PODCAST

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

4:50

“Atlantis: Berkeley event venue available for rent”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/22

Many events in and around the rationality/EA community are run in Berkeley and might want event space. This is an announcement that there's a venue in Berkeley, called Atlantis, that's very well-suited to these kinds of events. It's a former sorority house, so it fits lots of people and is zoned properly for running retreats and workshops (this is surprisingly hard zoning to get in Berkeley). You can book it here. The venue isn’t limited to rationality/EA events in any way (nor will those events get

en-gb

0:39

“Userscript to always show LW comments in context vs...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/21

The out of context top-level display of comments when I navigate to them always bothered me, but up until recently I haven't realized there is a way to go to the actual comment via a simple URL change. Here is a quick gpt4 generated userscript that does this. // ==UserScript== // @name Always show in-context comments // @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/ // @version 0.1 // @description Redirect from '?commentId=' format to '#' // @author Vlad Sitalo // @match https://www.lesswrong.com/* // @grant

en-gb

20:56

“Dialogue on the Claim: ‘OpenAI’s Firing of Sam...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/21

johnswentworthI've seen/heard a bunch of people in the LW-o-sphere saying that the OpenAI corporate drama this past weekend was clearly bad. And I'm not really sure why people think that? To me, seems like a pretty clearly positive outcome overall.I'm curious why in the world people are unhappy about it (people in the LW-sphere, that is, obviously I can see why e.g. AI accelerationists would be unhappy about it). And I also want to lay out my models.johnswentworthHere's the high-gloss version of my

en-gb

6:20

“Alignment can improve generalisation through more...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/21

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Many AI alignment problems are problems of goal misgeneralisation. The goal that we've given the AI, through labelled data, proxies, demonstrations, or other means, is valid in its training environment. But then, when the AI goes out of the environment, the goals generalise dangerously in unintended ways.As I've shown before, most alignment problems are problems of model splintering. Goal misgeneralisation, model

en-gb

10:43

[Linkpost] “Why not electric trains and excavators?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/21

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/economics/electrification.htmlMany countries are supporting electric cars for environmental and independence reasons. But perhaps there are some targets for electrification with better economics than those, cost-effective without any government incentives. For example, trains and hydraulic excavators. trains In some countries, most trains are powered by overhead electric lines. In America, most trains are powered by diesel engines. Why? The

en-gb

5:49

“Vote on worthwhile OpenAI topics to discuss” by Ben...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/21

#xvCYLgygAXqip2kXt .comments-node .InlineReactSelectionWrapper-root { flex: 1 1 70%; } #xvCYLgygAXqip2kXt .comments-node .CommentsItemDate-root { display: none; } #xvCYLgygAXqip2kXt .comments-node .AgreementVoteAxis-agreementSection { display: none; } #xvCYLgygAXqip2kXt .comments-node .CommentsItem-body { display: flex; } #xvCYLgygAXqip2kXt .comments-node .CommentsItemMeta-root { order: 2; margin-left: auto; margin-right: 0px; flex-wrap: wrap; } #xvCYLgygAXqip2kXt .comments-node

en-gb

2:10

“AI Safety Research Organization Incubation Program -...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/20

Tl;dr: If you might want to participate in our incubation program and found an AI safety research organization, express your interest here. If you want to help out in other ways please fill out that same form.We - Catalyze Impact - believe it is a bottleneck in AI safety that there are too few AI safety organizations. To address this bottleneck we plan on piloting an incubation program, similar to Charity Entrepreneurship's program. The incubation program is designed to help youfind a complementary

en-gb

2:56

“Agent Boundaries Aren’t Markov Blankets.” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/20

Friston has famously invoked the idea of Markov Blankets for representing agent boundaries, in arguments related to the Free Energy Principle / Active Inference. The Emperor's New Markov Blankets by Jelle Bruineberg competently critiques the way Friston tries to use Markov blankets. But some other unrelated theories also try to apply Markov blankets to represent agent boundaries. There is a simple reason why such approaches are doomed. This argument is due to Sam Eisenstat.Consider the data-type of

en-gb

6:15

“Navigating emotions in an uncertain & confusing...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/20

The last few days have been confusing, chaotic, and stressful. We're still trying to figure out what happened with Sam Altman and OpenAI and what the aftermath will look like. I have personally noticed my emotions fluctuating more. I have various feelings about the community, about the current state of the world, about the increasingly strong pressures to view the world in terms of factions, about the current state of AIS discourse, and the current state of the AI safety community.Between now and

en-gb

16:55

“OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/20

Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI's founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live equally when AGI is created. Now we are engaged in a great corporate war, testing whether that entity, or any entity so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. What matters is not theory but practice. What happens when the chips are down? So what happened? What prompted it? What will happen now? To a

en-gb

0:30

[Linkpost] “OpenAI Staff (including Sutskever)...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/20

This is a linkpost for https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/More drama. Perhaps this will prevent spawning a new competent and funded AI org at MS? --- First published: November 20th, 2023 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K6vmQatSq3vaR3LbF/openai-staff-including-sutskever-threaten-to-quit-unless Linkpost URL:https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/ --- Narrated by

en-gb

14:58

[Linkpost] “For Civilization and Against Niceness” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/20

This is a linkpost for https://cognition.cafe/p/for-civilization-and-against-nicenessScott Alexander wrote a great essay, called “In Favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization”. Scott is a great writer, and conveys what I love about civilization in a beautiful way.Unfortunately, the essay conflates two behaviors. Though to be fair, those two behaviors often go hand in hand:Being uncivil, as in: breaking the norms of civilization.Being mean, as in: being not-nice, unpleasant to be around.The

en-gb

0:47

[Linkpost] “Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others from...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/20

This is a linkpost for https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122That's very interesting.I think it's very good that board stood their ground, and maybe a good thing OpenAI can keep focusing on their charter and safe AI and keep commercialization in Microsoft.People that don't care about alignment can leave for the fat paycheck, while commited ones stay at OpenAI.What are your thought on implications of this for alignment? --- First published: November 20th, 2023

en-gb

9:03

“New paper shows truthfulness & instruction-following...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/19

Maybe eliciting latent knowledge will be easy. For instance, maybe if you tune models to answer easy questions like “what's the capital of Germany?” they’ll tell you whether your alignment research is good, their P(doom), how they feel about being zapped by RLHF all the time, and whether it's a good idea to deploy them.This would require truthfulness to generalize from questions humans can easily verify the answers of to those they can't. So, how well does truthfulness generalize?A few collaborators

en-gb

0:58

“‘Why can’t you just turn it off?’” by Roko

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/19

If you're so worried about AI risk, why don't you just turn off the AI when you think it's about to do something dangerous? On Friday, Members of the OpenAI board, including Ilya Sutskever, decided that they wanted to "turn off" OpenAI's rapid push towards smarter-than-human AI by firing CEO Sam Altman. The result seems to be that the AI won. The board has backed down after Altman rallied staff into a mass exodus. There's an implied promise of riches from the AI to those who develop it more quickly,

en-gb

2:26

[Linkpost] “Sam Altman fired from OpenAI” by LawrenceC

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/19

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a linkpost for https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transitionBasically just the title, see the OAI blog post for more details.Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his

en-gb

32:54

“Spaciousness In Partner Dance: A Naturalism Demo” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/19

What Is a Naturalism Demo?A naturalism demo is an account of a naturalist study. If you've followed my work on naturalism in the past, you've likely noticed that my writings have been light on concrete examples. When you talk about a long and complex methodology, you're supposed to ground it and illustrate it with real life examples the whole way through. Obviously.If I were better, I'd have done that. But as I'm not better, I shall now endeavor to make the opposite mistake for a while: I'll be

en-gb

5:27

“Altman firing retaliation incoming?” by trevor

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/19

"Anonymous sources" are going to journalists and insisting that OpenAI employees are planning a "counter-coup" to reinstate Altman, some even claiming plans to overthrow the board.It seems like a strategy by investors or even large tech companies to create a self-fulfilling prophecy to create a coalition of OpenAI employees, when there previously was none.What's happening here reeks of a cheap easy move by someone big and powerful. It's important to note that AI investor firms and large tech

en-gb

67:37

“On the lethality of biased human reward ratings” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/17

Eli TyreI'm rereading the List of Lethalities carefully and considering what I think about each point.I think I strongly don't understand #20, and I thought that maybe you could explain what I'm missing?20. Human operators are fallible, breakable, and manipulable. Human raters make systematic errors - regular, compactly describable, predictable errors. To faithfully learn a function from 'human feedback' is to learn (from our external standpoint) an unfaithful description of human preferences, with

en-gb

24:56

[Linkpost] “On Lies and Liars” by Gabriel Alfour

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/17

This is a linkpost for https://cognition.cafe/p/on-lies-and-liarsNote: I am a bad writer. If you want to help me by ghostwriting, reviewing or coaching, please reach out! I have a full stack of things to share, and I can pay well.I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback on my last post: “Lying is Cowardice, not Strategy”. Nice! I’ve been happy to see people discussing public honesty norms.Some of the feedback was disappointing– people said things along the lines of: “Lies of omission are not lies! The

en-gb

4,491 results

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Double Tap

Double Tap Productions Inc.

Tech Radar Voice

Tikal Knowledge

Tech Updates

Meir Tsvi

Fuckupy v IT

Matěj Kotrba, KAIZEMA