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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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2:13

“Introducing AI-Powered Audiobooks of Rational...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/04

(ElevenLabs reading of this post, if anyone can tell me how to embed the audio into Lesswrong I'd appreciate it)I'm excited to share a project I've been working on that I think many in the Lesswrong community will appreciate - converting some rational fiction into high-quality audiobooks using cutting-edge AI voice technology from ElevenLabs, under the name "Askwho Casts AI". The keystone of this project is an audiobook version of Planecrash (AKA Project Lawful), the epic glowfic authored by

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37:12

“Now THIS is forecasting: understanding Epoch’s...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/04

Happy May the 4th from Convergence Analysis! Cross-posted on the EA Forum.As part of Convergence Analysis's scenario research, we’ve been looking into how AI organisations, experts, and forecasters make predictions about the future of AI. In February 2023, the AI research institute Epoch published a report in which its authors use neural scaling laws to make quantitative predictions about when AI will reach human-level performance and become transformative. The report has a corresponding blog post,

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9:26

[Linkpost] “My hour of memoryless lucidity” by Eric...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/04

This is a linkpost for https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2024/05/04/my-hour-of-memoryless-lucidity/Yesterday, I had a coronectomy: the top halves of my bottom wisdom were teeth surgically removed. It was my first time being sedated, and I didn’t know what to expect. While I was unconscious during the surgery, the hour after surgery turned out to be a fascinating experience, because I was completely lucid but had almost zero short-term memory.My girlfriend, who had kindly agreed to accompany me to the

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2:36

“Apply to ESPR & PAIR, Rationality and AI Camps for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/04

TLDR – Apply now to ESPR and PAIR. ESPR welcomes students between 16-19 years. PAIR is for students between 16-21 years.The FABRIC team is running two immersive summer workshops for mathematically talented students this year.The Program on AI and Reasoning (PAIR) is for students with an interest in artificial intelligence, cognition, and minds in general. We will study how current AI systems work, mathematical theories about human minds, and how the two relate. Alumni of previous PAIR described the

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9:12

[Linkpost] “‘AI Safety for Fleshy Humans’ an AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/03

This is a linkpost for https://aisafety.dance/Nicky Case, of "The Evolution of Trust" and "We Become What We Behold" fame (two quite popular online explainers/mini-games) has written an intro explainer to AI Safety! It looks pretty good to me, though just the first part is out, which isn't super in-depth. I particularly appreciate Nicky clearly thinking about the topic himself, and I kind of like some of their "logic vs. intuition" frame, even though I think that aspect is less core to my model of

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51:23

“Key takeaways from our EA and alignment research...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/03

Many thanks to Spencer Greenberg, Lucius Caviola, Josh Lewis, John Bargh, Ben Pace, Diogo de Lucena, and Philip Gubbins for their valuable ideas and feedback at each stage of this project—as well as the ~375 EAs + alignment researchers who provided the data that made this project possible. BackgroundLast month, AE Studio launched two surveys: one for alignment researchers, and another for the broader EA community. We got some surprisingly interesting results, and we're excited to share them here.We

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58:44

“AI #62: Too Soon to Tell” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/03

What is the mysterious impressive new ‘gpt2-chatbot’ from the Arena? Is it GPT-4.5? A refinement of GPT-4? A variation on GPT-2 somehow? A new architecture? Q-star? Someone else's model? Could be anything. It is so weird that this is how someone chose to present that model. There was also a lot of additional talk this week about California's proposed SB 1047. I wrote an additional post extensively breaking that bill down, explaining how it would work in practice, addressing misconceptions

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1:49

“Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop Happening at...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/03

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Announcing the first academic Mechanistic Interpretability workshop, held at ICML 2024!We'd love to get papers submitted if any of you have relevant projects! Deadline May 29, max 4 or max 8 pages. We welcome anything that brings us closer to a principled understanding of model internals, even if it's not "traditional” mech interp. Check out our website for example topics! There's $1750 in best paper prizes. We

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76:24

“Q&A on Proposed SB 1047” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/02

Previously: On the Proposed California SB 1047. Text of the bill is here. It focuses on safety requirements for highly capable AI models. This is written as an FAQ, tackling all questions or points I saw raised. Safe & Secure AI Innovation Act also has a description page. Why Are We Here Again? There have been many highly vocal and forceful objections to SB 1047 this week, in reaction to a (disputed) claim that the bill has been ‘fast tracked.’ The bill continues to have

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7:50

“Please stop publishing ideas/insights/research about...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/02

Basically all ideas/insights/research about AI is potentially exfohazardous. At least, it's pretty hard to know when some ideas/insights/research will actually make things better; especially in a world where building an aligned superintelligence (let's call this work "alignment") is quite harder than building any superintelligence (let's call this work "capabilities"), and there's a lot more people trying to do the latter than the former, and they have a lot more material resources. Ideas about AI,

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30:40

“Manifund Q1 Retro: Learnings from impact certs” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/02

Manifund is a philanthropic startup that runs a website and programs to fund awesome projects. From January to now, we wrapped up 3 different programs for impact certificates (aka venture-style funding for charity projects): ACX Grants, Manifold Community Fund, and the Chinatalk essay competition. Overall, we’ve learned a lot and are happy with the projects we’ve funded, but are less excited by impact certs than before — it's been hard to get investor interest, and we still haven’t found a use case

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3:38

“An explanation of evil in an organized world” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/02

A classic problem with Christianity is the so-called ‘problem of evil’—that friction between the hypothesis that the world's creator is arbitrarily good and powerful, and a large fraction of actual observations of the world. Coming up with solutions to the problem of evil is a compelling endeavor if you are really rooting for a particular bottom line re Christianity, or I guess if you enjoy making up faux-valid arguments for wrong conclusions. At any rate, I think about this more than you might

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6:37

“Take SCIFs, it’s dangerous to go alone” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/02

Coauthored by Dmitrii Volkov_^1_, Christian Schroeder de Witt_^2_, Jeffrey Ladish_^1_ (_^1_Palisade Research, _^2_University of Oxford).We explore how frontier AI labs could assimilate operational security (opsec) best practices from fields like nuclear energy and construction to mitigate near-term safety risks stemming from AI R&D process compromise. Such risks in the

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13:21

“The Intentional Stance, LLMs Edition” by Eleni Angelou

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/01

In memoriam of Daniel C. Dennett. tldr; I sketch out what it means to apply Dennett's Intentional Stance to LLMs. I argue that the intentional vocabulary is already ubiquitous in experimentation with these systems therefore what is missing is the theoretical framework to justify this usage. I aim to make up for that and explain why the intentional stance is the best available explanatory tool for LLM behavior. Choosing Between StancesWhy choose the intentional stance? It seems natural to employ

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5:04

“ACX Covid Origins Post convinced readers” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/01

ACX recently posted about the Rootclaim Covid origins debate, coming out in favor of zoonosis. Did the post change the minds of those who read it, or not? Did it change their judgment in favor of zoonosis (as was probably the goal of the post), or conversely did it make them think Lab Leak was more likely (as the "Don't debate conspiracy theorists" theory claims)?I analyzed the ACX survey to find out, by comparing responses before and after the post came out. The ACX survey asked readers whether

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13:12

“LessWrong Community Weekend 2024, open for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/01

Main event pageFriday 13th September- Monday 16th September 2024 is the 11th annual Less Wrong Community Weekend (LWCW) in Berlin. This is the world's largest rationalist social gathering which brings together 250+ aspiring rationalists from across Europe and beyond for four days of intellectual exploration, socialising and fun.We’re expanding to 250+ participants and taking over the whole hostel. This year there will only be us during the event: a huge variety of spaces to talk, relax and have fun

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44:15

“Transcoders enable fine-grained interpretable...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/01

Summary. We present a method for performing circuit analysis on language models using "transcoders," an occasionally-discussed variant of SAEs that provide an interpretable approximation to MLP sublayers' computations. Transcoders are exciting because they allow us not only to interpret the output of MLP sublayers but also to decompose the MLPs themselves into interpretable computations. In contrast, SAEs only allow us to interpret the output of MLP sublayers and not how they were computed.We

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17:24

“Questions for labs” by Zach Stein-Perlman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/01

Associated with AI Lab Watch, I sent questionnaires to some labs a week ago (except I failed to reach Microsoft). I didn't really get any replies (one person replied in their personal capacity; this was very limited and they didn't answer any questions). Here are most of those questions, with slight edits since I shared them with the labs + similar questions condensed into the last two sections.Lots of my questions are normal I didn't find public info on this safety practice and I think you should

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81:00

“Mechanistically Eliciting Latent Behaviors in...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/30

Produced as part of the MATS Winter 2024 program, under the mentorship of Alex Turner (TurnTrout).TL,DR: I introduce a method for eliciting latent behaviors in language models by learning unsupervised perturbations of an early layer of an LLM. These perturbations are trained to maximize changes in downstream activations. The method discovers diverse and meaningful behaviors with just one prompt, including perturbations overriding safety training, eliciting backdoored behaviors and uncovering latent

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7:11

“Why I’m doing PauseAI” by Joseph Miller

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/30

GPT-5 training is probably starting around now. It seems very unlikely that GPT-5 will cause the end of the world. But it's hard to be sure. I would guess that GPT-5 is more likely to kill me than an asteroid, a supervolcano, a plane crash or a brain tumor. We can predict fairly well what the cross-entropy loss will be, but pretty much nothing else.Maybe we will suddenly discover that the difference between GPT-4 and superhuman level is actually quite small. Maybe GPT-5 will be extremely good at

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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