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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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12:50

“Oppression and production are competing explanations...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/07

You would like to go to the beach tomorrow if it's sunny, but aren't sure whether it will rain; if it rains, you'd rather go to the movies. So you resolve to put on a swimsuit and a raincoat, and thus attired, attend the beach in the morning and the movies in the afternoon, regardless of the weather. Something is wrong with that decision process,[1] and it's also wrong with the decisions made by many supposedly systemic approaches to philanthropy: it does not engage with real and potentially

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25:27

“What Indicators Should We Watch to Disambiguate AGI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/06

(Cross-post from https://amistrongeryet.substack.com/p/are-we-on-the-brink-of-agi, lightly edited for LessWrong. The original has a lengthier introduction and a bit more explanation of jargon.)No one seems to know whether transformational AGI is coming within a few short years. Or rather, everyone seems to know, but they all have conflicting opinions. Have we entered into what will in hindsight be not even the early stages, but actually the middle stage, of the mad tumbling rush into singularity? Or

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8:35

“Estimating the benefits of a new flu drug (BXM)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/06

IntroductionH5N1 is a looming threat, making regular headlines. The CDC has identified 66 U.S. human cases as of January 4, 2024. Scott Alexander has a recent post outlining the situation.There are several FDA-approved prescription antiviral flu drugs. The newest, using a novel mechanism of action called "cap-snatching," is baloxavir marboxil (BXM, brand name Xofluza). It is on-patent and substantially more expensive than oseltamivir (OST, brand name Tamiflu, now available as a generic).I built a

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78:49

“How will we update about scheming?” by ryan_greenblatt

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/06

I mostly work on risks from scheming (that is, misaligned, power-seeking AIs that plot against their creators such as by faking alignment). Recently, I (and co-authors) released "Alignment Faking in Large Language Models", which provides empirical evidence for some components of the scheming threat model. One question that's really important is how likely scheming is. But it's also really important to know how much we expect this uncertainty to be resolved by various key points in the future. I

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1:13

“Sam Altman - Reflections” by Nikola Jurkovic

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/06

This is a link post.We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes. We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here

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24:19

“The Laws of Large Numbers” by Dmitry Vaintrob

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/05

Audio note: this article contains 94 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. IntroductionIn this short post we'll discuss fine-grained variants of the law of large numbers beyond the central limit theorem. In particular we'll introduce cumulants as a crucial (and very nice) invariant of probability distributions to track. We'll also briefly discusses parallels with physics. This post should be interesting

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23:27

“1. Meet the Players: Value Diversity” by Allison...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/05

Civilization is an inherited game shaped by those before you. You start this game as a product of previous iterations: “Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all

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22:13

“Reasons for and against working on technical AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/05

I am about to start working on a frontier lab safety team. This post presents a varied set of perspectives that I collected and thought through before accepting my offer. Thanks to the many people I spoke to about this. ForYou're close to the action. As AI continues to heat up, being closer to the action seems increasingly important. Being at a frontier lab allows you to better understand how frontier AI development actually happens and make better predictions about how it might play out in future

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2:16

“Maximizing Communication, not Traffic” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/05

As someone who writes for fun, I don't need to get people onto my site: If I write a post and some people are able to get the core idea just from the title or a tweet-length summary, great! I can include the full contents of my posts in my RSS feed and on FB, because so what if people read the whole post there and never click though to my site? It would be different if I funded my writing through ads (maximize time on site to maximize impressions) or subscriptions (get the

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25:12

“Capital Ownership Will Not Prevent Human...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/05

Crossposted from my personal blog. I was inspired to cross-post this here given the discussion that this post on the role of capital in an AI future elicited.When discussing the future of AI, I semi-often hear an argument along the lines that in a slow takeoff world, despite AIs automating increasingly more of the economy, humanity will remain in the driving seat because of its ownership of capital. This world posits one where humanity effectively becomes a rentier class living well off the vast

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14:51

“Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/04

The anonymous review of The Anti-Politics Machine published on Astral Codex X focuses on a case study of a World Bank intervention in Lesotho, and tells a story about it:The World Bank staff drew reasonable-seeming conclusions from sparse data, and made well-intentioned recommendations on that basis. However, the recommended programs failed, due to factors that would have been revealed by a careful historical and ethnographic investigation of the area in question. Therefore, we should spend more

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11:14

“Human study on AI spear phishing campaigns” by Simon...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/04

TL;DR: We ran a human subject study on whether language models can successfully spear-phish people. We use AI agents built from GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to search the web for available information on a target and use this for highly personalized phishing messages. We achieved a click-through rate of above 50% for our AI-generated phishing emails. Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00586This post is intended to be a brief summary of the main findings, these are some key insights we gained: AI

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34:37

“The Intelligence Curse” by lukedrago

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/04

“Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” – Charlie MungerEconomists are used to modeling AI as an important tool, so they don’t get how it could make people irrelevant. Past technological revolutions have driven human potential further. The agrarian revolution birthed civilizations; the industrial revolution let us scale them.But AGI looks a lot more like coal or oil than the plow, steam engine, or computer. Like those resources: It will require immensely wealthy actors to discover

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22:31

“Introducing Squiggle AI” by ozziegooen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/03

We’re releasing Squiggle AI, a tool that generates probabilistic models using the Squiggle language. This can provide early cost-effectiveness models and other kinds of probabilistic programs. No prior Squiggle knowledge is required to use Squiggle AI. Simply ask for whatever you want to estimate, and the results should be fairly understandable. The Squiggle programming language acts as an adjustable backend, but isn’t mandatory to learn. Beyond being directly useful, we’re interested in Squiggle

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21:22

“The subset parity learning problem: much more than...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/03

Audio note: this article contains 108 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Imagine that you’re looking for buried treasure on a large desert island, worth a billion dollars. You don’t have a map, but a mysterious hermit offers you a box with a button to help find the treasure. Each time you press the button, it will tell you either “warmer” or “colder”. But there's a catch. With probability

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3:44

“My January alignment theory Nanowrimo” by Dmitry...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/03

This is a quick announcement/commitment post:I've been working at the PIBBSS Horizon Scanning team (with Lauren Greenspan and Lucas Teixeira), where we have been working on reviewing some "basic-science-flavored" alignment and interpretability research and doing talent scouting (see this intro doc we wrote so far, which we split off from an unfinished larger review). I have also been working on my own research. Aside from active projects, I've accumulated a bit of a backlog of technical writeups and

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13:10

“Alignment Is NOT All You Need” by Adam Jones

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/03

AI risk discussions often focus on malfunctions, misuse, and misalignment. But this often misses other key challenges from advanced AI systems: Coordination: Race dynamics may encourage unsafe AI deployment, even from ‘safe’ actors.Power: First-movers with advanced AI could gain permanent military, economic, and/or political dominance.Economics: When AI generates all wealth, humans have no leverage to ensure they are treated well.These are all huge hurdles, and need solutions before advanced AI

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11:38

“Practicing Bayesian Epistemology with ‘Two Boys’...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/03

The PuzzleThere's a simple Monty Hall adjacent probability puzzle that goes like this:Puzzle 1 I have two children, at least one of whom is a boy. What is the probability that both children are boys?A more complex variation recently went viral on Twitter:Puzzle 2 I have two children, (at least) one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday — what is the probability that both children are boys?Then Isaac King tweeted an even more complex variation:Puzzle 3 I have two children, at least one of whom is a boy

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7:47

“Preference Inversion” by Benquo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/02

You asked why people who "believe in" avoiding nonmarital sex so frequently engage in and report badly regretting it. Instead of responding within your frame, I'm going to lay out the interpretive framework that seems most natural to me to use for this problem, and then answer in those terms.We can call things or actions good or bad, right or wrong, with reference to some intention that both the speaker and listener have in mind. For instance, a sturdier and sharper knife is a better one, because

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33:24

“Grammars, rule combinatorics, and generalization” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/02

Audio note: this article contains 55 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Introduction This is the first installment of my January writing project. We will look at generative neural networks from the framework of (probabilistic) "formal grammars", specifically focusing on building a complex grammar out of simple “rule grammars”. This turns out to lead to a nice, and relatively non-technical way of

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