Eliezer Yudkowsky periodically complains about people coming up with questionable plans with questionable assumptions to deal with AI, and then either: Saying "well, if this assumption doesn't hold, we're doomed, so we might as well assume it's true." Worse: coming up with cope-y reasons to assume that the assumption isn't even questionable at all.…

This post was inspired by some talks at the recent LessOnline conference including one by LessWrong user “Gene Smith”. Let's say you want to have a “designer baby”. Genetically extraordinary in some way — super athletic, super beautiful, whatever. 6’5”, blue eyes, with a trust fund. Ethics aside[1], what would be necessary to actually do this? Fund…

This is a link post.Editor's note: Somewhat after I posted this on my own blog, Max Chiswick cornered me at LessOnline / Manifest and gave me a whole new perspective on this topic. I now believe that there is a way to use poker to sharpen epistemics that works dramatically better than anything I had been considering. I hope to write it up—together …

This is a linkpost for https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin, posted in full here given its relevance to this community. Gerard has been one of the longest-standing malicious critics of the rationalist and EA communities and has done remarkable amounts of work to shape their public images behind the scenes. Note: …

xlr8harder writes: In general I don’t think an uploaded mind is you, but rather a copy. But one thought experiment makes me question this. A Ship of Theseus concept where individual neurons are replaced one at a time with a nanotechnological functional equivalent. Are you still you? Presumably the question xlr8harder cares about here isn't semantic…

I haven't shared this post with other relevant parties – my experience has been that private discussion of this sort of thing is more paralyzing than helpful. I might change my mind in the resulting discussion, but, I prefer that discussion to be public. I think 80,000 hours should remove OpenAI from its job board, and similar EA job placement serv…

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/biology/cancer%20vaccines.html cancer neoantigens For cells to become cancerous, they must have mutations that cause uncontrolled replication and mutations that prevent that uncontrolled replication from causing apoptosis. Because cancer requires several mutations, it often begins with damage to mu…

I Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement, whose early influences came from socialist intellectual communities such as the Fabian Society, as opposed to the rationalist diaspora. Let's name this hypothetical movement the Effective Samaritans. Like the EA movement of today, they believe in doing as much good as possible, what…

About a year ago I decided to try using one of those apps where you tie your goals to some kind of financial penalty. The specific one I tried is Forfeit, which I liked the look of because it's relatively simple, you set single tasks which you have to verify you have completed with a photo. I’m generally pretty sceptical of productivity systems, to…

An NII machine in Nogales, AZ. (Image source)There's bound to be a lot of discussion of the Biden-Trump presidential debates last night, but I want to skip all the political prognostication and talk about the real issue: fentanyl-detecting machines. Joe Biden says: And I wanted to make sure we use the machinery that can detect fentanyl, these big m…

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.[Thanks to Aryan Bhatt, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Adam Kaufman, Vivek Hebbar, Hanna Gabor, Justis Mills, Aaron Scher, Max Nadeau, Ryan Greenblatt, Peter Barnett, Fabien Roger, and various people at a presentation of these arguments for comments. These ideas aren’t very …

(Cross-posted from my website. Audio version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.) This is the final essay in a series that I'm calling "Otherness andcontrol in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can beread fairly well on their own, butsee here fora brief summary of the series as a whole. There's also a…

ARC's current research focus can be thought of as trying to combine mechanistic interpretability and formal verification. If we had a deep understanding of what was going on inside a neural network, we would hope to be able to use that understanding to verify that the network was not going to behave dangerously in unforeseen situations. ARC is atte…

Summary Summary . LLMs may be fundamentally incapable of fully general reasoning, and if so, short timelines are less plausible. Longer summary There is ML research suggesting that LLMs fail badly on attempts at general reasoning, such as planning problems, scheduling, and attempts to solve novel visual puzzles. This post provides a brief introduct…

Summary: Superposition-based interpretations of neural network activation spaces are incomplete. The specific locations of feature vectors contain crucial structural information beyond superposition, as seen in circular arrangements of day-of-the-week features and in the rich structures. We don’t currently have good concepts for talking about this …

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a link post.TL;DR: We published a new paper on out-of-context reasoning in LLMs. We show that LLMs can infer latent information from training data and use this information for downstream tasks, without any in-context learning or CoT. For instance, we finet…

This is a link post.I have canceled my OpenAI subscription in protest over OpenAI's lack ofethics. In particular, I object to: threats to confiscate departing employees' equity unless thoseemployees signed a life-long non-disparagement contract Sam Altman's pattern of lying about important topics I'm trying to hold AI companies to higher standards …

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a link post.New Anthropic model organisms research paper led by Carson Denison from the Alignment Stress-Testing Team demonstrating that large language models can generalize zero-shot from simple reward-hacks (sycophancy) to more complex reward tampering (…

After living in a suburb for most of my life, when I moved to a major U.S. city the first thing I noticed was the feces. At first I assumed it was dog poop, but my naivety didn’t last long. One day I saw a homeless man waddling towards me at a fast speed while holding his ass cheeks. He turned into an alley and took a shit. As I passed him, there w…

ARC-AGI post Getting 50% (SoTA) on ARC-AGI with GPT-4o I recently got to 50%[1] accuracy on the public test set for ARC-AGI by having GPT-4o generate a huge number of Python implementations of the transformation rule (around 8,000 per problem) and then selecting among these implementations based on correctness of the Python programs on the examples…

Have you heard this before? In clinical trials, medicines have to be compared to a placebo to separate the effect of the medicine from the psychological effect of taking the drug. The patient's belief in the power of the medicine has a strong effect on its own. In fact, for some drugs such as antidepressants, the psychological effect of taking a pi…

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.As an AI researcher who wants to do technical work that helps humanity, there is a strong drive to find a research area that is definitely helpful somehow, so that you don’t have to worry about how your work will be applied, and thus you don’t have to worry about …

Preamble: Delta vs Crux This section is redundant if you already read My AI Model Delta Compared To Yudkowsky. I don’t natively think in terms of cruxes. But there's a similar concept which is more natural for me, which I’ll call a delta. Imagine that you and I each model the world (or some part of it) as implementing some program. Very oversimplif…

Preamble: Delta vs Crux I don’t natively think in terms of cruxes. But there's a similar concept which is more natural for me, which I’ll call a delta. Imagine that you and I each model the world (or some part of it) as implementing some program. Very oversimplified example: if I learn that e.g. it's cloudy today, that means the “weather” variable …

(Cross-posted from Twitter.) My take on Leopold Aschenbrenner's new report: I think Leopold gets it right on a bunch of important counts. Three that I especially care about: Full AGI and ASI soon. (I think his arguments for this have a lot of holes, but he gets the basic point that superintelligence looks 5 or 15 years off rather than 50+.) This te…