on their own include whether America or France has better food and various claims related to Y-Combinator, in addition to the usual additional categories of energy, childhood, fertility and housing. Bad News All publicity is good publicity, act accordingly and solve for the equilibrium edition. OnlyFans creators are paying meme aggregation

en-gb

16:34

“Who Has the Best Food?” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/09/05

It is a fun question going around the internet this past week, so here we go. In particular, people focused on the question of France vs. America. As one would expect, those on the French side think those on the American side are crazy, it is insulting to even consider this a question. Those on the American side like food. All of this is always just, like, your opinion, man, or at least that’s the story. Checking the Survey Data YouGov asked back in 2019, got the following answers across

en-gb

86:37

“AI #27: Portents of Gemini” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/31

By all reports, and as one would expect, Google’s Gemini looks to be substantially superior to GPT-4. We now have more details on that, and also word that Google plans to deploy it in December, Manifold gives it 82% to happen this year and similar probability of being superior to GPT-4 on release. I indeed expect this to happen on both counts. This is not too long from now, but also this is AI #27 and Bard still sucks, Google has been taking its sweet time getting its act together. So now we have

en-gb

65:56

“Dating Roundup #1: This is Why You’re Single” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/29

Developments around relationships and dating have a relatively small speed premium, so I figured I would wait until I had a full post worth of them. Indeed I now present such a post, in which I present several theories as to why so many of you might still be single. While I am my usual opinionated self, I am not going to be offering a section of my list of related Good Advice. That would be its own project, which may or may not happen at some time in the future. There is still much in the way

en-gb

62:28

“AI #26: Fine Tuning Time” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/24

GPT-3.5 fine tuning is here. GPT-4 fine tuning is only a few months away. It is about to get a lot easier to get a powerful system that does what you… --- First published: August 24th, 2023 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kLa3HmkesF5w3MFEY/ai-26-fine-tuning-time --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

en-gb

12:55

“The Road to Mazedom” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/21

Previous post: How Escape From Immoral Mazes Sequence begins here: Moloch Hasn’t Won The previous posts mostly took mazes as given. As an individual, one’s ability to fight any large system is limited. That does not mean our individual decisions do not matter. They do matter. They add up. Mostly our choice is a basic one. Lend our strength to that which we wish to be free from. Or not do so. Even that is difficult. The methods of doing so are unclear. Mazes are ubiquitous. Not lending our

en-gb

16:28

“Summary of and Thoughts on the Hotz/Yudkowsky...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/18

George Hotz and Eliezer Yudkowsky debated on YouTube for 90 minutes, with some small assists from moderator Dwarkesh Patel. It seemed worthwhile to post my notes on this on their own.I thought this went quite well for the first half or so, then things went increasingly off the rails in the second half, and Hotz gets into questions where he didn’t have a chance to reflect and prepare, especially around cooperation and the prisoner’s dilemma.First, some general notes, then specific notes I took while

en-gb

66:58

“AI #25: Inflection Point” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/17

Inflection.ai is the latest AI lab whose CEO is advocating for regulation of AI. I discuss that under the Quest for Sane Regulation. Amazon and Apple are incrementally stepping up their AI game. Hotz and Yudkowsky debate whether AI is existentially risky, cover all the usual bases with mixed results but do so in good faith. We have more discussion about whether GPT-4 is creative, and whether it can reason. Mostly we get the exact opposite of the title, more of the same. Note: My posts get made

en-gb

16:31

“Summary of and Thoughts on the Holtz/Yudkowsky...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/16

George Holtz and Eliezer Yudkowsky debated on YouTube for 90 minutes, with some small assists from moderator Dwarkesh Patel. It seemed worthwhile to post my notes on this on their own. I thought this went quite well for the first half or so, then things went increasingly off the rails in the second half, and Holtz gets into questions where he didn’t have a chance to reflect and prepare, especially around cooperation and the prisoner’s dilemma. First, some general notes, then specific notes I

en-gb

80:04

“AI #24: Week of the Podcast” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/10

In addition to all the written developments, this was a banner week for podcasts. I would highlight four to consider listening to. Dario Amodei of Anthropic went on The Lunar Society to talk to Dwarkesh Patel. We got our best insight so far into where Dario’s head is at, Dwarkesh is excellent at getting people to open up like this and really dive into details. Jan Leike, OpenAI’s head of alignment, went on 80,000 hours with Robert Wiblin. If you want to know what is up with the whole

en-gb

104:10

“Monthly Roundup #9: August 2023” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/07

What a month. So much to cover. What this post does not cover beyond this introduction is the biggest news story of the month, a potential room temperature superconductor. If this discovery is real, it could be transformative. Think of the potential. We could be so back. Chances are that instead it is over, but even a small chance of something this big is huge. Even if it ends up being all over, it was amazing to see people around the world come together and do science to this to try and

en-gb

73:34

“AI #23: Fundamental Problems with RLHF” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/03

After several jam-packed weeks, things slowed down to allow everyone to focus on the potential room temperature superconductor, check Polymarket to see how likely it is we are so back and bet real money, or Manifold for chats and better graphs and easier but much smaller trading. The main thing I would highlight this week are an excellent paper laying out many of the fundamental difficulties with RLHF, and a systematic new exploit of current LLMs that seems to reliably defeat RLHF. I’d also

en-gb

70:29

“Barbieheimer: Across the Dead Reckoning” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/08/01

SPOILER WARNING: This post, after a brief spoiler-free review section, will contain full spoilers for Oppenheimer, Barbie and Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, and some for Across the Spiderverse. Movies are so back. While they are having their Barbieheimer moment, it seems worthwhile to gather thoughts of myself and others on both movies, and also mention two other recent pictures. First, I’ll offer various levels of spoiler-free review of all four movies, then get into the

en-gb

75:26

“AI #19: Hofstadter, Sutskever, Leike” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/07/31

The big news of the week is OpenAI introducing the Superalignment Taskforce. OpenAI is pledging 20% of compute secured to date towards a four year effort to solve the core technical challenges of superintelligence alignment. They plan to share the results broadly. Co-founder and OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever will lead the effort alongside Head of Alignment Jan Leike, and they are hiring to fill out the team. That is serious firepower. The devil, as always, is in the details. Will this be

en-gb

31:16

“Llama We Doing This Again?” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/07/26

I’ve finally had an opportunity to gather the available information about Llama-2 and take an in-depth look at the system card.My conclusion is that Llama-2 looks to score about 3.4 GPTs, with coding as its relative weak point. The system card tries to claim better performance than that in some places in rather misleading fashion, but in other places it does not make such claims.For its intended purposes it is now the best open source model, while remaining well behind closed source models. There is

en-gb

17:15

“Anthropic Observations” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/07/25

Dylan Matthews had in depth Vox profile of Anthropic, which I recommend reading in full if you have not yet done so. This post covers that one.Anthropic HypothesisThe post starts by describing an experiment. Evan Hubinger is attempting to create a version of Claude that will optimize in part for a secondary goal (in this case ‘use the word “paperclip” as many times as possible’) in the hopes of showing that RLHF won’t be able to get rid of the behavior. Co-founder Jared Kaplan warns that perhaps

en-gb

83:12

“Monthly Roundup #8: July 2023” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2023/07/22

As always, plenty of non-AI things are happening, most of which do not justify their own posts. This is where all of those go. Skimming for things relevant to your interests is encouraged.Before I begin, a Point of Order: I plan to have a post later regarding the rate limitation and disruption on Twitter, which disrupts many features of Tweetdeck and means that if you aren’t logged in Twitter links no longer work. Adjustments will need to be made if the situation is not fixed very soon, despite my

en-gb

306 results

LessWrong posts by zvi

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Linux in the Ham Shack

Black Sparrow Media

Data Engineering Podcast

Tobias Macey

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

Reflections

Livewire Labs