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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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6:19

“Pivotal Acts might Not be what You Think they are”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/05

This article is mainly for people who have not read the pivotal act article on arbital. If you have the most interesting section would probably be "Omnicient ML Researchers: A Pivotal Act without a Monolithic Control Structure". Many people seem to match the concept of a "pivotal act" to some dystopian version of "deploy AGI to take over the world". 'Pivotal act' means something much more specific, though. Something, arguably, quite different. I strongly recommend you read the original article, as I

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9:33

“The Assumed Intent Bias” by silentbob

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/05

Summary: when thinking about the behavior of others, people seem to have a tendency to assume clear purpose and intent behind it. In this post I argue that this assumption of intent quite often is incorrect, and that a lot of behavior exists in a gray area where it's easily influenced by subconscious factors.This consideration is not new at all and relates to many widely known effects such as the typical mind fallacy, the false consensus effect, black and white thinking and the concept of trivial

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10:09

“Stuxnet, not Skynet: Humanity’s disempowerment by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/04

Several high-profile AI skeptics and fellow travelers have recently raised the objection that it is inconceivable that a hostile AGI or smarter than human intelligence could end the human race. Some recent quotes I found; Scott Aaronson: The causal story that starts with a GPT-5 or GPT-4.5 training run, and ends with the sudden death of my children and of all carbon-based life, still has a few too many gaps for my aging, inadequate brain to fill in Michael Shermer: Halting AI is ridiculous. I

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5:11

“The 6D effect: When companies take risks, one email...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/04

Recently, I have been learning about industry norms, legal discovery proceedings, and incentive structures related to companies building risky systems. I wanted to share some findings in this post because they may be important for the frontier AI community to understand well. TL;DRDocumented communications of risks (especially by employees) make companies much more likely to be held liable in court when bad things happen. The resulting Duty to Due Diligence from Discoverable Documentation of Dangers

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32:44

“Genetic fitness is a measure of selection strength,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/04

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Alternative title: "Evolution suggests robust rather than fragile generalization of alignment properties."A frequently repeated argument goes something like this: Evolution has optimized humans for inclusive genetic fitness (IGF)However, humans didn’t end up explicitly optimizing for genetic fitness (e.g. they use contraception to avoid having children)Therefore, even if we optimize an AI for X (typically something

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12:29

[Linkpost] “The Soul Key” by Richard_Ngo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/04

The ocean is your home, but a forbidding one: often tempestuous, seldom warm. So one of your great joys is crawling onto land and slipping off your furry skin, to laze in the sun in human form. On the beaches, you and your sisters can relax in a way that older generations never could. The elders tell horror stories of their friends whose skins were stolen by humans, a single moment of carelessness leaving them stranded forever on land. That doesn’t happen any more, though; this is a more civilized

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10:57

“We are already in a persuasion-transformed world and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/04

"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists"Summary:We're already in the timeline where the research and manipulation of the human thought process is widespread; SOTA psychological research systems require massive data sets, which in turn requires massive numbers of unsuspecting test subjects (users) in order to automate the process of analyzing and exploiting human targets. This therefore must

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4:52

“Being good at the basics” by dominicq

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/04

(crossposted from my blog) In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, there's a notion of being "good at the basics", as opposed to "being good by knowing advanced techniques". How you want to be good is a question of personal preference, but the idea is that these are the two ways, and most people do one or the other. I think this is a concept that applies outside of BJJ, and one that's useful if you're trying to learn a field, but you're not sure how to approach it. I'll take physics as an example, because that is a

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9:38

“Untrusted smart models and trusted dumb models” by Buck

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/04

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.[Thanks Ryan Greenblatt for making an original version of this point to me a while ago and then developing a bunch of these ideas, also thanks to Paul Christiano and a huge number of other people for various relevant discussions, and to Ryan, Roger Grosse, Peter Barnett, Oliver Habryka, Max Nadeau, Stephen Casper, and Fabien Roger for comments on this post. I’m sure these points are obvious to many people, but I

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15:56

“Deception Chess: Game #1” by Zane

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/03

This is the first of my analyses of the deception chess games. The introduction will describe the setup of the game, and the conclusion will sum up what happened in general terms; the rest of the post will mostly be chess analysis and skippable if you just want the results. If you haven't read the original post, read it before reading this so that you know what's going on here.The first game was between Alex A as player A, Chess.com computer Komodo 12 as player B, myself as the honest C advisor, and

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21:30

“8 examples informing my pessimism on uploading...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/03

(If you’ve already read everything I’ve written, you’ll find this post pretty redundant. See especially my old posts Building brain-inspired AGI is infinitely easier than understanding the brain, and Randal Koene on brain understanding before whole brain emulation, and Connectomics seems great from an AI x-risk perspective. But I’m writing it anyway mainly in response to this post from yesterday.)1. Background / Context1.1 What does uploading (a.k.a. Whole Brain Emulation (WBE)) look like with and

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40:24

“Integrity in AI Governance and Advocacy” by habryka,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/03

habrykaOk, so we both had some feelings about the recent Conjecture post on "lots of people in AI Alignment are lying", and the associated marketing campaign and stuff. I would appreciate some context in which I can think through that, and also to share info we have in the space that might help us figure out what's going on. I expect this will pretty quickly cause us to end up on some broader questions about how to do advocacy, how much the current social network around AI Alignment should

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19:12

“Thoughts on open source AI” by Sam Marks

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/03

Epistemic status: I only ~50% endorse this, which is below my typical bar for posting something. I’m more bullish on “these are arguments which should be in the water supply and discussed” than “these arguments are actually correct.” I’m not an expert in this, I’ve only thought about it for ~15 hours, and I didn’t run this post by any relevant experts before posting.Thanks to Max Nadeau and Eric Neyman for helpful discussion.Right now there's a significant amount of public debate about open source

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1:03

“The other side of the tidal wave” by KatjaGrace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/03

I guess there's maybe a 10-20% chance of AI causing human extinction in the coming decades, but I feel more distressed about it than even that suggests—I think because in the case where it doesn’t cause human extinction, I find it hard to imagine life not going kind of off the rails. So many things I like about the world seem likely to be over or badly disrupted with superhuman AI (writing, explaining things to people, friendships where you can be of any use to one another, taking pride in skills,

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50:42

“Evaluating an uploading moonshot: blockers,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/03

This is a dialogue between Davidad, Anders Sandberg (Arenamontanus), Lisa Thiergart, and me (Jacob) about Davidad's moonshot proposal to upload human brains.davidad has a 10-min talk out on a proposal about which he says: “the first time I’ve seen a concrete plan that might work to get human uploads before 2040, maybe even faster, given unlimited funding”.I think the talk is a good watch, but the dialogue below is pretty readable even if you haven't seen it. I'm also putting some summary notes from

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12:30

“One Day Sooner” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/02

There is a particular skill I would like to share, which I wish I had learned when I was younger. I picked it up through working closely with a previous boss (a CTO who had founded a company and raised it up to hundreds of employees and multi-million dollar deals) but it wasn’t until I read The Story of VaccinateCA that I noticed it was a distinct skill and put into words how it worked. The Sazen for this skill is “One Day Sooner.” I would like to give warning before explaining further however: This

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41:51

“Propaganda or Science: A Look at Open Source AI and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/02

0: TLDR I examined all the biorisk-relevant citations from a policy paper arguing that we should ban powerful open source LLMs. None of them provide good evidence for the paper's conclusion. The best of the set is evidence from statements from Anthropic -- which rest upon data that no one outside of Anthropic can even see, and on Anthropic's interpretation of that data. The rest of the evidence cited in this paper ultimately rests on a single extremely questionable "experiment" without a control

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66:31

“AI #36: In the Background” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/02

Wow, what a week. We had the Executive Order, which I read here so you don’t have to and then I have a tabulation of the reactions of others. Simultaneously there was the UK AI Summit. There was also robust related discussion around Responsible Scaling Policies, and the various filings companies did in advance of the Summit. I touched on Anthropic's RSP in particular in previous weeks, but I did not do a sufficiently close analysis and many others have offered more detailed thoughts as

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8:58

“Saying the quiet part out loud: trading off x-risk...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/02

Statement: I want to deliberately balance the caution and the recklessness in developing AGI, such that it gets created in the last possible moment so that I and my close ones do not die. This Statement confuses me. There are several observations I can make about it. There are also many questions I want to ask but have no idea how to answer. The goal of this post is to deconfuse myself, and to get feedback on the points that I raised (or failed to raise) below. First observation: The Statement is

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2:19

“Estimating effective dimensionality of MNIST models”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/02

The local learning coefficent <span>_lambda_</span> is a measure of a model's "effective dimensionality" that captures its complexity (more background here). Lau et al recently described a sampling method (SGLD) using noisy gradients to find a stochastic estimate <span>_hat{lambda}_</span> in a computationally tractable way (good explanation here):Examples of points sampled by SGLD in a two-dimensional toy model (Lau et al, 2023)I present results (Github repo) of the "Task

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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