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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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21:24

“AI takeoff and nuclear war” by owencb

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/11

This is a link post.Summary. As we approach and pass through an AI takeoff period, the risk of nuclear war (or other all-out global conflict) will increase.An AI takeoff would involve the automation of scientific and technological research. This would lead to much faster technological progress, including military technologies. In such a rapidly changing world, some of the circumstances which underpin the current peaceful equilibrium will dissolve or change. There are then two risks[1]: Fundamental

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11:14

“‘Metastrategic Brainstorming’, a core building-block...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/11

I want to develop rationality training, which is aimed at solving confusing problems. Two key problems with "confusing problems" are: You might feel so confused and overwhelmed that you bounce off completely.You might be confused about what counts as progress, or where the most progress is possible, and accidentally work on the wrong thing.A skill that helps with both of these is "metastrategic brainstorming" – the art of generating lots of potential good approaches, and then choosing approaches

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27:33

“[Valence series] 4. Valence & Liking / Admiring” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/11

4.1 Post summary / Table of contentsPart of the Valence series.(This is my second attempt to write the 4th post of my valence series. If you already read the previous attempt and are unsure whether to read this too, see footnote→[1]. Also, note that this post has a bit of overlap with (and self-plagiarism from) my post Social status part 2/2: everything else, but the posts are generally pretty different.)The previous three posts built a foundation about what valence is, and how valence relates to

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3:53

“Soviet comedy film recommendations” by Nina Rimsky

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/10

This is a link post.I’m a big fan of the Soviet comedy directors Eldar Ryazanov, Leonid Gaidai, and Georgiy Daneliya. Almost anything by them is worth watching, but here are my favorites (filtered for things that have a free YouTube version with good English subtitles, bold are the highest-recommended):Scene from "The Garage" Ryazanov 1966 Beware of the Car (Берегись автомобиля) [YouTube] Comedy about a benevolent car thief who steals to donate to charity1975 The Irony of Fate (Ирония судьбы или с

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109:44

“On Dwarksh’s Podcast with Leopold Aschenbrenner” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/10

Previously: Quotes from Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness PaperDwarkesh Patel talked to Leopold Aschenbrenner for about four and a half hours. The central discussion was the theses of his paper, Situational Awareness, which I offered quotes from earlier, with a focus on the consequences of AGI rather than whether AGI will happen soon. There are also a variety of other topics. Thus, for the relevant sections of the podcast I am approaching this via roughly accepting the

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7:28

“My AI Model Delta Compared To Yudkowsky” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/10

Preamble: Delta vs CruxI don’t natively think in terms of cruxes. But there's a similar concept which is more natural for me, which I’ll call a delta.Imagine that you and I each model the world (or some part of it) as implementing some program. Very oversimplified example: if I learn that e.g. it's cloudy today, that means the “weather” variable in my program at a particular time[1] takes on the value “cloudy”. Now, suppose your program and my program are exactly the same, except that somewhere in

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1:11

“What if a tech company forced you to move to NYC?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/10

It's interesting to me how chill people sometimes are about the non-extinction future AI scenarios. Like, there seem to be opinions around along the lines of “pshaw, it might ruin your little sources of ‘meaning’, Luddite, but we have always had change and as long as the machines are pretty near the mark on rewiring your brain it will make everything amazing”. Yet I would bet that even that person, if faced instead with a policy that was going to forcibly relocate them to New York City, would be

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3:37

“The Data Wall is Important” by JustisMills

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/10

This is a link post.Modern AI is trained on a huge fraction of the internet, especially at the cutting edge, with the best models trained on close to all the high quality data we’ve got.[1] And data is really important! You can scale up compute, you can make algorithms more efficient, or you can add infrastructure around a model to make it more useful, but on the margin, great datasets are king. And, naively, we’re about to run out of fresh data to use.It's rumored that the top firms are looking for

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15:20

“Why I don’t believe in the placebo effect” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/10

Have you heard this before? In clinical trials, medicines have to be compared to a placebo to separate the effect of the medicine from the psychological effect of taking the drug. The patient's belief in the power of the medicine has a strong effect on its own. In fact, for some drugs such as antidepressants, the psychological effect of taking a pill is larger than the effect of the drug. It may even be worth it to give a patient an ineffective medicine just to benefit from the placebo effect. This

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7:49

“Dumbing down” by Martin Sustrik

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/09

In past few years I've been blogging in Slovak, that is, downscaling from writing in English, a language with 1457 million speakers to a language with 7 million speakers.From the point of view of the writer, this has been a very different experience. It's not only that for a topic that interests one million English speakers, the equivalent is five thousand in Slovakia, scaling down by factor of 200. It's also that topic that interests 100 English speakers, interests one half of a hypothetical

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1:04

“Demystifying ‘Alignment’ through a Comic” by milanrosko

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/09

Understanding the alignment problem can be challenging, especially with its complex theoretical underpinnings and technical jargon. To make this crucial topic more accessible, I've created a comic that breaks down the key concepts in a simple, intuitive, and engaging way. Whether you're new to the subject or looking for a fresh perspective, this visual guide aims to clarify why alignment is so important and what it means for the future of AI. Dive in and explore the alignment problem through a story

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59:38

“2. Corrigibility Intuition” by Max Harms

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/09

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.(Part 2 of the CAST sequence)As a reminder, here's how I’ve been defining “corrigible” when introducing the concept: an agent is corrigible when it robustly acts opposite of the trope of "be careful what you wish for" by cautiously reflecting on itself as a flawed tool and focusing on empowering the principal to fix its flaws and mistakes.This definition is vague, imprecise, and hides a lot of nuance. What do we

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10:41

“Access to powerful AI might make computer security...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/08

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.People talk about model weight security being really hard and crucial around the advent of AGI. (E.g. RAND report, Leopold; see here for some distinctions in these thread models that I think are important.) But I think that the thinking on this has not been sufficiently attentive to the fact that during that crucial time period, by assumption we’ll have access to powerful AIs. I think that such access might make

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69:32

“1. The CAST Strategy” by Max Harms

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/08

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.(Part 1 of the CAST sequence) AI Risk Introduction(TLDR for this section, since it's 101 stuff that many readers will have already grokked: Misuse vs Mistake; Principal-Agent problem; Omohundro Drives; we need deep safety measures in addition to mundane methods. Jump to “Sleepy-Bot” if all that seems familiar.)Earth is in peril. Humanity is on the verge of building machines capable of intelligent action that

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19:41

“0. CAST: Corrigibility as Singular Target” by Max Harms

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/08

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.What the heck is up with “corrigibility”? For most of my career, I had a sense that it was a grab-bag of properties that seemed nice in theory but hard to get in practice, perhaps due to being incompatible with agency.Then, last year, I spent some time revisiting my perspective, and I concluded that I had been deeply confused by what corrigibility even was. I now think that corrigibility is a single, intuitive

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0:35

“Natural Latents Are Not Robust To Tiny Mixtures” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/07

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: June 7th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xDsbqxeCQWe4BiYFX/natural-latents-are-not-robust-to-tiny-mixtures --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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72:26

“Quotes from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/07

This post is different. Usually I offer commentary and analysis. I share what others think, then respond. This is the second time I am importantly not doing that. The work speaks for itself. It offers a different perspective, a window and a worldview. It is self-consistent. This is what a highly intelligent, highly knowledgeable person actually believes after much thought. So rather than say where I agree and disagree and argue back (and I do both strongly in many places), this is only

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4:41

“GPT2, Five Years On” by Joel Burget

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/07

This is a link post.Jack Clark's retrospective on GPT2 is full of interesting policy thoughts, I recommend reading the whole thing. One excerpt:I've come to believe that in policy "a little goes a long way" - it's far better to have a couple of ideas you think are robustly good in all futures and advocate for those than make a confident bet on ideas custom-designed for one specific future - especially if it's based on a very confident risk model that sits at some unknowable point in front of

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73:42

“AI #67: Brief Strange Trip” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/07

I had a great time at LessOnline. It was a both a working trip and also a trip to an alternate universe, a road not taken, a vision of a different life where you get up and start the day in dialogue with Agnes Callard and Aristotle and in a strange combination of relaxed and frantically go from conversation to conversation on various topics, every hour passing doors of missed opportunity, gone forever.Most of all it meant almost no writing done for five days, so I am shall we say a bit behind

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22:18

“Is Claude a mystic?” by jessicata

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/07

This is a link post.There's an odd tendency for large language models such as Claude to output spiritual meta content if they run long enough. See, for example, some LLM outputs selected by Replicate (LLM content starts in 2024), and Worldspider outputs selected by John Pressman. One thing that is unclear is how consistent these outputs are: how much is it a result of prompting or post-selection? I believe there is a consistency to this, but realize the current evidence is not especially convincing

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