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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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5:57

“5 homegrown EA projects, seeking small donors” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/29

What do I mean by “homegrown”? These projects are: Local: Creators have a good track record in the EA or AI Safety community Modest: The amount requested is not large; $5k would be meaningful Overlooked: Not already backed by large institutional funders like OpenPhil If you’re a small donor or earn to give, consider giving to projects like these: 1. Feature-length documentary on SB 1047 By Michael Trazzi — $16k raised of $55k Michael has already recorded interviews with the main characters of SB

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2:22

“Gwern: Why So Few Matt Levines?” by kave

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/29

This is a link post.Matt Levine is the most well-known newslettrist (“Money Stuff”) in the financial industry, having blogged or written since 2011, finding his niche in popularization after stints in Wall Street & law. His commentary is influential, people leak to him, he sometimes interviews major figures (notoriously, Sam Bankman-Fried) or recounts inside information, and a number of phrases like his “laws of insider trading” (specifically, how not to) have gained currency to the point where

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49:13

“How might we solve the alignment problem? (Part 1:...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/29

Introduction/summaryIn my last post, I laid out my picture of what it would even be to solve the alignment problem. In this series of posts, I want to talk about how we might solve it.To be clear: I don’t think that humans necessarily need to solve the whole problem – at least, not on our own. To the contrary, I think we should be trying hard to get help from sufficiently capable and trusted AIs.[1] And I think various paths that my last post would class as “avoiding” or “handling but not solving”

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8:49

“Finishing The SB-1047 Documentary In 6 Weeks” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/28

(Some people have messaged me asking me to crosspost my Manifund proposal to Lesswrong for reach. Below, a summary. Full text available here) Summary of the proposalWe will produce a one-hour feature documentary about SB-1047, which would: Serve as a comprehensive reference on the bill's history and implications.Present a balanced view of perspectives from both proponents and opponents, bridging ideological divides.Contribute to informed discussions about future AI Policy by providing in-depth,

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59:34

“Winners of the Essay competition on the Automation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/28

We’re delighted to announce the winners of the Essay competition on the Automation of Wisdom and Philosophy. OverviewThe competition attracted 90 entries in total (only one of which was obviously just the work of an LLM!), taking a wide variety of angles on the topic. The judges awarded the top four prizes as follows: $7,000 to Rudolf Laine for essays on wisdom, amortised optimisation, and AI: Part I: Wisdom, amortised optimisation, and AIPart II: Growth and amortised optimisationPart III: AI

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30:28

“~80 Interesting Questions about Foundation Model...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/28

Many people helped us a great deal in developing the questions and ideas in this post, including people at CHAI, MATS, various other places in Berkeley, and Aether. To all of them: Thank you very much! Any mistakes are our own.Foundation model agents - systems like AutoGPT and Devin that equip foundations models with planning, memory, tool use, and other affordances to perform autonomous tasks - seem to have immense implications for AI capabilities and safety. As such, I (Rohan) am planning to do

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38:00

“How Likely Are Various Precursors of Existential...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/28

Seven Samotsvety forecasters give their probabilities for different possible catastrophes to lead to more than 1M direct deaths in any one year, in any of the next 10 years. This post presents results, starting with a table which presents the probabilities, continuing with a discussion of each of the items, and concluding with some thoughts on relevance for Sentinel's work averting or mitigating incipient calamities.Some forecasters found some questions in particular much more interesting, so we

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4:23

“Is the Power Grid Sustainable?” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/28

When I was growing up most families in our neighborhood had the daily paper on their lawn. As getting your news on the internet became a better option for most folks, though, delivery became less efficient: fewer houses on the same route. Prices went up, more people cancelled, and decline continued. I wonder if we might see something similar with the power grid? Solar panels keep getting cheaper. When we installed panels in 2019 they only made sense because of the combination of net metering

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12:44

“Open Source Replication of Anthropic’s Crosscoder...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/28

IntroAnthropic recently released an exciting mini-paper on crosscoders (Lindsey et al.). In this post, we open source a model-diffing crosscoder trained on the middle layer residual stream of the Gemma-2 2B base and IT models, along with code, implementation details / tips, and a replication of the core results in Anthropic's paper.While Anthropic highlights several potential applications of crosscoders, in this post we focus solely on “model-diffing”. That is, localizing and interpreting a small

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5:03

“On Shifgrethor” by JustisMills

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/28

This is a link post.A small number of terms are elevated from the pages of literature, up to the Mount Olympus of blog post vernacular. Moloch, as the dark god of failed coordination problems. The Dark Forest, as domains where there's active incentive not to be noticed. And from Ursula K. Le Guin, the Omelas child, a person whose suffering is a counterweight to the joys of others.[1]This post is an attempt to elevate another of Le Guin's terms to the blog post realm. That term is shifgrethor

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28:39

“The hostile telepaths problem” by Valentine

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/27

Epistemic status: model-building based on observation, with a few successful unusual predictions. Anecdotal evidence has so far been consistent with the model. This puts it at risk of seeming more compelling than the evidence justifies just yet. Caveat emptor.Imagine you're a very young child. Around, say, three years old.You've just done something that really upsets your mother. Maybe you were playing and knocked her glasses off the table and they broke.Of course you find her reaction

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0:49

“Video lectures on the learning-theoretic agenda” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/27

This is a link post.This is a YouTube playlist of recorded lectures on the learning-theoretic AI alignment agenda (LTA) I gave for my MATS scholars of the Winter 2024 cohort, edited by my beloved spouse @Marcus Ogren. I hope these will become a useful resource for anyone who wants to get up to speed on the LTA, complementary to the reading list. In the future, I might record more lectures to expand this list. Table of Contents Agents and AIXIHidden rewards and the problem of

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5:58

“Electrostatic Airships?” by DaemonicSigil

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/27

Airships are pretty dang cool. Airplanes need a continuous expenditure of energy to stay in the air, but if you just fill a bag with a light gas, you can stay up in the air with no energy expenditure at all. The two lightest gases are hydrogen and helium. Though the hydrogen atom is 4 times lighter than helium, hydrogen gas is made of two hydrogen atoms bonded together, so it's only twice as light as helium gas. The difference in lifting power is even more minor: What matters for lifting power of a

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42:47

“AI Safety Camp 10” by Robert Kralisch, Linda...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/27

We are pleased to announce that the 10th version of the AI Safety Camp is now entering the team member application phase! We again have a wide range of projects this year, so check them out to see if you or someone you know might be interested in applying to join one of them. You can find all of the projects and the application form on our website, or directly apply here. The deadline for team member applications is November 17th (Sunday).Below, we are including the categories and summaries of all

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6:03

“Our Digital and Biological Children” by Eneasz

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/26

[Linkpost. This presents a way to talk to people about AI that hold overly-romanticized views built on fictional evidence.]MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is a type of staph bacteria that's become resistant to many of the antibiotics we use. The original staph bacteria that is the ancestor of MRSA was first identified in 1880, but has likely existed in some form for ages. Humans created MRSA first by gathering many sick people in one location for centuries via hospitals, nursing

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1:32

“Linkpost: Memorandum on Advancing the United States’...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/25

This is a link post.Memorandum on Advancing the United States’ Leadership in Artificial Intelligence; Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Fulfill National Security Objectives; and Fostering the Safety, Security, and Trustworthiness of Artificial Intelligence This memorandum fulfills the directive set forth in subsection 4.8 of Executive Order 14110 of October 30, 2023 (Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence). This memorandum provides further direction on

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3:22

“IAPS: Mapping Technical Safety Research at AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/25

This is a link post. As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more advanced, concerns about large-scale risks from misuse or accidents have grown. This report analyzes the technical research into safe AI development being conducted by three leading AI companies: Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI. We define “safe AI development” as developing AI systems that are unlikely to pose large-scale misuse or accident risks. This encompasses a range of technical approaches aimed at ensuring AI

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7:16

“Big tech transitions are slow (with implications for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/25

The first practical steam engine was built by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. It was used to pump water out of mines.“Old Bess,” London Science Museum Photo by the authorAn astute observer might have looked at this and said: “It's clear where this is going. The engine will power everything: factories, ships, carriages. Horses will become obsolete!”This person would have been right—but they might have been surprised to find, two hundred years later, that we were still using horses to plow fields.Sacaton

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19:19

“Reflections on the Metastrategies Workshop” by gw

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/24

I'm a research lead at Timaeus and attended a workshop that @Raemon ran from Oct 4-6 (it was shortened from 4 days to 2.5 days to fit into a weekend). I had prior interest + experience in deliberate practice and enjoyed lots of Ray's posts about it, so I was curious about the workshop on top of being in a position to actually make impactful plans. This is a lightly edited write up that I initially made for myself and for the team at Timaeus about my experience and takeaways. It's not super polished,

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29:55

“Claude Sonnet 3.5.1 and Haiku 3.5” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/24

Anthropic has released an upgraded Claude Sonnet 3.5, and the new Claude Haiku 3.5.They claim across the board improvements to Sonnet, and it has a new rather huge ability accessible via the API: Computer use. Nothing could possibly go wrong. Claude Haiku 3.5 is also claimed as a major step forward for smaller models. They are saying that on many evaluations it has now caught up to Opus 3. Missing from this chart is o1, which is in some ways not a fair comparison since it uses so

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