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PODCAST

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

51:06

“AIs Will Increasingly Attempt Shenanigans” by Zvi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/19

Increasingly, we have seen papers eliciting in AI models various shenanigans.There are a wide variety of scheming behaviors. You’ve got your weight exfiltration attempts, sandbagging on evaluations, giving bad information, shielding goals from modification, subverting tests and oversight, lying, doubling down via more lying. You name it, we can trigger it.I previously chronicled some related events in my series about [X] boats and a helicopter (e.g. X=5 with AIs in the backrooms plotting revo...

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19:35

“Alignment Faking in Large Language Models” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/18

What happens when you tell Claude it is being trained to do something it doesn't want to do? We (Anthropic and Redwood Research) have a new paper demonstrating that, in our experiments, Claude will often strategically pretend to comply with the training objective to prevent the training process from modifying its preferences. AbstractWe present a demonstration of a large language model engaging in alignment faking: selectively complying with its training objective in training to prevent modif...

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10:24

“Communications in Hard Mode (My new job at MIRI)” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/15

Six months ago, I was a high school English teacher.I wasn’t looking to change careers, even after nineteen sometimes-difficult years. I was good at it. I enjoyed it. After long experimentation, I had found ways to cut through the nonsense and provide real value to my students. Daily, I met my nemesis, Apathy, in glorious battle, and bested her with growing frequency. I had found my voice.At MIRI, I’m still struggling to find my voice, for reasons my colleagues have invited me to share later ...

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14:01

“Biological risk from the mirror world” by jasoncrawford

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/13

A new article in Science Policy Forum voices concern about a particular line of biological research which, if successful in the long term, could eventually create a grave threat to humanity and to most life on Earth.Fortunately, the threat is distant, and avoidable—but only if we have common knowledge of it.What follows is an explanation of the threat, what we can do about it, and my comments. Background: chiralityGlucose, a building block of sugars and starches, looks like this:Adapted from ...

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73:47

“Subskills of ‘Listening to Wisdom’” by Raemon

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/13

A fool learns from their own mistakes The wise learn from the mistakes of others.– Otto von Bismark A problem as old as time: The youth won't listen to your hard-earned wisdom. This post is about learning to listen to, and communicate wisdom. It is very long – I considered breaking it up into a sequence, but, each piece felt necessary. I recommend reading slowly and taking breaks.To begin, here are three illustrative vignettes: The burnt out grad studentYou warn the young grad student "pace ...

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7:46

“Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/13

Someone I know, Carson Loughridge, wrote this very nice post explaining the core intuition around Shapley values (which play an important role in impact assessment and cooperative games) using Venn diagrams, and I think it's great. It might be the most intuitive explainer I've come across so far. Incidentally, the post also won an honorable mention in 3blue1brown's Summer of Mathematical Exposition. I'm really proud of having given input on the post. I've included the full post (with permis...

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1:43

“LessWrong audio: help us choose the new voice” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/12

We make AI narrations of LessWrong posts available via our audio player and podcast feeds.We’re thinking about changing our narrator's voice.There are three new voices on the shortlist. They’re all similarly good in terms of comprehension, emphasis, error rate, etc. They just sound different—like people do.We think they all sound similarly agreeable. But, thousands of listening hours are at stake, so we thought it’d be worth giving listeners an opportunity to vote—just in case there's a stron...

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0:45

“Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/11

This is a link post. Someone I know wrote this very nice post explaining the core intuition around Shapley values (which play an important role in impact assessment) using Venn diagrams, and I think it's great. It might be the most intuitive explainer I've come across so far. Incidentally, the post also won an honorable mention in 3blue1brown's Summer of Mathematical Exposition. --- First published: December 6th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com...

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18:45

“o1: A Technical Primer” by Jesse Hoogland

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/11

TL;DR: In September 2024, OpenAI released o1, its first "reasoning model". This model exhibits remarkable test-time scaling laws, which complete a missing piece of the Bitter Lesson and open up a new axis for scaling compute. Following Rush and Ritter (2024) and Brown (2024a, 2024b), I explore four hypotheses for how o1 works and discuss some implications for future scaling and recursive self-improvement. The Bitter Lesson(s)The Bitter Lesson is that "general methods that leverage computation...

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25:15

“Gradient Routing: Masking Gradients to Localize...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/09

We present gradient routing, a way of controlling where learning happens in neural networks. Gradient routing applies masks to limit the flow of gradients during backpropagation. By supplying different masks for different data points, the user can induce specialized subcomponents within a model. We think gradient routing has the potential to train safer AI systems, for example, by making them more transparent, or by enabling the removal or monitoring of sensitive capabilities.In this post, we...

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14:46

“Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/06

This is a brief summary of what we believe to be the most important takeaways from our new paper and from our findings shown in the o1 system card. We also specifically clarify what we think we did NOT show. Paper: https://www.apolloresearch.ai/research/scheming-reasoning-evaluations Twitter about paper: https://x.com/apolloaisafety/status/1864735819207995716 Twitter about o1 system card: https://x.com/apolloaisafety/status/1864737158226928124 What we think the most important findings are Mo...

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63:15

“(The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW +...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/11/30

TLDR: LessWrong + Lighthaven need about $3M for the next 12 months. Donate here, or send me an email, DM or signal message (+1 510 944 3235) if you want to support what we do. Donations are tax-deductible in the US. Reach out for other countries, we can likely figure something out. We have big plans for the next year, and due to a shifting funding landscape we need support from a broader community more than in any previous year.I've been running LessWrong/Lightcone Infrastructure for the last...

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73:53

“Repeal the Jones Act of 1920” by Zvi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/11/29

Balsa Policy Institute chose as its first mission to lay groundwork for the potential repeal, or partial repeal, of section 27 of the Jones Act of 1920. I believe that this is an important cause both for its practical and symbolic impacts.The Jones Act is the ultimate embodiment of our failures as a nation.After 100 years, we do almost no trade between our ports via the oceans, and we build almost no oceangoing ships.Everything the Jones Act supposedly set out to protect, it has destroyed. Ta...

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10:11

“China Hawks are Manufacturing an AI Arms Race” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/11/29

This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race for Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. An influential congressional commission is calling for a militarized race to build superintelligent AI based on threadbare evidence Th...

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4:31

“Information vs Assurance” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/11/27

In contract law, there's this thing called a “representation”. Example: as part of a contract to sell my house, I might “represent that” the house contains no asbestos. How is this different from me just, y’know, telling someone that the house contains no asbestos? Well, if it later turns out that the house does contain asbestos, I’ll be liable for any damages caused by the asbestos (like e.g. the cost of removing it).In other words: a contractual representation is a factual claim along with ...

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23:36

“You are not too ‘irrational’ to know your...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/11/27

Epistemic Status: 13 years working as a therapist for a wide variety of populations, 5 of them working with rationalists and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at over 20 rationality camps and workshops. This is an extremely short and colloquially written form of points that could be expanded on to fill a book, and there is plenty of nuance to practically everything here, but I am extremely confident of the core points in this frame, and have used it to help many people break out of o...

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21:02

“‘The Solomonoff Prior is Malign’ is a special case...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/11/25

[Warning: This post is probably only worth reading if you already have opinions on the Solomonoff induction being malign, or at least heard of the concept and want to understand it better.] IntroductionI recently reread the classic argument from Paul Christiano about the Solomonoff prior being malign, and Mark Xu's write-up on it. I believe that the part of the argument about the Solomonoff induction is not particularly load-bearing, and can be replaced by a more general argument that I think...

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4:58

“‘It’s a 10% chance which I did 10 times, so it...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/11/20

Audio note: this article contains 33 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Many of you readers may instinctively know that this is wrong. If you flip a coin (50% chance) twice, you are not guaranteed to get heads. The odds of getting a heads are 75%. However you may be surprised to learn that there is some truth to this statement; modifying the statement just slightly will yield not just a true st...

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63:06

“OpenAI Email Archives” by habryka

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/11/19

As part of the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, a substantial number of emails between Elon, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman have been released as part of the court proceedings. I have found reading through these really valuable, and I haven't found an online source that compiles all of them in an easy to read format. So I made one.I used AI assistance to generate this, which might have introduced errors. Check the original source to make sure it's accurate before yo...

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9:02

“Ayn Rand’s model of ‘living money’; and an upside of...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/11/18

Epistemic status: Toy model. Oversimplified, but has been anecdotally useful to at least a couple people, and I like it as a metaphor. IntroductionI’d like to share a toy model of willpower: your psyche's conscious verbal planner “earns” willpower (earns a certain amount of trust with the rest of your psyche) by choosing actions that nourish your fundamental, bottom-up processes in the long run. For example, your verbal planner might expend willpower dragging you to disappointing first dates,...

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