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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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63:59

“AI #48: The Talk of Davos” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/25

While I was in San Francisco, the big head honchos headed for Davos, where AI was the talk of the town. As well it should be, given what will be coming soon. It did not seem like anyone involved much noticed or cared about the existential concerns. That is consistent with the spirit of Davos, which has been not noticing or caring about things that don’t directly impact your business or vibe since (checks notes by which I mean an LLM) 1971. It is what it is. Otherwise we got a relatively quiet

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8:42

[Linkpost] “[Repost] The Copenhagen Interpretation of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/25

This is a linkpost for http://web.archive.org/web/20230105070226/https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/Because the original webpage (and domain) is down, and it takes about a minute (including loading time) for Wayback Machine to give me the page, I've decided to repost this essay here. I consider it an essay that seems core to 2010s rationalist discourse. The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and

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86:54

“The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/24

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.In this post, we argue that AI labs should ensure that powerful AIs are controlled. That is, labs should make sure that the safety measures they apply to their powerful models prevent unacceptably bad outcomes, even if the AIs are misaligned and intentionally try to subvert those safety measures. We think no fundamental research breakthroughs are required for labs to implement safety measures that meet our standard

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76:59

“Monthly Roundup #14: January 2024” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/24

There's always lots of stuff going on. The backlog of other roundups keeps growing rather than shrinking. I have also decided to hold back a few things to turn them into their own posts instead. Bad News I wonder if it is meaningful that most of the bad news is about technology? I don’t even know if this is news, but Rutgers finds TikTok amplifies and suppresses content based on whether it aligns with the CCP. It would be great if we could find a way to ban or stop using TikTok

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2:11

“This might be the last AI Safety Camp” by Remmelt,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/24

We are organising the 9th edition without funds. We have no personal runway left to do this again. We will not run the 10th edition without funding. In a nutshell: Last month, we put out AI Safety Camp'sfunding case. A private donor then decided to donate €5K. Five more donors offered $7K onManifund. For that $7K to not be wiped out and returned, another$21K in funding is needed. At that level, we may be able to run a minimal version of AI Safety Camp next year, where we get research leads started

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4:25

“Humans aren’t fleeb.” by Charlie Steiner

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/24

In the oceans of the planet Water, a species of intelligent squid-like aliens - we'll just call them the People - debate about what it means to be fleeb.Fleeb is a property of great interest to the People, or at least they think so, but they also have a lot of trouble defining it. They're fleeb when they're awake, but less fleeb or maybe not fleeb at all when they're asleep. Some animals that act clever are probably somewhat fleeb, and other animals that are stupid and predictable probably aren't

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16:47

“From Finite Factors to Bayes Nets” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/23

I was hoping I could produce a one-to-one mapping between diagrams of overlapping factors (from FFS) and Bayes nets. This is not possible, but instead I have been able to produce a similar mapping between factor overlap diagrams and sets of Bayes nets, subject to certain compatibility relationships. Bayes NetsThe Bayes nets over some variables <span>_X_</span> can be thought of as a category of objects related by "bookkeeping" (and similar) relationships. To be more specific, we can say

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2:47

“Making a Secular Solstice Songbook” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/23

After this year's secular solstice several people were saying they'd be interested in getting together to sing some of these songs casually. This is a big part of what we sang at the post-EAG music party, but one issue was logistical: how do you get everyone on the same words and chords? I have slides (2023, 2022, 2019, 2018) with the chords and lyrics to the songs we've done at the past few events, but they have some issues: They were intended only for my use, so they're a bit

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4:44

[Linkpost] “Loneliness and suicide mitigation for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/23

This is a linkpost for https://www.nature.com/articles/s44184-023-00047-6Survey of users of Replika, an AI chatbot companion. 23% of users reported that it stimulated rather than displaced interactions with real humans, while 8% reported displacement. 30 participants (3%) spontaneously reported that it stopped them from attempting suicide.Some excerpts:During data collection in late 2021, Replika was not programmed to initiate therapeutic or intimate relationships. In addition to generative AI, it

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7:35

[Linkpost] “the subreddit size threshold” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/23

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/culture/subreddit%20size.html Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. — Yogi Berra In the early days of the internet, people on Usenet complained about the influx of new users from AOL making it worse. I always thought the evolution of online communities with growth was an interesting and important topic. Do they really get worse with size? According to who? Why would that happen? What can be done about it? Today, Reddit has over 1 billion

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“There is way too much serendipity” by Malmesbury

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/22

Crossposted from substack.As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry.Four billion years of evolution endowed our brains with a simple, straightforward mechanism to make sure we occasionally get an energy refuel so we can continue the foraging a little longer, and of course we are completely ignoring the instructions and spend billions on fake fuel that doesn’t actually grant any energy. A classic case of the Human Alignment Problem.If

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19:07

“We need a science of evals” by Marius Hobbhahn,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/22

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a linkpost for https://www.apolloresearch.ai/blog/we-need-a-science-of-evals In this post, we argue that if AI model evaluations (evals) want to have meaningful real-world impact, we need a “Science of Evals”, i.e. the field needs rigorous scientific processes that provide more confidence in evals methodology and results. Model evaluations allow us to reduce uncertainty about properties of Neural Networks

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106:32

“′ petertodd’’s last stand: The final days of open...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/22

TL;DR All GPT-3 models were decommissioned by OpenAI in early January. I present some examples of ongoing interpretability research which would benefit from the organisation rethinking this decision and providing some kind of ongoing research access. This also serves as a review of work I did in 2023 and how it progressed from the original ' SolidGoldMagikarp' discovery just over a year ago into much stranger territory.Introduction. Some months ago, when OpenAI announced that the decommissioning of

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16:41

[Linkpost] “InterLab – a toolkit for experiments with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/22

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a linkpost for https://acsresearch.org/posts/interlab-introThis post introduces InterLab, a toolkit for experiments with multi-agent interaction. We plan to release more posts on the overall project, technical details, design considerations, and concrete research projects and ideas over the next few weeks to months.This post focuses on the motivation behind the project and touches upon more high-level

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5:47

“When Does Altruism Strengthen Altruism?” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/21

Joey Savoie recently wrote that Altruism Sharpens Altruism: I think many EAs have a unique view about how one altruistic action affects the next altruistic action, something like altruism is powerful in terms of its impact, and altruistic acts take time/energy/willpower; thus, it's better to conserve your resources for these topmost important altruistic actions (e.g., career choice) and not sweat it for the other actions. However, I think this is a pretty simplified and incorrect

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12:35

“A Shutdown Problem Proposal” by johnswentworth,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/21

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. GoalFirst things first: this is not (yet) aimed at solving the whole corrigibility problem, or even the whole shutdown problem.The main thing this proposal is intended to do is to get past the barriers MIRI found in their old work on the shutdown problem. In particular, in a toy problem basically-identical to the one MIRI used, we want an agent which: Does not want to manipulate the shutdown buttonDoes respond to

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22:51

[Linkpost] “Book review: Cuisine and Empire” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/21

This is a linkpost for https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2024/01/20/book-review-cuisine-and-empire/People began cooking our food maybe two million years ago and have not stopped since. Cooking is almost a cultural universal. Bits of raw fruit or leaves or flesh are a rare occasional treat or garnish – we prefer our meals transformed. There are other millennia-old procedures we do to make raw ingredients into cooking: separating parts, drying, soaking, slicing, grinding, freezing, fermenting. We do all

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15:48

[Linkpost] “legged robot scaling laws” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/20

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/industrial%20design/walker%20scaling.htmlFiction has lots of giant walking robots. Those designs are generally considered impractical or impossible, but they've been discussed for thousands of years, there must be something appealing about them. So, let's consider exactly what's impractical about large walking robots and what properties they'd have if they could be made. practicalitySuppose you have a humanoid robot that operates in a factory. It

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4:51

“A quick investigation of AI pro-AI bias” by Fabien...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/19

A quick investigation of AI pro-AI biasQuestion: Do LLMs exhibit a pro-AI bias in their answers?Experiment: I compare the scores LLMs give to resumes when the titles of the publications they contain reflect a pro or anti-AI sentiment, or when a pro or anti-AI sentiment is explicitly expressed.Result: I don’t find evidence of pro or anti-AI bias in GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4. MethodsI took 14 governance-related publications published after 2022 (GPT-4-0613's knowledge cutoff is 2021), and I inserted 3

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14:46

“On ‘Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths’” by alkjash, Gordon...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/19

Gordon Seidoh WorleyHey, alkjash! I'm excited to talk about some of David Chapman's work with you. Full disclosure, I'm a big fan of Chapman's in general and also a creator within the meta/post-rationality scene with him (to use some jargon to be introduced very shortly).You mentioned being superficially convinced of a post he wrote a while ago about how subcultures collapse called "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution". In it he makes a few key claims that, together, give a model of

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