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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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1:56

“Linkpost: Surely you can be serious” by kave

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/19

This is a link post.Adam Mastroianni writes about "actually caring about stuff, and for the right reasons", rather than just LARPing. The opening is excerpted below.I once saw someone give a talk about a tiny intervention that caused a gigantic effect, something like, “We gave high school seniors a hearty slap on the back and then they scored 500 points higher on the SAT.”1Everyone in the audience was like, “Hmm, interesting, I wonder if there were any gender effects, etc.”I wanted to get up and

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100:21

“AI #73: Openly Evil AI” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/18

What do you call a clause explicitly saying that you waive the right to whistleblower compensation, and that you need to get permission before sharing information with government regulators like the SEC?I have many answers. I also know that OpenAI, having f***ed around, seems poised to find out, because that is the claim made by whistleblowers to the SEC. Given the SEC fines you for merely not making an explicit exception to your NDA for whistleblowers, what will they do once aware of

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0:38

“Individually incentivized safe Pareto improvements...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/18

This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description. --- First published: July 17th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGfDx9es2pnYWaWJr/individually-incentivized-safe-pareto-improvements-in-open --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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37:51

“A List of 45+ Mech Interp Project Ideas from Apollo...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/18

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Why we made this list: The interpretability team at Apollo Research wrapped up a few projects recently[1]. In order to decide what we’d work on next, we generated a lot of different potential projects. Unfortunately, we are computationally bounded agents, so we can't work on every project idea that we were excited about!Previous lists of project ideas (such as Neel's collation of200 Concrete Open Problems in

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30:32

“Mech Interp Lacks Good Paradigms” by Daniel Tan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/18

Note: I wrote this post rather quickly as an exercise in sharing rough / unpolished thoughts. I am also not an expert on some of the things I've written about. If you spot mistakes or would like to point out missed work / perspectives, please feel free! Note 2: I originally sent this link to some people for feedback, but I was having trouble viewing the comments on the draft. The post was also in a reasonably complete state, so I decided to just publish it - and now I can see the comments! If you're

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12:13

“We ran an AI safety conference in Tokyo. It went...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/18

AbstractTechnical AI Safety 2024 (TAIS 2024) was a conference organised by AI Safety 東京 and Noeon Research, in collaboration with Reaktor Japan, AI Alignment Network and AI Industry Foundation. You may have heard of us through ACX.The goals of the conference were demonstrate the practice of technical safety research to Japanese researchers new to the fieldshare ideas among established technical safety researchersestablish a good international reputation for AI Safety 東京 and Noeon Researchestablish

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4:35

“Friendship is transactional, unconditional...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/18

It feels a little icky to say, but we befriend people because we get something out of it. We enjoy the company, the conversation, the emotional support, the activities, the connection, etc. It's not a coincidence people don't befriend brick walls.(The same is true in romantic relationships, except we expect even more.)Granted, friendship is not an explicit transaction that's negotiated, quantified, legally enforceable, etc. It's fuzzy, which helps it work better for reasons I won't really get into

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7:11

“What are you getting paid in?” by Austin Chen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/17

This is a link post.Crossposting this essay by my friend, Leila Clark.A long time ago, a manager friend of mine wrote a book to collect his years of wisdom. He never published it, which is a shame because it was full of interesting insights. One that I think a lot about today was the question: “How are you paying your team?”This friend worked in finance. You might think that people in finance, like most people, are paid in money. But it turns out that even in finance, you can’t actually always pay

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12:50

“Optimistic Assumptions, Longterm Planning, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/17

Eliezer Yudkowsky periodically complains about people coming up with questionable plans with questionable assumptions to deal with AI, and then either: Saying "well, if this assumption doesn't hold, we're doomed, so we might as well assume it's true."Worse: coming up with cope-y reasons to assume that the assumption isn't even questionable at all. It's just a pretty reasonable worldview.Sometimes the questionable plan is "an alignment scheme, which Eliezer thinks avoids the hard part of the

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12:49

“Optimistic Assumptions, Longterm Planning, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/17

Eliezer periodically complains about people coming up with questionable plans with questionable assumptions to deal with AI, and then either: Saying "well, if this assumption doesn't hold, we're doomed, so we might as well assume it's true."Worse: coming up with cope-y reasons to assume that the assumption isn't even questionable at all. It's just a pretty reasonable worldview.Sometimes the questionable plan is "an alignment scheme, which Eliezer thinks avoids the hard part of the problem."

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1:36

“Turning Your Back On Traffic” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/17

We do a lot of walking around the neighborhood with kids, which usually involves some people getting to intersections a while before others. I'm not worried about even the youngest going into the street on their own—Nora's been street trained for about a year—but we have to be careful about what signals we send to cars. Someone standing at an intersection facing traffic looks to a driver like they're waiting for the opportunity to cross. Waving drivers to continue doesn't work well: they

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9:30

“DM Parenting” by Shoshannah Tekofsky

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/17

This is a link post.Cause no one will question your ethics if you refer to yourself as a Dungeon Mom.I snort experimentation to feel alive. It's a certain type of orientation to life, completely at odds with all parenting advice about predictability and routine.Enter DM parenting. Where you approach every parenting task as a Dungeons and Dragons session where you are shepherding a team of pure outliers on the enthusiasm-skill spectrum through the Sisyphisian ordeal of rolling their toothbrush up hi

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14:09

“Multiplex Gene Editing: Where Are We Now?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/16

the Cas9 enzyme used in CRISPRWe’re starting to get working gene therapies for single-mutation genetic disorders, and genetically modified cell therapies for attacking cancer.Some of them use CRISPR-based gene editing, a new technology (that earned Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier the 2020 Nobel Prize) to “cut” and “paste” a cell's DNA. But so far, the FDA-approved therapies can only edit one gene at a time.What if we want to edit more genes? Why is that hard, and how close are we to

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30:35

“Dialogue on What It Means For Something to Have A...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/16

Context for LW audience: Ramana, Steve and John regularly talk about stuff in the general cluster of agency, abstraction, optimization, compression, purpose, representation, etc. We decided to write down some of our discussion and post it here. This is a snapshot of us figuring stuff out together.Hooks from Ramana: Where does normativity come from?Two senses of "why" (from Dennett): How come? vs What for? (The latter is more sophisticated, and less resilient. Does it supervene on the former?)An

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13:48

“I found 800 orthogonal ‘write code’ steering...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/16

This is a link post.Produced as part of the MATS Summer 2024 program, under the mentorship of Alex Turner (TurnTrout).A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a very weird fact: it is possible to find multiple steering vectors in a language model that activate very similar behaviors while all being orthogonal. This was pretty surprising to me and to some people that I talked to, so I decided to write a post about it. I don't currently have the bandwidth to investigate this much more, so I'm just putting

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6:54

“Towards more cooperative AI safety strategies” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/16

This post is written in a spirit of constructive criticism. It's phrased fairly abstractly, in part because it's a sensitive topic, but I welcome critiques and comments below. The post is structured in terms of three claims about the strategic dynamics of AI safety efforts; my main intention is to raise awareness of these dynamics, rather than advocate for any particular response to them.Claim 1: The AI safety community is structurally power-seeking.By “structurally power-seeking” I mean: tends to

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41:56

“Against Aschenbrenner: How ‘Situational Awareness’...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/15

This is a link post. Summary/IntroductionAschenbrenner's ‘Situational Awareness’ (Aschenbrenner, 2024) promotes a dangerous narrative of national securitisation. This narrative is not, despite what Aschenbrenner suggests, descriptive, but rather, it is performative, constructing a particular notion of security that makes the dangerous world Aschenbrenner describes more likely to happen.This piece draws on the work of Nathan A. Sears (2023), who argues that the failure to sufficiently eliminate

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25:42

“Stitching SAEs of different sizes” by Bart Bussmann,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/15

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Work done in Neel Nanda's stream of MATS 6.0, equal contribution by Bart Bussmann and Patrick Leask, Patrick Leask is concurrently a PhD candidate at Durham UniversityTL;DR: When you scale up an SAE, the features in the larger SAE can be categorized in two groups: 1) “novel features” with new information not in the small SAE and 2) “reconstruction features” that sparsify information that already exists in the small

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8:20

“Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/15

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic.I’ve been noticing recently that often, a big blocker to teams staying effective as they grow is trust. “Alice doesn’t trust Bob” makes Alice sound like the bad guy, but it's often completely appropriate for people not to trust each other in some areas: One might have an active reason to expect someone to be bad at something. For example, recently I didn’t fully trust two of my managers to set their teams’ roadmaps… because they’d

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9:58

“patent process problems” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/15

This is a link post.The current patent process has some problems. Here are some of them. patenting is slow The US Patent Office tracks pendency of patents. Currently, on average, there's 20 months from filing to the first response, and over 25 months before issuance. That's a long time. Here's a paper on this issue. It notes: The USPTO is aware that delays create significant costs to innovators seeking protection. The result? A limiting of the number of hours an examiner spends per patent in order

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