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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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34:04

“Examining Language Model Performance with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/27

Summary. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) reveal interpretable features in the activation spaces of language models, but SAEs don’t reconstruct activations perfectly. We lack good metrics for evaluating which parts of model activations SAEs fail to reconstruct, which makes it hard to evaluate SAEs themselves. In this post, we argue that SAE reconstructions should be tested using well-established benchmarks to help determine what kinds of tasks they degrade model performance on.We stress-test a recently

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28:16

“Acting Wholesomely” by owencb

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/26

Overview of essay series This is the first in a collection of three essays exploring and ultimately defending the idea of choosing what feels wholesome as a heuristic for picking actions which are good for the world. I'm including a summary of the series here, before getting to the essay proper. The two main generators of my thinking about this were: Reflecting on major mistakes that have been made in EA, and wondering how EA might have been different at a deep level in ways that could have

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9:35

“How I build and run behavioral interviews” by benkuhn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/26

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Wave. I used to think that behavioral interviews were basically useless, because it was too easy for candidates to bullshit them and too hard for me to tell what was a good answer. I’d end up grading every candidate as a “weak yes” or “weak no” because I was never sure what bar I should hold them to. I still think most behavioral interviews are like that, but after doing way too many behavioral interviews, I now think it's possible to escape that

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10:46

“China-AI forecasts” by NathanBarnard

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/25

The rate at which China is able to advance towards TAI is a crucial consideration in for many policy questions. My current take is that, without significant political reforms which seem very unlikely while Xi is alive (although considerably more likely after his death,) it's very unlikely that China will be able to mount a meaningful challenge to AI firms in US and allies in the race for TAI. I don’t think it requires democratic reforms are required to China to be competitive with the US and allies,

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21:01

[Linkpost] “Ideological Bayesians” by Kevin Dorst

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/25

This is a linkpost for https://kevindorst.substack.com/p/ideological-bayesiansTLDR: It's often said that Bayesian updating is unbiased and converges to the truth—and, therefore, that biases must emerge from non-Bayesian sources. That's not quite right. The convergence results require updating on your total evidence—but for agents at all like us, that's impossible—instead, we must selectively attend to certain questions, ignoring others. Yet correlations between what we see and what questions we

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5:09

“‘In-Context’ ‘Learning’” by Arjun Panickssery

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/25

I see people use "in-context learning" in different ways.Take the opening to "In-Context Learning Creates Task Vectors":In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the “standard” machine learning framework, where one uses a training set <span>_S_</span> to find a best-fitting function <span>_f(x)_</span>

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37:24

“Cooperating with aliens and (distant) AGIs: An ECL...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/24

Summary. Evidential cooperation in large worlds (ECL) is a proposed way of reaping gains—that is, getting more of what we value instantiated—through cooperating with agents across the universe/multiverse. Such cooperation does not involve physical, or causal, interaction. ECL is potentially a crucial consideration, because we may be able to do more good this way compared to the “standard” (i.e., causal) way of optimizing for our values. The core idea of ECL can be summarized as: According to

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12:47

“Choosing My Quest (Part 2 of ‘The Sense Of Physical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/24

This is the second post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of "Hug the Query", as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism. This one demos phase zero, all the preparation that's often needed before you can really get to work. It corresponds to the how-to posts "Getting Started With Naturalism" and "Catching the Spark". For context on this sequence, see the intro post. The Dead Words Of OthersAt the outset of any naturalist study, original seeing

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26:00

“Rationality Research Report: Towards 10x OODA...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/24

6 months ago I wrote Feedbackloop-first Rationality. I didn't followup on it for awhile (except for sporadic Deliberate (“Purposeful?”) Practice Club).I just spent 6 weeks actually exploring "how would I build my own cognition training program?". In the process of doing so, I've iterated a bunch. I'm still in an orienting phase, but it seemed worth writing down the current stage of my thoughts. What's my goal?A rough overview: I want to get more, higher quality "X-risk thinker hours" hours. This

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13:26

[Linkpost] “We Need Major, But Not Radical, FDA...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/24

This is a linkpost for https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/we-need-major-but-not-radical-fdaFellow progress blogger Alex Telford and I have had a friendly back-and-forth going over FDA reform. Alex suggests incremental reforms to the FDA, which I strongly support, but these don’t go far enough. The FDA's failures merit a complete overhaul: Remove efficacy requirements and keep only basic safety testing and ingredient verification. Any drug that doesn’t go through efficacy trials gets a big red

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2:33

“Balancing Games” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/24

When I play an N-player game I want everyone to both: Try to win Win about 1/N of the time With many games and groups of participants these are in conflict: if I play bridge against my kids I'm going to win all the time, but I'm not very good at the game so if I play against people who are serious about it I'm going to lose ~all the time. One way some games handle this is by including a lot of luck. The more random the outcomes are, the more you'll approach 1/N

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18:23

“How well do truth probes generalise?” by mishajw

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/24

Representation engineering (RepEng) has emerged as a promising research avenue for model interpretability and control. Recent papers have proposed methods for discovering truth in models with unlabeled data, guiding generation by modifying representations, and building LLM lie detectors. RepEng asks the question: If we treat representations as the central unit, how much power do we have over a model's behaviour?Most techniques use linear probes to monitor and control representations. An important

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10:08

“The Sense Of Physical Necessity: A Naturalism Demo...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/24

Note on genre: This sequence is a demonstration of a complete naturalist study, as described in Intro to Naturalism and The Nuts and Bolts Of Naturalism. I think of naturalism demos as reference material. I’ve tried to make it readable, but like a dictionary or a user manual, I only expect it to be of interest to people who already have a reason to consult it.Epistemic status: The explicit concepts I’m building around what I’ve learned are still under construction. I think the framing emphasized in

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22:34

“A starting point for making sense of task structure...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/24

ML models can perform a range of tasks and subtasks, some of which are more closely related to one another than are others. In this post, we set out two very initial starting points. First, we motivate reverse engineering models’ task decompositions. We think this can be helpful for interpretability and for understanding generalization. Second, we provide a (potentially non-exhaustive, initial) list of techniques that could be used to quantify the ‘distance’ between two tasks or inputs. We hope

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0:33

“The Shutdown Problem: Incomplete Preferences as a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/23

This article contains more than 100 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: February 23rd, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YbEbwYWkf8mv9jnmi/the-shutdown-problem-incomplete-preferences-as-a-solution --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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1:39

“Deep and obvious points in the gap between your...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/23

Some ideas feel either deep or extremely obvious. You’ve heard some trite truism your whole life, then one day an epiphany lands and you try to save it with words, and you realize the description is that truism. And then you go out and try to tell others what you saw, and you can’t reach past their bored nodding. Or even you yourself, looking back, wonder why you wrote such tired drivel with such excitement. When this happens, I wonder if it's because the thing is true in your model of how to

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4:17

“Complexity of value but not disvalue implies more...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/23

As per title. I often talk to people that have views that I think should straightforwardly imply a larger focus on s-risk than they think. In particular, people often seem to endorse something like a rough symmetry between the goodness of good stuff and the badness of bad stuff, sometimes referring to this short post that offers some arguments in that direction. I'm confused by this and wanted to quickly jot down my thoughts - I won't try to make them rigorous and make various guesses for what

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7:44

[Linkpost] “Contra Ngo et al. ‘Every ‘Every Bay Area...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/22

This is a linkpost for https://bayesshammai.substack.com/p/contra-ngo-et-al-every-every-bayWith thanks to Scott Alexander for the inspiration, Jeffrey Ladish, Philip Parker, Avital Morris, and Drake Thomas for masterful cohosting, and Richard Ngo for his investigative journalism.Last summer, I threw an Every Bay Area House Party themed party. I don’t live in the Bay, but I was there for a construction-work-slash-webforum-moderation-and-UI-design-slash-grantmaking gig, so I took the opportunity to

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53:31

“AI #52: Oops” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/22

We were treated to technical marvels this week. At Google, they announced Gemini Pro 1.5, with a million token context window within which it has excellent recall, using mixture of experts to get Gemini Advanced level performance (e.g. GPT-4 level) out of Gemini Pro levels of compute. This is a big deal, and I think people are sleeping on it. Also they released new small open weights models that look to be state of the art. At OpenAI, they announced Sora, a new text-to-video model that is a

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32:52

“Gemini Has a Problem” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/22

Google's Gemini 1.5 is impressive and I am excited by its huge context window. I continue to default to Gemini Advanced as my default AI for everyday use when the large context window is not relevant. However, while it does not much interfere with what I want to use Gemini for, there is a big problem with Gemini Advanced that has come to everyone's attention. Gemini comes with an image generator. Until today it would, upon request, create pictures of humans. On Tuesday evening, some people

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