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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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30:38

“On OpenAI Dev Day” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/09

OpenAI DevDay was this week. What delicious and/or terrifying things await? Turbo Boost First off, we have GPT-4-Turbo. Today we’re launching a preview of the next generation of this model, GPT-4 Turbo. GPT-4 Turbo is more capable and has knowledge of world events up to April 2023. It has a 128k context window so it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt. We also optimized its performance so we are able to offer GPT-4 Turbo at a 3x cheaper price for

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18:54

[Linkpost] “Comp Sci in 2027 (Short story by Eliezer...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/09

Comp sci in 2017:Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments.Teaching assistant: You have failed to understand not just compilers but the concept of computation itself.Comp sci in 2027:Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments.TA: That's weird. Have you tried adding a comment at the start of the file asking the compiler to pay closer attention to the comments?Student: Yes.TA: Have you tried repeating the comments? Just copy and

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0:44

[Linkpost] “A free to enter, 240 character,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/09

I'm running an iterated prisoner's dilemma tournament where all programs are restricted to 240 characters maximum. The exact rules are posted in the Manifold Markets link; I figured I'd cross-post the contest here to reach more potentially-interested people. (You don't need a Manifold account to participate, you can just put your program in the comments on LessWrong or PM me.) --- First published: November 9th, 2023 Source:

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7:38

“Making Bad Decisions On Purpose” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/09

Allowing myself to make bad decisions on purpose sometimes seems to be a load bearing part of epistemic rationality for me. Human minds are so screwed up.1.Start from the premise that humans want to do the right thing.For example, perhaps you are trying to decide whether to do your homework tonight. If you do your homework, you will get a better grade in class. Also, you may learn something. However, if you don't do your homework tonight you could instead hang out with your roommate and play some

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13:00

[Linkpost] “Five projects from AI Safety Hub Labs...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/08

AI Safety Hub Labs is a research programme that helps early-career researchers to complete an AI safety research project. Projects are completed in groups of 3-5 participants, supervised by a more senior safety researcher, and managed by AI Safety Hub. This summer's programme was unpaid due to funding constraints. It consisted of 12 weeks of either part- or full-time research. The goal for participants was to produce a preprint in the style of an ML conference/workshop.The original motivation for

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13:18

“Thinking By The Clock” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/08

1.I'm sure Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality taught me some of the obvious, overt things it set out to teach. Looking back on it a decade after I first read it however, what strikes me most strongly are often the brief, tossed off bits in the middle of the flow of a story.Fred and George exchanged worried glances."I can't think of anything," said George."Neither can I," said Fred. "Sorry."Harry stared at them.And then Harry began to explain how you went about thinking of things.It had been

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14:49

“Concrete positive visions for a future without AGI”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/08

"There was a threshold crossed somewhere," said the Confessor, "without a single apocalypse to mark it. Fewer wars. Less starvation. Better technology. The economy kept growing. People had more resource to spare for charity, and the altruists had fewer and fewer causes to choose from. They came even to me, in my time, and rescued me. Earth cleaned itself up, and whenever something threatened to go drastically wrong again, the whole attention of the planet turned in that direction and took

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53:30

“Social Dark Matter” by [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/07

You know it must be out there, but you mostly never see it.Author's Note 1: I'm something like 75% confident that this will be the last essay that I publish on LessWrong. Future content will be available on my substack, where I'm hoping people will be willing to chip in a little commensurate with the value of the writing, and (after a delay) on my personal site. I decided to post this final essay here rather than silently switching over because many LessWrong readers would otherwise never find out

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5:47

“Announcing Athena - Women in AI Alignment Research”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/07

Athena is a new research mentorship program fostering diversity of ideas in AI safety research. We aim to get more women and marginalized genders into technical research and offer the support needed to thrive in this space. Applications for scholars are open until December 3rd, 2023Apply as a scholar: hereApply as a mentor or speaker: hereFinancial aid is available for travel expenses for the in-person retreat to those otherwise unable to attend without itProgram StructureA 2-month hybrid mentorship

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3:59

“Scalable And Transferable Black-Box Jailbreaks For...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/07

Paper coauthors: Rusheb Shah, Quentin Feuillade--Montixi, Soroush J. Pour, Arush Tagade, Stephen Casper, Javier Rando. MotivationOur research team was motivated to show that state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude 2 are not robust to misuse risk and can't be fully aligned to the desires of their creators, posing risk for societal harm. This is despite significant effort by their creators, showing that the current paradigm of pre-training, SFT, and RLHF is not adequate for model

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2:03

“AMA: Earning to Give” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/07

This week the Effective Altruism Forum is running an Effective Giving Spotlight, and they asked if I could post an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on my experience earning to give. Some background: I was earning to give from 2009 to 2022, except for a few months in 2017 when I worked on expanding access to the financial system in Ethiopia and looking into AI risk disagreements. I've been a Giving What We Can member since 2013, making a public pledge to continue with effective

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15:48

“The Stochastic Parrot Hypothesis is debatable for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/07

This post is part of a sequence on model Psychology@Pierre Peigné wrote the details section in argument 3 and the other weird phenomenon. The rest is written in the voice of @Quentin FEUILLADE--MONTIXI IntroBefore diving into what model psychology is, it is crucial to clarify the nature of the subject we are studying. In this post, I’ll challenge the commonly debated stochastic parrot hypothesis for state-of-the-art large language models (≈GPT-4), and in the next post, I’ll shed light on the

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57:07

“On the UK Summit” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/07

In the eyes of many, Biden's Executive Order somewhat overshadowed the UK Summit. The timing was unfortunate. Both events were important milestones. Now that I have had time, here is my analysis of what happened at the UK Summit. As is often the case with such events, there was a lot of talk relative to the amount of action. There was a lot of diplomatic talk, talk of that which everyone agrees upon, relative to the amount of talk of real substance. There were days of meetings that resulted in

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14:28

“AI Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator (ARENA):...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/07

TL;DRApply here for the third iteration of ARENA (Jan 8th - Feb 2nd)! IntroductionWe are excited to announce the third iteration of ARENA (Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator), a 4-week ML bootcamp with a focus on AI safety. Our mission is to prepare participants for full-time careers as research engineers in AI safety, e.g. at leading organizations or as independent researchers. The program will run from January 8th - February 2nd 2024[1], and will be held at the offices of the London

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15:52

“The Perils of Professionalism” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/07

Professionalism is a useful trait to be able to display, but it isn’t an unalloyed good. This essay is attempting to outline why deliberately not signaling professionalism may be useful for you.First, a definition by example for professionalism: Clean button down shirts with solid colour ties, blazers or suit jackets, clean shaven beards, hair tied up in a bun without flyers, beige or gray or at least solid colour cars and desks and walls, even toned voices with just enough of a hint of emotion not

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0:45

“Job listing: Communications Generalist / Project...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/06

Looking for a way to help communicate about AI x-risk? MIRI is hiring in the Communications department. There will be additional job listings soon for writers and editors, but we're starting with this comms generalist / project manager role.https://intelligence.org/careers/comms-generalist-pm/I am the Communications Manager at MIRI and this person will be working closely with me. I'm happy to answer questions. --- First published: November 6th, 2023 Source:

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25:37

“An illustrative model of backfire risks from pausing...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/06

TLDRThe post contains a simple modelization of the maximum explosive takeoff speed (simplified as "takeoff speed"), using as the main parameters: overhangs[1]sizes (investment, hardware efficiency, software efficiency)overhangs consumption rates[2]training/inference asymmetry[3]The post concludes that:in a short timeline scenario, increasing investment or pausing software efficiency improvement can increase a lot the maximum takeoff speed.because you can only decrease one overhang by increasing the

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6:30

[Linkpost] “Are language models good at making...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/06

To get a crude answer to this question, we took 5000 questions from Manifold markets that were resolved after GPT-4's current knowledge cutoff of Jan 1, 2022. We gave the text of each of them to GPT-4, along with these instructions:You are an expert superforecaster, familiar with the work of Tetlock and others. For each question in the following json block, make a prediction of the probability that the question will be resolved as true.Also you must determine category of the question. Some examples

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4:18

“On Overhangs and Technological Change” by Roko

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/05

Imagine an almost infinite, nearly flat plain of early medieval farming villages populated by humans and their livestock (cows, horses, sheep, etc) politically organized into small duchies and generally peaceful apart from rare skirmishes. Add a few key technologies like stirrups and compound bows (as well as some social technology - the desire for conquest, maneuver warfare, multiculturalism) and a great khan or warlord can take men and horses and conquer the entire world. The Golden Horde did this

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8:19

“EA orgs’ legal structure inhibits risk taking and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/05

What is fiscal sponsorship?It's fairly common for EA orgs to provide fiscal sponsorship to other EA orgs. Wait, no, that sentence is not quite right. The more accurate sentence is that there are very few EA organizations, in the legal sense; most of what you think of as orgs are projects that are legally hosted by a single org, and which governments therefore consider to be one legal entity. The king umbrella is Effective Ventures Foundation, which hosts CEA, 80k, Longview, EA Funds, Giving What We

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