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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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11:24

“Idealized Agents Are Approximate Causal Mirrors (+...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/22

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Epistemic status: I'm currently unsure whether that's a fake framework, a probably-wrong mechanistic model, or a legitimate insight into the fundamental nature of agency. Regardless, viewing things from this angle has been helpful for me.In addition, the ambitious implications of this view is one of the reasons I'm fairly optimistic about arriving at a robust solution to alignment via agent-foundations research in

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3:09

“The LessWrong 2022 Review: Review Phase” by RobertM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/22

This year's LessWrong review nomination phase ended a few days ago, with 339 posts nominated. For comparison, 291 posts were nominated in the 2021 review. Nomination Phase ResultsHere are the current top-20 posts by vote total: AGI Ruin: A List of LethalitiesMIRI announces new "Death With Dignity" strategySimulatorsWhere I agree and disagree with EliezerReward is not the optimization targetSix Dimensions of Operational Adequacy in AGI ProjectsYou Are Not Measuring What You Think You Are

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2:32

“Most People Don’t Realize We Have No Idea How Our...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/21

This point feels fairly obvious, yet seems worth stating explicitly.Those of us familiar with the field of AI after the deep-learning revolution know perfectly well that we have no idea how our ML models work. Sure, we have an understanding of the dynamics of training loops and SGD's properties, and we know how ML models' architectures work. But we don't know what specific algorithms ML models' forward passes implement. We have some guesses, and some insights painstakingly mined by interpretability

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5:16

“Pseudonymity and Accusations” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/21

Here's a category of situations I'm not sure how to think about: Avery, writing under a pseudonym ('Alex'), accuses Pat of something, let's say abuse. A major motivation of Avery's is for people to know to consider this information before in their interactions with Pat. Pat claims that actually it was 'Alex' who was abusive, and gives their side of the story. While it's all pretty hard for outsiders to judge, a bunch of people end up thinking that they would like to take some precautions in how

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91:02

“AI #43: Functional Discoveries” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/21

We get innovation in functional search. In an even more functional search, we finally get a Nature paper submitted almost two years ago, in which AI discovered a new class of antibiotic. That's pretty damn exciting, with all the implications thereof.OpenAI continued its rapid pace of shipping, pivoting for this week to safety. There was a paper about weak-to-strong generalization. I see what they are trying to do. It is welcome, but I was underwhelmed. It and Leike's follow-up post continue down a

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7:26

“AI Safety Chatbot” by markov, Robert Miles

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/21

Hello World! The AISafety.info team is launching a prototype of the AI Safety Chatbot.The chatbot uses a dataset of alignment literature to answer any questions related to AI safety that you might have, while also citing established sources. Please keep in mind that this is a very early prototype and despite citing references, it may still provide inaccurate or inappropriate information.The overall objective is to help people better understand AI Safety issues based on alignment research using an

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41:29

“On OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/21

Previously: On RSPs. Be Prepared OpenAI introduces their preparedness framework for safety in frontier models. A summary of the biggest takeaways, which I will repeat at the end: I am very happy the preparedness framework exists at all. I am very happy it is beta and open to revision. It's very vague and needs fleshing out in several places. The framework exceeded expectations, with many great features. I updated positively. I am happy we can talk price, while noting our

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6:11

“Prediction Markets aren’t Magic” by SimonM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/21

One common theme which I come across quite a bit in the prediction market space is:Prediction markets would solve [x][1]And the proposal for "solving" [x] is: Set up prediction market???ProfitThese people need to consider the idea that "prediction markets aren't as popular as think think because they aren't as good as you think". (And I say this as a person who is a big fan of prediction markets!) If you think prediction markets are valuable it's likely because you think they price things well -

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65:50

“On the future of language models” by owencb

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/20

1. Introduction 1.1 Summary of key claims Even without further breakthroughs in AI, language models will have big impacts in the coming years, as people start sorting out proper applications The early important applications will be automation of expert advisors, management, and perhaps software development The more transformative but harder prizes are automation of research and automation of executive capacity In their most straightforward form (“foundation models”), language models are a

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19:11

[Linkpost] “Succession” by Richard_Ngo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/20

This is a linkpost for https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/succession“A table beside the evening sea where you sit shelling pistachios, flicking the next open with the half- shell of the last, story opening story, on down to the sandy end of time.” V1: LeavingDeceleration is the hardest part. Even after burning almost all of my fuel, I’m still coming in at 0.8c. I’ve planned a slingshot around the galaxy's central black hole which will slow me down even further, but at this speed it’ll require incredibly

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3:49

“Matrix completion prize results” by paulfchristiano

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/20

Earlier this year ARC posted a prize for two matrix completion problems. We received a number of submissions we considered useful, but not any complete solutions. We are closing the contest and awarding the following partial prizes: $500 to Elad Hazan for solving a related problem and pointing us to this paper$500 to Som Bagchi and Jacob Stavrianos for their analysis in this comment.$500 to Shalev Ben-David for a reduction to computing the gamma 2 norm.Our main update from running this prize is that

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10:15

[Linkpost] “Legalize butanol?” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/20

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/food/butanol.html ethanol Alcoholic drinks are popular in most of the world. Excessive consumption of them is also a major public health problem. Bans have been attempted, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, but some people argue that alcohol plays a necessary role in social interactions. Alcoholic drinks contain ethanol, which is metabolized to acetaldehyde, which is metabolized to acetate. In cells, ethanol is mostly unreactive (but

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51:38

“Ronny and Nate discuss what sorts of minds humanity...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

Context: somebody at some point floated the idea that Ronny might (a) understand the argument coming out of the Quintin/Nora camp, and (b) be able to translate them to Nate. Nate invited Ronny to chat. The chat logs follow, lightly edited. The basic (counting) argumentRonny FernandezAre you mostly interested in Quintin's newest post?I haven’t read it but I don’t suspect it's his bestSo8resI'm more interested in something like "what are the actual arguments here".I'm less interested in "ronny

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22:27

“Meaning & Agency” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

The goal of this post is to clarify a few concepts relating to AI Alignment under a common framework. The main concepts to be clarified: Optimization. Specifically, this will be a type of Vingean agency. It will split into Selection vs Control variants.Reference (the relationship which holds between map and territory; aka semantics, aka meaning). Specifically, this will be a teleosemantic theory.The main new concepts employed will be endorsement and legitimacy. TLDR: Endorsement of a process is

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3:07

“Don’t Share Information Exfohazardous on Others’...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.(An "exfohazard" is information that's not dangerous to know for individuals, but which becomes dangerous if widely known. Chief example: AI capability insights.)Different alignment researchers have a wide array of different models of AI Risk, and one researcher's model may look utterly ridiculous to another researcher. Somewhere in the concept-space there exists the correct model, and the models of some of us are

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13:58

[Linkpost] “Paper: Tell, Don’t Show- Declarative...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

This is a linkpost for https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07779This post is the abstract and introduction and figures from this paper (Tweets) by Alexander Meinke and myself.Abstract. We examine how large language models (LLMs) generalize from abstract declarative statements in their training data. As an illustration, consider an LLM that is prompted to generate weather reports for London in 2050. One possibility is that the temperatures in the reports match the mean and variance of reports from 2023 (i.e

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7:17

“Goal-Completeness is like Turing-Completeness for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

Turing-completeness is a useful analogy we can use to grasp why AGI will inevitably converge to “goal-completeness”.By way of definition: An AI whose input is an arbitrary goal, which outputs actions to effectively steer the future toward that goal, is goal-complete.A goal-complete AI is analogous to a Universal Turing Machine: its ability to optimize toward any other AI's goal is analogous to a UTM's ability to run any other TM's same computation.Let's put the analogy to work:Imagine the year is

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48:27

“Monthly Roundup #13: December 2023” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

I have not actually forgotten that the rest of the world exists. As usual, this is everything that wasn’t worth an entire post and is not being saved for any of the roundup post categories. (Roundup post categories are currently AI, Medical and Health, Housing and Traffic, Dating, Childhood and Education, Fertility, Startups, and potentially NEPA and Clean Energy.) Bad News Rebels from Yemen were firing on ships in the Red Sea, a problem dating back thousands of years. Here's where we

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54:16

“Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

The New York Times Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek's Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they'd heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called

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21:07

[Linkpost] “A Universal Emergent Decomposition of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

This is a linkpost for https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.10091This work was done as a Master's thesis project at Conjecture, independent from the primary agenda of the organization. Paper available here, thesis here.Over the past months I (Alexandre) — with the help of Eric — have been working on a new approach to interpretability of language models (LMs). In the search for the units of interpretability, I decided to zoom out instead of zooming in. I focused on careful dataset design and causal

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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