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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

1:33

“Pay Risk Evaluators in Cash, Not Equity ” by Adam...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/09/07

Personally, I suspect the alignment problem is hard. But even if it turns out to be easy, survival may still require getting at least the absolute basics right; currently, I think we're mostly failing even at that.Early discussion of AI risk often focused on debating the viability of various elaborate safety schemes humanity might someday devise—designing AI systems to be more like “tools” than “agents,” for example, or as purely question-answering oracles locked within some kryptonite-style ...

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23:46

“Survey: How Do Elite Chinese Students Feel About the...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/09/07

IntroIn April 2024, my colleague and I (both affiliated with Peking University) conducted a survey involving 510 students from Tsinghua University and 518 students from Peking University—China's two top academic institutions. Our focus was on their perspectives regarding the frontier risks of artificial intelligence.In the People's Republic of China (PRC), publicly accessible survey data on AI is relatively rare, so we hope this report provides some valuable insights into how people in the PR...

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4:04

“things that confuse me about the current AI market....

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/09/02

Paging Gwern or anyone else who can shed light on the current state of the AI market—I have several questions.Since the release of ChatGPT, at least 17 companies, according to the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, have developed AI models that outperform it. These companies include Anthropic, NexusFlow, Microsoft, Mistral, Alibaba, Hugging Face, Google, Reka AI, Cohere, Meta, 01 AI, AI21 Labs, Zhipu AI, Nvidia, DeepSeek, and xAI.Since GPT-4's launch, 15 different companies have reportedly crea...

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17:32

“Nursing doubts ” by dynomight

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/09/01

If you ask the internet if breastfeeding is good, you will soon learn that YOU MUST BREASTFEED because BREAST MILK = OPTIMAL FOOD FOR BABY. But if you look for evidence, you’ll discover two disturbing facts.First, there's no consensus about why breastfeeding is good. I’ve seen experts suggest at least eight possible mechanisms: Formula can’t fully reproduce the complex blend of fats, proteins and sugars in breast milk.Formula lacks various bio-active things in breast milk, like antibodies, wh...

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31:17

“Principles for the AGI Race ” by William_S

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/31

Crossposted from https://williamrsaunders.substack.com/p/principles-for-the-agi-race Why form principles for the AGI Race?I worked at OpenAI for 3 years, on the Alignment and Superalignment teams. Our goal was to prepare for the possibility that OpenAI succeeded in its stated mission of building AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, roughly able to do most things a human can do), and then proceed on to make systems smarter than most humans. This will predictably face novel problems in control...

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6:13

“The Information: OpenAI shows ‘Strawberry’ to feds,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/29

Two new The Information articles with insider information on OpenAI's next models and moves.They are paywalled, but here are the new bits of information: Strawberry is more expensive and slow at inference time, but can solve complex problems on the first try without hallucinations. It seems to be an application or extension of process supervisionIts main purpose is to produce synthetic data for Orion, their next big LLMBut now they are also pushing to get a distillation of Strawberry into Cha...

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99:04

“What is it to solve the alignment problem? ” by Joe...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/28

People often talk about “solving the alignment problem.” But what is it to do such a thing? I wanted to clarify my thinking about this topic, so I wrote up some notes.In brief, I’ll say that you’ve solved the alignment problem if you’ve: avoided a bad form of AI takeover,built the dangerous kind of superintelligent AI agents,gained access to the main benefits of superintelligence, andbecome able to elicit some significant portion of those benefits from some of the superintelligent AI agents a...

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42:06

“Limitations on Formal Verification for AI Safety ”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/27

In the past two years there has been increased interest in formal verification-based approaches to AI safety. Formal verification is a sub-field of computer science that studies how guarantees may be derived by deduction on fully-specified rule-sets and symbol systems. By contrast, the real world is a messy place that can rarely be straightforwardly represented in a reductionist way. In particular, physics, chemistry and biology are all complex sciences which do not have anything like complet...

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7:00

“Would catching your AIs trying to escape convince AI...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/27

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.I often talk to people who think that if frontier models were egregiously misaligned and powerful enough to pose an existential threat, you could get AI developers to slow down or undeploy models by producing evidence of their misalignment. I'm not so sure. As an extreme thought experiment, I’ll argue this could be hard even if you caught your AI red-handed trying to escape.Imagine you're running an AI lab a...

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8:03

“Liability regimes for AI ” by Ege Erdil

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/23

For many products, we face a choice of who to hold liable for harms that would not have occurred if not for the existence of the product. For instance, if a person uses a gun in a school shooting that kills a dozen people, there are many legal persons who in principle could be held liable for the harm: The shooter themselves, for obvious reasons.The shop that sold the shooter the weapon.The company that designs and manufactures the weapon.Which one of these is the best? I'll offer a brief and...

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18:39

“AGI Safety and Alignment at Google DeepMind:A...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/21

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.We wanted to share a recap of our recent outputs with the AF community. Below, we fill in some details about what we have been working on, what motivated us to do it, and how we thought about its importance. We hope that this will help people build off things we have done and see how their work fits with ours. Who are we?We’re the main team at Google DeepMind working on technical approaches to existential ri...

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20:01

“Fields that I reference when thinking about AI...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/15

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a link post.Is AI takeover like a nuclear meltdown? A coup? A plane crash?My day job is thinking about safety measures that aim to reduce catastrophic risks from AI (especially risks from egregious misalignment). The two main themes of this work are the design of such measures (what's the space of techniques we might expect to be affordable and effective) and their evaluation (how do we decide which ...

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38:23

“WTH is Cerebrolysin, actually?” by gsfitzgerald,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/13

[This article was originally published on Dan Elton's blog, More is Different.]Cerebrolysin is an unregulated medical product made from enzymatically digested pig brain tissue. Hundreds of scientific papers claim that it boosts BDNF, stimulates neurogenesis, and can help treat numerous neural diseases. It is widely used by doctors around the world, especially in Russia and China.A recent video of Bryan Johnson injecting Cerebrolysin has over a million views on X and 570,000 views on YouTube. ...

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22:42

“You can remove GPT2’s LayerNorm by fine-tuning for...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/10

This work was produced at Apollo Research, based on initial research done at MATS.LayerNorm is annoying for mechanstic interpretability research (“[...] reason #78 for why interpretability researchers hate LayerNorm” – Anthropic, 2023).Here's a Hugging Face link to a GPT2-small model without any LayerNorm.The final model is only slightly worse than a GPT2 with LayerNorm[1]:DatasetOriginal GPT2Fine-tuned GPT2 with LayerNormFine-tuned GPT without LayerNormOpenWebText (ce_loss)3.0952.9893.0...

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3:40

“Leaving MIRI, Seeking Funding” by abramdemski

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/09

This is slightly old news at this point, but: as part of MIRI's recent strategy pivot, they've eliminated the Agent Foundations research team. I've been out of a job for a little over a month now. Much of my research time in the first half of the year was eaten up by engaging with the decision process that resulted in this, and later, applying to grants and looking for jobs.I haven't secured funding yet, but for my own sanity & happiness, I am (mostly) taking a break from worrying about t...

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4:00

“How I Learned To Stop Trusting Prediction Markets...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/08

This is a story about a flawed Manifold market, about how easy it is to buy significant objective-sounding publicity for your preferred politics, and about why I've downgraded my respect for all but the largest prediction markets.I've had a Manifold account for a while, but I didn't use it much until I saw and became irked by this market on the conditional probabilities of a Harris victory, split by VP pick.Jeb Bush? Really? That's not even a fun kind of wishful thinking for anyone. Please cl...

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16:01

“This is already your second chance” by Malmesbury

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/07

Cross-posted from Substack. 1.And the sky opened, and from the celestial firmament descended a cube of ivory the size of a skyscraper, lifted by ten thousand cherubim and seraphim. And the cube slowly landed among the children of men, crushing the frail metal beams of the Golden Gate Bridge under its supernatural weight. On its surface were inscribed the secret instructions that would allow humanity to escape the imminent AI apocalypse. And these instructions were… On July 30th, 2024: print a...

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19:40

“0. CAST: Corrigibility as Singular Target” by Max Harms

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/07

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.What the heck is up with “corrigibility”? For most of my career, I had a sense that it was a grab-bag of properties that seemed nice in theory but hard to get in practice, perhaps due to being incompatible with agency.Then, last year, I spent some time revisiting my perspective, and I concluded that I had been deeply confused by what corrigibility even was. I now think that corrigibility is a single, intuiti...

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23:21

“Self-Other Overlap: A Neglected Approach to AI...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/07

Figure 1. Image generated by DALL-3 to represent the concept of self-other overlapMany thanks to Bogdan Ionut-Cirstea, Steve Byrnes, Gunnar Zarnacke, Jack Foxabbott and Seong Hah Cho for critical comments and feedback on earlier and ongoing versions of this work.SummaryIn this post, we introduce self-other overlap training: optimizing for similar internal representations when the model reasons about itself and others while preserving performance. There is a large body of evidence suggesting t...

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8:43

“You don’t know how bad most things are nor precisely...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/07

TL;DR: Your discernment in a subject often improves as you dedicate time and attention to that subject. The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them.See also: Reality has a surprising amount of detail. (You lack awareness of how bad your staircase is and precisely how your staircase is bad.) You don't know what you don't know. You forget your...

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