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13:29

“Forecasting One-Shot Games ” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/01

Cliff notes: You can practice forecasting on videogames you've never played before, to develop the muscles for "decision-relevant forecasting."Turn based videogames work best. I recommend "Luck Be a Landlord", "Battle for Polytopia", or "Into the Breach."Each turn, make as many Fatebook predictions as you can in 5 minutes, then actually make your decision(s) for the turn.After 3 turns, instead of making "as many predictions as possible", switch to trying to come up with at least two mutually

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15:14

“My Model of Epistemology ” by adamShimi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/01

I regularly get asked by friends and colleagues for recommendation of good resources to study epistemology. And whenever that happens, I make an internal (or external) "Eeehhh"pained sound.For I can definitely point to books and papers and blog posts that inspired me, excited me, and shaped my world view on the topic. But there is no single resource that encapsulate my full model of this topic.To be clear, I have tried to write that resource — my hard-drive is littered with such attempts. It's just

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16:40

“Book review: On the Edge ” by PeterMcCluskey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/31

Book review: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, by Nate Silver.Nate Silver's latest work straddles the line between journalistic inquiry and subject matter expertise. "On the Edge" offers a valuable lens through which to understand analytical risk-takers. The River versus The Village Silver divides the interesting parts of the world into two tribes. On his side, we have "The River" - a collection of eccentrics typified by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and professional gamblers, who tend

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14:23

“Congressional Insider Trading ” by Maxwell Tabarrok

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/31

You’ve probably seen the Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker on X or else a collection of articles and books exposing the secret and lucrative world of congressional insider trading.The underlying claim behind these stories is intuitive and compelling. Regulations, taxes, and subsidies can make or break entire industries and congresspeople can get information on these rules before anyone else, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they used this information to make profitable stock trades.But do congresspeople

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32:21

“AI for Bio: State Of The Field ” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/31

AI for biotech, particularly with drug discovery applications, has been used for more than a decade, with ambiguous success. But in the era of foundation models we may have experienced a step change in what's possible.I used to work on AI-for-drug-discovery years ago, at Recursion, where we sought to identify phenotypes of genetic diseases visible in microscopic images of cells, and screen for drugs that made the cells visually “look healthy” in the hopes that those drugs would also turn out to be

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31:18

“Principles for the AGI Race ” by William_S

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/30

Crossposted from https://williamrsaunders.substack.com/p/principles-for-the-agi-race Why form principles for the AGI Race?I worked at OpenAI for 3 years, on the Alignment and Superalignment teams. Our goal was to prepare for the possibility that OpenAI succeeded in its stated mission of building AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, roughly able to do most things a human can do), and then proceed on to make systems smarter than most humans. This will predictably face novel problems in controlling

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29:09

“Singular learning theory: exercises ” by Zach Furman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/30

Audio note: this article contains 353 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Thanks to Jesse Hoogland for feedback on these exercises.In learning singular learning theory (SLT), I found it was often much easier to understand by working through examples, rather than try to work through the (fairly technical) theorems in their full generality. These exercises are an attempt to collect the sorts of examples

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17:33

“Nursing doubts ” by dynomight

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/30

If you ask the internet if breastfeeding is good, you will soon learn that YOU MUST BREASTFEED because BREAST MILK = OPTIMAL FOOD FOR BABY. But if you look for evidence, you’ll discover two disturbing facts.First, there's no consensus about why breastfeeding is good. I’ve seen experts suggest at least eight possible mechanisms: Formula can’t fully reproduce the complex blend of fats, proteins and sugars in breast milk.Formula lacks various bio-active things in breast milk, like antibodies, white

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27:36

“Things I learned talking to the new breed of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/30

Note: this article is sponsored by and cross-posted to the Good Science Project. They also write a fair bit, and their articles were essential reading for writing this essay!Also, this article would not be possible without the hours of discussion/editing help I’ve had with several people from these institutions, and a few outside of them. Huge shout-out to all of them! IntroductionArcadia Science, Speculative Technologies, FutureHouse, Arc, and Convergent.All of these are a new form of scientific

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4:05

“things that confuse me about the current AI market....

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/30

Paging Gwern or anyone else who can shed light on the current state of the AI market—I have several questions.Since the release of ChatGPT, at least 17 companies, according to the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, have developed AI models that outperform it. These companies include Anthropic, NexusFlow, Microsoft, Mistral, Alibaba, Hugging Face, Google, Reka AI, Cohere, Meta, 01 AI, AI21 Labs, Zhipu AI, Nvidia, DeepSeek, and xAI.Since GPT-4's launch, 15 different companies have reportedly created AI

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14:12

“Solving adversarial attacks in computer vision as a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/30

I spent the last few months trying to tackle the problem of adversarial attacks in computer vision from the ground up. The results of this effort are written up in our new paper Ensemble everything everywhere: Multi-scale aggregation for adversarial robustness (explainer on X/Twitter). Taking inspiration from biology, we reached state-of-the-art or above state-of-the-art robustness at 100x – 1000x less compute, got human-understandable interpretability for free, turned classifiers into generators,

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59:00

“AI #79: Ready for Some Football ” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/29

I have never been more ready for Some Football.Have I learned all about the teams and players in detail? No, I have been rather busy, and have not had the opportunity to do that, although I eagerly await Seth Burn's Football Preview. I’ll have to do that part on the fly. But oh my would a change of pace and chance to relax be welcome. It is time. The debate over SB 1047 has been dominating for weeks. I’ve now said my peace on the bill and how it works, and compiled the reactions in support

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9:24

“How to hire somebody better than yourself ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/29

TLDR: Select candidates heterogeneously, then give them all a very hard test, only continue with candidates that do very well (accept that you lose some good ones), then briefly judge on interviews/whatever.I'm no expert but I've made some recommendations that turned out pretty well -- maybe like 5 ever. This post would probably be better if I waited 10 years to write it. Nonetheless, I think my method is far better than what most orgs/corps do. I have not seen a post on this subject on LW. If you

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4:10

“Unit economics of LLM APIs ” by dschwarz, nikos,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/28

Disclaimer 1: Our calculations are rough in places; information is sparse, guesstimates abound.Disclaimer 2: This post draws from public info on FutureSearch as well as a paywalled report. If you want the paywalled numbers, email dan@futuresearch.ai with your LW account name and we’ll send you the report for free.Here's our view of the unit economics of OpenAI's API. Note: this considers GPT-4-class models only, not audio or image APIs, and only direct API traffic, not usage in ChatGPT products. As

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2:58

“In defense of technological unemployment as the main...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/28

It seems to me that when normal people are concerned about AI destroying their life, they are mostly worried about technological unemployment, whereas rationalists think that it is a bigger risk that the AI might murder us all, and that automation gives humans more wealth and free time and is therefore good.I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the rationalist position here. If we had a plan for how to use AI to create a utopia where humanity could thrive, I'd be all for it. We have problems (like

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6:14

“The Information: OpenAI shows ‘Strawberry’ to feds,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/28

Two new The Information articles with insider information on OpenAI's next models and moves.They are paywalled, but here are the new bits of information: Strawberry is more expensive and slow at inference time, but can solve complex problems on the first try without hallucinations. It seems to be an application or extension of process supervisionIts main purpose is to produce synthetic data for Orion, their next big LLMBut now they are also pushing to get a distillation of Strawberry into ChatGPT as

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7:33

“What Depression Is Like ” by Sable

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/27

This is a link post.I was thinking to myself about the difficulties I have explaining depression to people, when I thought of a relatively good metaphor for it.Bear with me. SudokuFor anyone unaware, Sudoku is a puzzle where one tries to fill in a 9x9 grid of numbers according to certain rules: Each row, column, and 3x3 square must have the numbers 1-9 in them, without repeating any numbers. Black numbers are given, red numbers start as blank squares and must be solved by the puzzler.It's a common

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24:50

“Why Large Bureaucratic Organizations? ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/27

Large bureaucratic organizations have long seemed… strange to me, on an intuitive level. Why do they exist? Like, in a world where the median person is John Wentworth (“Wentworld”), I’m pretty sure there just aren’t large organizations of the sort our world has. Nobody would ever build such an organization, because they’re so obviously wildly inefficient and misaligned. And even if somebody tried, everyone would demand prohibitively high prices to work either for the large organization or with it,

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49:00

“Soft Nationalization: How the US Government Will...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/27

This is a link post.We have yet to see anyone describe a critical element of effective AI safety planning: a realistic model of the upcoming role the US government will play in controlling frontier AI.The rapid development of AI will lead to increasing national security concerns, which will in turn pressure the US to progressively take action to control frontier AI development. This process has already begun,[1] and it will only escalate as frontier capabilities advance.However, we argue that

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99:05

“What is it to solve the alignment problem? ” by Joe...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/27

People often talk about “solving the alignment problem.” But what is it to do such a thing? I wanted to clarify my thinking about this topic, so I wrote up some notes.In brief, I’ll say that you’ve solved the alignment problem if you’ve: avoided a bad form of AI takeover,built the dangerous kind of superintelligent AI agents,gained access to the main benefits of superintelligence, andbecome able to elicit some significant portion of those benefits from some of the superintelligent AI agents at stake

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