This is a link post.Today, Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone has joined our Board of Directors. A leading expert in cybersecurity, Nakasone's appointment reflects OpenAI's commitment to safety and security, and underscores the growing significance of cybersecurity as the impact of AI technology continues to grow.As a first priority, Nakasone will join the Board's Safety and Security Committee, which is responsible for making recommendations to the full Board on critical safety and security

The Arthropoda Foundation Tens of trillions of insects are used or killed by humans across dozens of industries. Despite being the most numerous animal species reared by animal industries, we know next to nothing about what's good or bad for these animals. And right now, funding for this work is scarce. Traditional science funders won’t pay for it; and within EA, the focus is on advocacy, not research. So, welfare science needs your help. We’re launching the Arthropoda Foundation, a fund to

I run a research organization. At any point you want to grow your organization, there will be at least one constraint that keeps it from growing.Over time, I've distilled these into what I consider to be eight fundamental constraints. You may have heard of talent gaps and funding gaps, but I actually think there are eight such gaps. Which constraint it is may change over time, but it is always one of these eight. (1) There needs to be a sufficient amount of important+neglected+tractable work to

I long to leave in silence,To be around, then disappear.It is in keeping with my nature,To pack my things by moonlightAnd be gone before breakfast.And I swear that when the heavens Rolled forth into existence that I knewThat this would be my calling,To witness with my presence,And let Him witness When I'm gone.

tl;drLessWrong now has a Subscribed tab (next to the Latest tab and Enriched tab[1]). You can now "follow" users, which means their posts and comments will show up in your Subscribed tab.You can follow users via multiple methods: Using the widget on the Subscribed tab:2. You can follow people from their user profile:3. You can follow people using the user tooltip that comes up when you hover on their username.<insert image> The full briefA while back...notifiy on all comments. I wanted a

This is a link post. Executive Summary Introductions to wild animal welfare as a moral concern abound, but there is no centralized overview of efforts to help wild animals. Using interviews and publicly available material, we describe the theories of change of five organizations working on wild animal welfare: Wild Animal Initiative, Welfare Footprint, Animal Ethics, Animal Charity Evaluators, and New York University's (NYU) Wild Animal Welfare program. Our synthesis reveals several commonalities:

This is a link post. I found this interview with Francois Chollet fascinating, and would be curious to hear what other people make of it. I think it is impressive that he's managed to devise a benchmark of tasks which are mostly pretty easy for most humans, but which LLMs have so far not been able to make much progress with. If you don't have time to watch the video, then I think these tweets of his sum up his views quite well: The point of general intelligence is to make it possible to deal with

I cannot make heads or tails of hell.My face is toward the light-filled placeAnd I will not turn back anymore forever.

This is a link post.I’m a big fan of the Soviet comedy directors Eldar Ryazanov, Leonid Gaidai, and Georgiy Daneliya. Almost anything by them is worth watching, but here are my favorites (filtered for things that have a free YouTube version with good English subtitles, bold are the highest-recommended):Scene from "The Garage" Ryazanov 1966 Beware of the Car (Берегись автомобиля) [YouTube] Comedy about a benevolent car thief who steals to donate to charity1975 The Irony of Fate (Ирония судьбы или с

Excluding the fact that EAs tend to be more tech-savvy and their advantage lies in technical work such as alignment, the community as a whole is not prioritizing advocacy and governance enough. Effective Altruists over-prioritize working on AI alignment over AI regulation advocacy. I disagree with prioritizing alignment because much of alignment research is simultaneously capabilities research (Connor Leahy even begged people to stop publishing interpretability research). Consequently, alignment

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.We are pleased to announce ILIAD — a 5-day conference bringing together 100+ researchers to build strong scientific foundations for AI alignment. ***Apply to attend by June 30!*** When: Aug 28 - Sep 3, 2024Where: @Lighthaven (Berkeley, US)What: A mix of topic-specific tracks, and unconference style programming, 100+ attendees. Topics will include Singular Learning Theory, Agent Foundations, Causal Incentives...

It's interesting to me how chill people sometimes are about the non-extinction future AI scenarios. Like, there seem to be opinions around along the lines of “pshaw, it might ruin your little sources of ‘meaning’, Luddite, but we have always had change and as long as the machines are pretty near the mark on rewiring your brain it will make everything amazing”. Yet I would bet that even that person, if faced instead with a policy that was going to forcibly relocate them to New York City, would be

This is a link post.Modern AI is trained on a huge fraction of the internet, especially at the cutting edge, with the best models trained on close to all the high quality data we’ve got.[1] And data is really important! You can scale up compute, you can make algorithms more efficient, or you can add infrastructure around a model to make it more useful, but on the margin, great datasets are king. And, naively, we’re about to run out of fresh data to use.It's rumored that the top firms are looking for

How often I have longed for a hand upon my back,A reasurring gesture, a friendly touch.There is so muchThat we don’t understand.And demons wait in the wingsTo seperate us from the ones we love.But I have not forgotten how the world began.It rises in my sacred imagination. And I see you there,The sacred one,The friend that I’ve forgotten.And from that place, I reach out To put a hand upon your back,A reassuring gesture, A friendly touch.Dear God, please wrap us upIn the love of friends that we’ve

This is a linkpost for an How to start an advance market commitment by Nan Ransohoff, published on Works in Progress[1]. Summary. Advance market commitments, or AMCs, are promises to buy or subsidize something in the future, if someone can invent and produce it. The purpose of an AMC is to provide a financial incentive for innovators to develop and scale products that address important societal needs but lack a natural commercial market. Past AMCs Pneumococcal Vaccines In the 2000s, hundreds of

Understanding the alignment problem can be challenging, especially with its complex theoretical underpinnings and technical jargon. To make this crucial topic more accessible, I've created a comic that breaks down the key concepts in a simple, intuitive, and engaging way. Whether you're new to the subject or looking for a fresh perspective, this visual guide aims to clarify why alignment is so important and what it means for the future of AI. Dive in and explore the alignment problem through a story