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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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3:57

[Linkpost] “Research Post: Tasks That Language Models...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/22

This is a linkpost for https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11349Abstract. We argue that there are certain properties of language that our current large language models (LLMs) don't learn. We present an empirical investigation of visual-auditory properties of language through a series of tasks, termed H-Test. This benchmark highlights a fundamental gap between human linguistic comprehension, which naturally integrates sensory experiences, and the sensory-deprived processing capabilities of LLMs. In support

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17:03

“Sora What” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/22

Hours after Google announced Gemini 1.5, OpenAI announced their new video generation model Sora. Its outputs look damn impressive. How Sora Works How does it work? There is a technical report. Mostly it seems like OpenAI did standard OpenAI things, meaning they fed in tons of data, used lots of compute, and pressed the scaling button super hard. The innovations they are willing to talk about seem to be things like ‘do not crop the videos into a standard size.’ That does not mean there

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19:46

“Do sparse autoencoders find ‘true features’?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/22

In this post I'll discuss an apparent limitation of sparse autoencoders (SAEs) in their current formulation as they are applied to discovering the latent features within AI models such as transformer-based LLMs. In brief, I'll cover the following: I'll argue that the L1 regularisation used to promote sparsity when training SAEs may cause neurons in the sparse layer to learn to represent common combinations of features rather than the individual features that we want them to discoverAs well as making

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32:07

“Everything Wrong with Roko’s Claims about an...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/22

PremisesHere I tackle some bold claims made by Roko in three separate posts about SARS-CoV-2 being an engineered virus (Brute Force Manufactured Consensus is Hiding the Crime of the Century, The Math of Suspicious Coincidences, and A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation On How Unlikely The Circumstantial Evidence Around Covid-19 Is). A first rebuttal to Roko's post is already out, and since I have been preparing this post for some time, certain arguments are going to be similar. The purpose of this

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15:23

“The One and a Half Gemini” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/22

Previously: I hit send on The Third Gemini, and within half an hour DeepMind announced Gemini 1.5. So this covers Gemini 1.5. One million tokens, and we are promised overall Gemini Advanced or GPT-4 levels of performance on Gemini Pro levels of compute. This post does not cover the issues with Gemini's image generation, and what it is and is not willing to generate. I am on top of that situation and will get to it soon. One Million Tokens Our teams continue pushing the frontiers of

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4:10

“The Byronic Hero Always Loses” by Cole Wyeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/22

Why do we root for the antiheroes?Walter White, Light Yagami, Lucifer Morningstar, Doctor Frankenstein... It seems to be natural to root for the bad guys, and perhaps even more natural for rationalists.“I must confess I have always had some sympathy with villains. Heroism makes fine entertainment but sooner or later someone has to get things done.” - Bayaz, Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy. I think this is the reason, at least for me. Villains (particularly the most beloved villains) are agentic

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0:38

“Job Listing: Managing Editor / Writer” by Gretta Duleba

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/21

MIRI is hiring a managing editor and one or more writers. Here's the job listing. We're accepting applications until March 13th.I am the Communications Manager at MIRI and I'm the hiring manager for these positions. I'm happy to answer questions. --- First published: February 21st, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j5twfHKz5mehjFMAB/job-listing-managing-editor-writer --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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14:44

“The Pareto Best and the Curse of Doom” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/21

1.Prerequisite reading: Being the (Pareto) Best in the World.A summary of Being the (Pareto) Best in the World: Being the world's best mathematician is hard. Being the world's best musician is hard. Being the world's best mathematician/musician is much easier, especially since there are multiple slots; an amazing mathematician who is also a competent musician, someone who is good at both, and a competent mathematician who is also an amazing musician can all find a niche.I like this concept, and

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7:48

“Analogies between scaling labs and misaligned...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/21

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.TL;DR: Scaling labs have their own alignment problem analogous to AI systems, and there are some similarities between the labs and misaligned/unsafe AI. Introduction. Major AI scaling labs (OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic, Google/DeepMind, and Meta) are very influential in the AI safety and alignment community. They put out cutting-edge research because of their talent, money, and institutional knowledge. A

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10:03

“Dual Wielding Kindle Scribes” by mesaoptimizer

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/21

This is an informal post intended to describe a workflow / setup that I found very useful, so that others might consider adopting or experimenting with facets of it that they find useful. In August 2023, I was a part of MATS 4.0 and begun learning the skill of deconfusion, with an aim of disentangling my conflicting intuitions between my belief that shard theory seemed to be at least directionally pointing at some issues with the MIRI model of AGI takeoff and alignment difficulty, and my belief

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1:39

“Less Wrong automated systems are inadvertently...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/21

Just a short post to highlight an issue with debate on LW; I have recently been involved with some interest in the debate on covid-19 origins on here. User viking_math posted a response which I was keen to respond to, but it is not possible for me to respond to that debate (or any) because the LW site has rate-limited me to one comment per 24 hours because my recent comments are on -5 karma or less. So, I feel that I should highlight that one side of the debate (my side) is simply not going to be

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67:46

“AI #51: Altman’s Ambition” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/20

[Editor's note: I forgot to post this to WorldPress on Thursday. I’m posting it here now. Sorry about that.] Sam Altman is not playing around. He wants to build new chip factories in the decidedly unsafe and unfriendly UAE. He wants to build up the world's supply of energy so we can run those chips. What does he say these projects will cost? Oh, up to seven trillion dollars. Not a typo. Even scaling back the misunderstandings, this is what ambition looks like. It is not what

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7:05

“Why does generalization work?” by Martín Soto

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/20

Just an interesting philosophical argument 1. PhysicsWhy can an ML model learn from part of a distribution or data set, and generalize to the rest of it? Why can I learn some useful heuristics or principles in a particular context, and later apply them in other areas of my life?The answer is obvious: because there are some underlying regularities between the parts I train on and the ones I test on. In the ML example, generalization won't work when approximating a function which is a completely

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3:50

“Retirement Accounts and Short Timelines” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/19

Sometimes I talk to people who don't use retirement accounts because they think the world will change enormously between now and when they're older. Something like, the most likely outcomes are that things go super well and they won't need the money, or things go super poorly and we're all dead. So they keep savings in unrestricted accounts for maximum flexibility. Which I think is often a bad decision, at least in the US: Even if you're especially optimistic or pessimistic, the

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22:10

“Protocol evaluations: good analogies vs control” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/19

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Let's say you want to use AIs that are capable of causing x-risk. You have a plan that describes how to train, validate and deploy AIs. For example, you could use pretraining+RLHF, check that it doesn’t fall for honeypots and never inserts a single backdoor in your coding validation set, and have humans look at the deployment outputs GPT-4 finds the most suspicious. How do you know if this plan allows you to use

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20:47

[Linkpost] “I’d also take $7 trillion” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/19

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/projects/7%20trillion.htmlSo, Sam Altman wants as much money as he can get - the number he chose to give was $7 trillion - to build more chips for AI as fast as possible. Including in places like the UAE. Thus undermining his argument that OpenAI is helping with AI safety by preventing overhang and maintaining a lead for America, which was never a good argument anyway. Well, I warned some people about him. To avoid getting fooled by bad actors, you

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27:40

“On coincidences and Bayesian reasoning, as applied...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/19

(Or: sometimes heuristics are no substitute for a deep dive into all of the available information). This post is a response to Roko's recent series of posts (Brute Force Manufactured Consensus is Hiding the Crime of the Century, The Math of Suspicious Coincidences, and A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation On How Unlikely The Circumstantial Evidence Around Covid-19 Is); however, I made a separate post for a few reasons. I think it's in-depth enough to warrant its own post, rather than making

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4:06

“Things I’ve Grieved” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/18

I think grieving is a fundamental rationality skill. Often, the difference between the Winning Move, and your Current Path, is that there is something really beautiful and good about your current path. Or there was something actually horrifying about reality that makes the Winning Move necessary. There is a skill to engaging with, but eventually letting go, of things that are beautiful and good but which you can't have right now.There is a skill to facing horror.I think these are a general skill, of

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112:48

“2023 Survey Results” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/18

The Data 0. PopulationThere were 558 responses over 32 days. The spacing and timing of the responses had hills and valleys because of an experiment I was performing where I'd get the survey advertised in a different place, then watch how many new responses happened in the day or two after that.Previous surveys have been run over the last decade or so. 2009: 166 2011: 1090 2012: 1195 2013: 1636 2014: 1503 2016: 3083 2017: "About 300" 2020: 61 2022: 186 2023: 558Last year when I got a hundred and

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14:15

[Linkpost] “‘What if we could redesign society from...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/18

This is a linkpost for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-A1i2g9riU In this video, we describe a speculative but promising idea to boost economic growth: giving cities the ability to write some of their own laws and design their own institutions, independently from their parent countries. Jackson Wagner, the first author of this post, has written the script. Writer, the second author, has given feedback. Below, you can find the script of the video.Introduction. When you think about ways to help

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