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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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4:23

“What’s your personal totalizing and self-consistent...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/28

Every major author who has influenced me has "his own totalising and self-consistent worldview/philosophy". This list includes Paul Graham, Isaac Asimov, Joel Spolsky, Brett McKay, Shakyamuni, Chuck Palahniuk, Bryan Caplan, qntm, and, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky, among many others. I tend to write obliquely. This can make for good pedagogy, but also makes it easy to hide muddled thinking. In this post, I'll attempt to lay out my own worldview and philosophy. If you have one too, then it's a good

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28:23

“Greedy-Advantage-Aware RLHF” by sej2020

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/28

Audio note: this article contains 81 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Greedy-Advantage-Aware RLHF addresses the negative side effects from misspecified reward functions problem in language modeling domains. In a simple setting, the algorithm improves on traditional RLHF methods by producing agents that have a reduced tendency to exploit misspecified reward functions. I also detect the presence of

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6:42

“If all trade is voluntary, then what is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/27

Capitalism is a force that has lifted billions out of poverty, where even poor remote villagers enjoy luxuries that would have been unimaginable to medieval kings. When someone takes a job, even the worst job, it's because both parties expect mutual gain. And yet companies routinely get accused of exploiting their workers for offering low pay and bad conditions, even if the pay and conditions are far better than the other available jobs. This sometimes results in protectionist laws that prevent

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39:21

“Review: Planecrash” by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/27

Take a stereotypical fantasy novel, a textbook on mathematical logic, and Fifty Shades of Grey. Mix them all together and add extra weirdness for spice. The result might look a lot like Planecrash (AKA: Project Lawful), a work of fiction co-written by "Iarwain" (a pen-name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and "lintamande".(image from Planecrash)Yudkowsky is not afraid to be verbose and self-indulgent in his writing. He previously wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that includes what's essentially an extended Ender's

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73:05

“AI #96: o3 But Not Yet For Thee” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/26

The year in models certainly finished off with a bang.In this penultimate week, we get o3, which purports to give us vastly more efficient performance than o1, and also to allow us to choose to spend vastly more compute if we want a superior answer. o3 is a big deal, making big gains on coding tests, ARC and some other benchmarks. How big a deal is difficult to say given what we know now. It's about to enter full fledged safety testing. o3 will get its own post soon, and I’m also pushing back

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3:23

“ReSolsticed vol I: ‘We’re Not Going Quietly’” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/26

For the past few months I've been working on an AI generated alternate solstice remix album. It's now released on Youtube and Spotify, and should be on Apple Music soon.My favorite genre of song is "cover that reimagines the original." Everyone else's favorite genre of solstice song is "exactly the way it was performed at their very first solstice", so it's not obvious how big an audience this will have. But I had a lot of fun with it, and I found it useful for exploring: What if solstice music

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14:04

“The Field of AI Alignment: A Postmortem, and What To...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/26

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".Over the past few years, a major source of my relative optimism on AI has been the hope

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18:05

“A Three-Layer Model of LLM Psychology” by Jan_Kulveit

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/26

This post offers an accessible model of psychology of character-trained LLMs like Claude. Epistemic StatusThis is primarily a phenomenological model based on extensive interactions with LLMs, particularly Claude. It's intentionally anthropomorphic in cases where I believe human psychological concepts lead to useful intuitions.Think of it as closer to psychology than neuroscience - the goal isn't a map which matches the territory in the detail, but a rough sketch with evocative names which hopefully

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1:25

“What Have Been Your Most Valuable Casual...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/25

I've heard repeatedly from many people that the highest-value part of conferences is not the talks or structured events, but rather the casual spontaneous conversations. Yet my own experience does not match this at all; the casual spontaneous conversations are consistently low-value.My current best model is that the casual spontaneous conversations mostly don't have much instrumental value, most people just really enjoy them and want more casual conversation in their life.... but I'm pretty highly

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0:56

“The Deep Lore of LightHaven, with Oliver Habryka...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/25

This is a link post.This is a link to the latest Bayesian Conspiracy episode. Oliver tells us how Less Wrong instantiated itself into physical reality via LightHaven, along with a bit of deep lore of foundational Rationalist/EA orgs. He also gives a surprisingly nuanced (IMO) view on Leverage! Do you like transcripts? We got one of those at the link as well. It's an mid AI-generated transcript, but the alternative is none. :) ---First published: December 24th, 2024

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6:08

“Vegans should eat just enough Meat - emperically...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/24

Once I talked to a person who said they were asexual. They were also heavily depressed and thought about committing suicide. I repeatedly told them to eat some meat, as they were vegan for many years. I myself had experienced veganism-induced depression. Finally, after many weeks they ate some chicken, and the next time we spoke, they said that they were no longer asexual, nor depressed. I was vegan or vegetarian for many consecutive years. Vegetarianism was manageable, perhaps because of cheese. I

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3:19

“What are the strongest arguments for very short...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/23

I'm seeing a lot of people on LW saying that they have very short timelines (say, five years or less) until AGI. However, the arguments that I've seen often seem to be just one of the following: "I'm not going to explain but I've thought about this a lot""People at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic etc. seem to believe this""Feels intuitive based on the progress we've made so far"At the same time, it seems like this is not the majority view among ML researchers. The most recent representative expert

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15:40

“Hire (or become) a Thinking Assistant / Body Double”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/23

Of the posts I've delayed writing for years, I maybe regret this one the most.I think more people (x-risk researchers in particular) should consider becoming (and hiring) metacognitive assistants. This is the single largest performance boost I know of – hire someone to sit with you and help you think. It doesn't help me (much) when I'm at my peak, but I'm not at my peak most of the time.There are four types of assistants I'm tracking so far: Body DoublesMetacognitive

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24:08

“A breakdown of AI capability levels focused on AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/22

In a variety of conversations about AI misalignment risks, I find that it is important to be able to clearly point at different levels of AI capability. My current favorite approach is to talk about how much the AI accelerates AI R&D[1] labor. I define acceleration of AI R&D labor by Y times as "the level of acceleration which is as useful (for making more powerful AIs) for an AI company as having its employees run Y times faster[2] (when you allow the total inference compute budget for AI

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“A breakdown of AI capability levels focused on AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/22

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44:14

“Review: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/22

I used to think that all generic strategy advice was pointless. After all, the point of a strategy is to achieve a thing, and to achieve a thing you just think hard about how to best do it and then work hard to do it. I said this to my friend Dewi, who said that this is mostly true, but there is an exception: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. Dewi was right.The book has some principles. In particular: a good strategy should include a diagnosis of the problem, an overall guiding policy,

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2:58

“Checking in on Scott’s composition image bet with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/22

2.5 years ago Scott Alexander made a bet that by June of 2025, image gen should have more or less solved compositionality, operationalized through 5 prompts, must get at least 3 correct. There was a premature declaration of victory, but if the bet was settled I hadn't heard about it. It's time. Google's Imagen 3 gets 4/5. The bet specifies 10 shots per prompt, but I'm just going to put the four it generates since that's plenty.1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her

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8:41

“What o3 Becomes by 2028” by Vladimir_Nesov

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/22

Funding for $150bn training systems just turned less speculative, with OpenAI o3 reaching 25% on FrontierMath, 70% on SWE-Verified, 2700 on Codeforces, and 80% on ARC-AGI. These systems will be built in 2026-2027 and enable pretraining models for 5e28 FLOPs, while o3 itself is plausibly based on an LLM pretrained only for 8e25-4e26 FLOPs. The natural text data wall won't seriously interfere until 6e27 FLOPs, and might be possible to push until 5e28 FLOPs. Scaling of pretraining won't end just yet.

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8:55

“When AI 10x’s AI R&D, What Do We Do?” by Logan Riggs

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/22

Note: below is a hypothetical future written in strong terms and does not track my actual probabilities.Throughout 2025, a huge amount of compute is spent on producing data in verifiable tasks, such as math[1] (w/ "does it compile as a proof?" being the ground truth label) and code (w/ "does it compile and past unit tests?" being the ground truth label).In 2026, when the next giant compute clusters w/ their GB200's are built, labs train the next larger model over 100 days, then some extra RL(H/AI)F

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14:59

“Orienting to 3 year AGI timelines” by Nikola Jurkovic

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/22

My median expectation is that AGI[1] will be created 3 years from now. This has implications on how to behave, and I will share some useful thoughts I and others have had on how to orient to short timelines.I’ve led multiple small workshops on orienting to short AGI timelines and compiled the wisdom of around 50 participants (but mostly my thoughts) here. I’ve also participated in multiple short-timelines AGI wargames and co-led one wargame.This post will assume median AGI timelines of 2027 and will

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