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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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12:54

“Principled Satisficing To Avoid Goodhart ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/17

There's an admirable LW post with (currently) zero net upvotes titled Goodhart's Law and Emotions where a relatively new user re-invents concepts of related to super-stimuli. In the comments, noggin-scratch explains in more detail:The technical meaning is a stimulus that produces a stronger response than the stimulus for which that response originally evolved.So for example a candy bar having a carefully engineered combination of sugar, fat, salt, and flavour in proportions that make it more

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10:44

“Calendar feature geometry in GPT-2 layer 8 residual...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/17

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.TL;DR: We demonstrate that the decoder directions of GPT-2 SAEs are highly structured by finding a historical date direction onto which projecting non-date related features lets us read off their historical time period by comparison to year features.Calendar years are linear: there are as many years between 2000 and 2024, as there are between 1800 and 1824. Linear probes can be used to predict years of particular

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6:19

“Investigating the Chart of the Century: Why is food...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/16

This is a link post.You’ve probably seen this chart from Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute.I’ve seen this chart dozens of times and have always enjoyed how many different and important stories it can tell.There is a story of the incredible abundance offered by technological growth and globalization. Compared to average hourly wages, cars, furniture, clothing, internet access, software, toys, and TVs have become far more accessible than they were 20 years ago. Flatscreens and Fiats that

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6:55

“Demis Hassabis — Google DeepMind: The Podcast” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/16

This is a link post.The YouTube "chapters" are mixed up, e.g. the question about regulation comes 5 minutes after the regulation chapter ends. Ignore them.8:40: Near-term AI is hyped too much (think current startups, VCs, exaggerated claims about what AI can do, crazy ideas that aren't ready) but AGI is under-hyped and under-appreciated.16:45: "Gemini is a project that has only existed for a year . . . our trajectory is very good; when we talk next time we should hopefully be right at the

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0:57

“My article in The Nation — California’s AI Safety...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/16

This is a link post. I wrote an article on California AI safety bill SB 1047 for The Nation and the reaction from the AI industry, investors, and the broader tech community. The story was informed by conversations with over a dozen relevant sources and comes shortly before the bill faces a floor vote in the California Assembly. I think it's useful to understand how industry responds to attempts to regulate AI, and centered my analysis on that topic. If you're interested in helping share the

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10:03

“Adverse Selection by Life-Saving Charities” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/16

This is a link post.GiveWell, and the EA community at large, often emphasize the "cost of saving a life" as a key metric, $5,000 being the most commonly cited approximation. At first glance, GiveWell might seem to be in the business of finding the cheapest lives that can be saved, and then saving them. More precisely, GiveWell is in the business of finding the cheapest DALY it can buy. But implicit in that is the assumption that all DALYs are equal, or that disability or health effects are the only

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15:31

“Danger, AI Scientist, Danger” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/16

While I finish up the weekly for tomorrow morning after my trip, here's a section I expect to want to link back to every so often in the future. It's too good.Danger, AI Scientist, Danger As in, the company that made the automated AI Scientist that tried to rewrite its code to get around resource restrictions and launch new instances of itself while downloading bizarre Python libraries? Its name is Sakana AI. (魚≈סכנה). As in, in hebrew, that literally means ‘danger’, baby. It's

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2:39

“Tell your reps to vote yes on SB 1047” by Holly_Elmore

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/15

See the event page here. Hello Californians! We need you to help us fight for SB 1047, a landmark bill to help set a benchmark for AI safety, decrease existential risk, and promote safety research. This bill has been supported by some of the world's leading AI scientists and the Center of AI Safety, and is extremely important for us to pass. As Californians, we have a unique opportunity to inspire other states to follow suit. Unfortunately, due to misinformation and lobbying by big tech companies,

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3:34

“Shifting Headspaces - Transitional Beast-Mode” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/15

This is a link post. I was sitting in a tiny rental lodge, feeling resistance. It was about dinner time — I knew I should go make some food. I just wanted to sleep, sink into a bed and stay passive. It felt similar to when I’m recently awake, lying in bed, and procrastinating getting up.On the one hand, making food would shift me into a new state of being, getting going and maybe feeling happier. For part of me, this promise didn’t feel real — not in the way the bed did. I realized I was stuck in a

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6:27

“An anti-inductive sequence” by Viliam

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/14

I was thinking about what would it mean for a sequence of bits to be "anti-inductive". It probably is a concept that is already known (as a rule of thumb, if I can think about it, someone probably already wrote a paper on it 50 years ago), but I haven't heard about it.*Some sequences are predictable and can be compressed. These two concepts are deeply related, because if you can successfully predict the next part of the sequence, you don't need to actually write it down; hence compression. A

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22:26

“Superintelligent AI is possible in the 2020s” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/14

Back in June 2023, Soroush Pour and I discussed AI timelines on his podcast, The AGI Show. The biggest difference between us was that I think “machines more intelligent than people are likely to be developed within a few years”, and he thinks that it's unlikely to happen for at least a few decades.[1]We haven’t really resolved our disagreement on this prediction in the year since, so I thought I would write up my main reasons for thinking we’re so close to superintelligence, and why the various

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10:24

“Announcing the $200k EA Community Choice” by Austin...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/14

This is a link post. Manifund is hosting a $200k funding round for EA community projects, where the grant decisions are made by you. You can direct $100-$800 of funding towards the projects that have helped with your personal journey as an EA. Your choices then decide how $100k in matching will be allocated, via quadratic funding! Sign up here to get notified when the projects are live, or read on to learn more! Timeline Phase 1: Project registrations open (Aug 13) Project organizers can now

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20:02

“Fields that I reference when thinking about AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/14

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a link post.Is AI takeover like a nuclear meltdown? A coup? A plane crash?My day job is thinking about safety measures that aim to reduce catastrophic risks from AI (especially risks from egregious misalignment). The two main themes of this work are the design of such measures (what's the space of techniques we might expect to be affordable and effective) and their evaluation (how do we decide which safety

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17:05

“Ten arguments that AI is an existential risk” by AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/13

This is a snapshot of a new page on the AI Impacts Wiki.We’ve made a list of arguments1 that AI poses an existential risk to humanity. These are intended as summaries—they may not contain the necessary detail to be compelling, or to satisfyingly represent the position. We’d love to hear how you feel about them in the comments and polls. Competent non-aligned agentsHumans increasingly lose games to the best AI systems. If AI systems become similarly adept at navigating the real world, will humans

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37:13

“Debate: Get a college degree?” by Ben Pace, Saul Munn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/13

Epistemic Status: Soldier mindset. These are not our actual positions, these are positions we were randomly assigned by a coin toss, and for which we (quickly) searched for the strongest arguments we could find over the course of ~1hr 45mins. That said, this debate got a little messy between our performed positions and our personal ones.Sides: Ben is arguing against getting a college degree, and Saul is arguing for. (This is a decision Saul is currently making for himself!)Reading Order: Ben and

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2:48

“Humanity isn’t remotely longtermist, so arguments...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/13

Toby Ord recently published a nice piece On the Value of Advancing Progress about mathematical projections of far-future outcomes given different rates of progress and risk levels. The problem with that and many arguments for caution is that people usually barely care about possibilities even twenty years out. We could talk about sharp discounting curves in decision-making studies, and how that makes sense given evolutionary pressures in tribal environments. But I think this is pretty obvious from

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22:04

“In Defense of Open-Minded UDT” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/12

Audio note: this article contains 33 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.A Defense of Open-Minded Updatelessness, with applications to alignment. This work owes a great debt to many conversations with Sahil, Martín Soto, and Scott Garrabrant.Sahil and I will have a public discussion about this this Wednesday (August

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10:38

“Rowing vs steering” by Saul Munn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/12

This is a link post.Alex Lawsen used a great metaphor on the 80k After Hours podcast:[1][1:38:14] …you’re rowing a boat on your own, and you’re trying to get somewhere, and you’ve got some map that you need to look at to see where you’re going, I imagine like a map and compass. […] When you’re rowing, you’re facing back; you can’t see where you’re going. You’ve just got to sit there and pull both of the oars, and do that a bunch of times, and then the boat goes forwards. […] You steer [… by pulling]

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20:03

“All The Latest Human tFUS Studies” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/10

from Peng, et al; stimulating the nucleus accumbens inhibits its activityTranscranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation — altering the brain's activity with low-intensity ultrasound — is really exciting . It allows us to manipulate arbitrary regions of the brain without surgery, potentially replacing the (brain-damaging) electrode implants currently used for serious neurological conditions like epilepsy and Parkinson's, and potentially also expanding applications of brain stimulation to milder

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15:12

“Provably Safe AI: Worldview and Projects” by bgold,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/10

In September 2023, Max Tegmark and Steve Omohundro proposed "Provably Safe AI" as a strategy for AI Safety. In May 2024, a larger group delineated the broader concept of "Guaranteed Safe AI" which includes Provably Safe AI and other related strategies. In July, 2024, Ben Goldhaber and Steve discussed Provably Safe AI and its future possibilities, as summarized in this document. BackgroundIn June 2024, ex-OpenAI AI Safety Researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote a 165-page document entitled

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