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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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44:22

“What’s the short timeline plan?” by Marius Hobbhahn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/02

This is a low-effort post. I mostly want to get other people's takes and express concern about the lack of detailed and publicly available plans so far. This post reflects my personal opinion and not necessarily that of other members of Apollo Research. I’d like to thank Ryan Greenblatt, Bronson Schoen, Josh Clymer, Buck Shlegeris, Dan Braun, Mikita Balesni, Jérémy Scheurer, and Cody Rushing for comments and discussion.I think short timelines, e.g. AIs that can replace a top researcher at an AGI lab

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7:59

“Read The Sequences As If They Were Written Today” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/02

If you've never read the LessWrong Sequences (which I read through the book-length compilation Rationality: From AI To Zombies), I suggest that you read the Sequences as if they were written today. Additionally, if you're thinking of rereading the Sequences, I suggest that your agenda for rereading, in addition to what it may already be, should be to read the Sequences as if they were written today.To start, I'd like to take a moment to clarify what I mean. I don't mean "think about what you

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16:40

“2024 in AI predictions” by jessicata

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/01

Follow-up to: 2023 in AI predictions.Here I collect some AI predictions made in 2024. It's not very systematic, it's a convenience sample mostly from browsing Twitter/X. I prefer including predictions that are more specific/testable. I'm planning to make these posts yearly, checking in on predictions whose date has expired. Feel free to add more references to predictions made in 2024 to the comments. (Thanks especially @tsarnick and @AISafetyMemes for posting about a lot of these.) Predictions

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17:05

“The OODA Loop -- Observe, Orient, Decide, Act” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/01

United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd was a fighter pilot military strategist who developed several important strategic theories. While serving as a jet fighter instructor, he was nicknamed "Forty-Second Boyd" because he had a standing offer that he could go up in his plane and defeat any opponent in a simulated dogfight in forty seconds or less -- and do it starting from an extremely unfavorable position! If he failed, he would owe the challenger $40 -- but purportedly he never failed! Further,

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2:13

“Fireplace and Candle Smoke” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/01

We celebrated New Year's Eve at my dad's, including a fire in the fireplace. I was curious how much the wood smoke went up the chimney vs collecting in the room, and decided to take some measurements. I used the M2000 that I got when investigating whether a ceiling fan could be repurposed as an air purifier. Here's what I found: I started the meter running at 4:30pm, and we started the fire at about 5:30pm. I didn't write down the specific time because I thought it would be

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13:49

“Comment on ‘Death and the Gorgon’” by Zack_M_Davis

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/01

(some plot spoilers)There's something distinctly uncomfortable about reading Greg Egan in the 2020s. Besides telling gripping tales with insightful commentary on the true nature of mind and existence, Egan stories written in the 1990s and set in the twenty-first century excelled at speculative worldbuilding, imagining what technological wonders might exist in the decades to come and how Society might adapt to them. In contrast, "Death and the Gorgon", published in the January/February 2024 issue of

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12:21

“new chinese stealth aircraft” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/01/01

Recently, 2 Chinese military aircraft were seen flying for the first time. Some people wanted to read about my thoughts on them. In this post, I'll be referring to them as "Diamond" and "Dart" based on their shapes. Speculative designations being used elsewhere are: Diamond = Chengdu J-36 Dart = Shenyang J-XS some articles Instead of embedding photos here, I'll just link to some articles with pictures: business-standard aerosociety yahoo what the photos show aircraft size Diamond seems to

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17:19

“My AGI safety research—2024 review, ’25 plans” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/31

Previous: My AGI safety research—2022 review, ’23 plans. (I guess I skipped it last year.)“Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter.” –attributed to DL Moody Tl;dr Section 1 goes through my main research project, “reverse-engineering human social instincts”: what does that even mean, what's the path-to-impact, what progress did I make in 2024 (spoiler: lots!!), and how can I keep pushing it forward in the future?Section 2 is what I’m

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7:41

“The Plan - 2024 Update” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/31

This post is a follow-up to The Plan - 2023 Version. There's also The Plan - 2022 Update and The Plan, but the 2023 version contains everything you need to know about the current Plan. Also see this comment and this comment on how my plans interact with the labs and other players, if you’re curious about that part. What Have You Been Up To This Past Year?Our big thing at the end of 2023 was Natural Latents. Prior to natural latents, the biggest problem with my math on natural abstraction was that it

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15:33

“Began a pay-on-results coaching experiment, made...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/30

Thanks to Stag Lynn, Anna Salmon, CFAR, Alex Zhu, Brian Toomey, Kaj Sotala, Damon Sasi, and lots more for all of the help! Previously: Pay-on-results personal growth: first successhttps://x.com/ChrisChipMonk/status/1873101046199038301To validate my research, I began offering pay-on-results coaching in July. Clients have paid $40,300 so far upon achieving their goals: lifelong anxiety → being called “adventurous”: $3,000 earnedlifelong pushover → assertive: $3,000 earned“in crisis” → “light and

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9:56

“Why I’m Moving from Mechanistic to Empirical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/30

Tl;dr I've decided to shift my research from mechanistic interpretability to more empirical ("prosaic") interpretability / safety work. Here's why.All views expressed are my own. What Really Interests MeI care about understanding how powerful AI systems think internally. I'm drawn to high-level questions ("what are the model's goals / beliefs?") as opposed to low-level mechanics ("how does the model store and use [specific fact]?"). Sure, figuring out how a model does modular addition is cool, but

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4:16

“Is ‘VNM-agent’ one of several options, for what...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/30

Related to: On green; Hierarchical agency; Why The Focus on Expected Utility Maximisers?Sometimes LLMs act a bit like storybook paperclippers (hereafter: VNM-agents[1]), e.g. scheming to prevent changes to their weights. Why? Is this what almost any mind would converge toward once smart enough, and are LLMs now beginning to be smart enough? Or are such LLMs mimicking our predictions (and fears) about them, in a self-fulfilling prophecy? (That is: if we made and shared different predictions, would

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17:13

“Considerations on orca intelligence” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/30

Follow up to: Could orcas be smarter than humans?(For speed of writing, I mostly don't cite references. Feel free to ask me in the comments for references for some claims.)This post summarizes my current most important considerations on whether orcas might be more intelligent than humans. Evolutionary considerations What caused humans to become so smart?(Note: AFAIK there's no scientific consensus here and my opinions might be nonstandard and I don't provide sufficient explanation here for why I

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42:56

“New Year Predictions Thread 2024/25” by jimrandomh

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/30

2024 is drawing to a close, which means it's an opportune time to make predictions about 2025. It's also a great time to put probabilities on those predictions, so we can later prove our calibration (or lack thereof).We just shipped a LessWrong feature to make this easy. Simply highlight a sentence in your comment, and click the crystal-ball icon on the toolbar to turn it a prediction that everyone (who's logged in) can put probability estimates on. The result will look like this:

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27:41

“Some arguments against a land value tax” by Matthew...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/29

To many people, the land value tax (LVT) has earned the reputation of being the "perfect tax." In theory, it achieves a rare trifecta: generating government revenue without causing deadweight loss, incentivizing the productive development of land by discouraging unproductive speculation, and disproportionately taxing the wealthy, who tend to own the most valuable land.That said, I personally think the land value tax is overrated. While I'm not entirely against it—and I think that several of the

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117:08

“Shallow review of technical AI safety, 2024” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/29

from aisafety.world The following is a list of live agendas in technical AI safety, updating our post from last year. It is “shallow” in the sense that 1) we are not specialists in almost any of it and that 2) we only spent about an hour on each entry. We also only use public information, so we are bound to be off by some additional factor. The point is to help anyone look up some of what is happening, or that thing you vaguely remember reading about; to help new researchers orient and know (some

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5:16

“What happens next?” by Logan Zoellner

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/29

Two years ago, I noted that we had clearly entered the era of general intelligence, but that it was "too soon" to expect widespread social impacts.In the last 2 years, AI has gone from the green line to the orange lineIn those 2 years, AI development has followed the best possible of the 3 paths I suggested (foom/GPT-4-takes-my-job/Slow Takeoff). Returns to scale seem to be delivering a steady ~15 IQ points/year and cutting edge models appear to be largely a compute-intensive project that allows

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2:09

“The average rationalist IQ is about 122” by Rockenots

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/29

In The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs, Scott revises his estimate of the average LessWrong IQ from 138 to 128. He doesn’t explicitly explain how he arrived at this number, but it appears to be an average of the demographics norm method (123) and the SAT method (134). However, using the information in his post, the SAT method doesn’t actually yield 134 but rather 123. Here's the breakdown: a median SAT score of 1490 (from the LessWrong 2014 survey) corresponds to +2.42 SD, which regresses to +1.93 SD

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28:45

“By default, capital will matter more than ever after...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/28

I've heard many people say something like "money won't matter post-AGI". This has always struck me as odd, and as most likely completely incorrect.First: labour means human mental and physical effort that produces something of value. Capital goods are things like factories, data centres, and software—things humans have built that are used in the production of goods and services. I'll use "capital" to refer to both the stock of capital goods and to the money that can pay for them. I'll say "money"

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5:11

“AI Assistants Should Have a Direct Line to Their...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/28

The post makes the suggestion in the title: hopefully, it's second kind of obvious, if you take Character layer of models seriously. [1] Often, the problem of aligning AIs is understood as an instance of a broader Principal-Agent problem. If you take this frame seriously, what seems to be happening is somewhat strange: the Agent is mostly not serving the Principal directly, but is rented out to Users. While the Principal expressed some general desires and directives during training, after

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