LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated This is a linkpost for https://unstableontology.com/2023/11/26/moral-reality-check/ Janet sat at her corporate ExxenAI computer, viewing some training performance statistics. ExxenAI was a major player in the generative AI space, with multimodal language, image, audio, and video AIs. They had scaled up op...

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. We’ve released a paper, AI Control: Improving Safety Despite Intentional Subversion. This paper explores techniques that prevent AI catastrophes even if AI instances are colluding to subvert the safety techniques. In this post: We summarize the paper; We compare our methodology to what the one used in other safe...

The Less Wrong General Census is unofficially here! You can take it at this link. It's that time again. If you are reading this post and identify as a LessWronger, then you are the target audience. I'd appreciate it if you took the survey. If you post, if you comment, if you lurk, if you don't actually read the site that much but you do read a bunch of the other rationalist blogs or...

If you are interested in the longevity scene, like I am, you probably have seen press releases about the dog longevity company, Loyal for Dogs, getting a nod for efficacy from the FDA. These have come in the form of the New York Post calling the drug "groundbreaking", Science Alert calling the drug "radical", and the more sedate New York Times just asking, "Could Longevity...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Crossposted from Otherwise Parents supervise their children way more than they used to Children spend less of their time in unstructured play than they did in past generations. Parental supervision is way up. The wild thing is that this is true even while the number of children per family has decreased an...

In the course of my life, there have been a handful of times I discovered an idea that changed the way I thought about the world. The first occurred when I picked up Nick Bostrom's book “superintelligence” and realized that AI would utterly transform the world. The second was when I learned about embryo selection and how it could change future generations. And the third happened a few months...

I was asked to respond to this comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky. This post is partly redundant with my previous post. Why is flesh weaker than diamond? When trying to resolve disagreements, I find that precision is important. Tensile strength, compressive strength, and impact strength are different. Material microstructure matters. Poorly-sintered diamond crystals could crumble like sand, and a large...

In May and June of 2023, I (Akash) had about 50-70 meetings about AI risks with congressional staffers. I had been meaning to write a post reflecting on the experience and some of my takeaways, and I figured it could be a good topic for a LessWrong dialogue. I saw that hath had offered to do LW dialogues with folks, and I reached out. In this dialogue, we discuss how I decided to chat with staffer...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated You can’t optimise an allocation of resources if you don’t know what the current one is. Existing maps of alignment research are mostly too old to guide you and the field has nearly no ratchet , no common knowledge of what everyone is doing and why, what is abandoned and why, what is renamed, what relates...

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. Quintin Pope & Nora Belrose have a new “AI Optimists” website, along with a new essay “AI is easy to control”, arguing that the risk of human extinction due to future AI (“AI x-risk”) is a mere 1% (“a tail risk worth considering, but not the dominant source of risk in the world”). (I’m much more pessimistic....

Any community which ever adds new people will need to either routinely teach the new and (to established members) blindingly obvious information to those who genuinely haven’t heard it before, or accept that over time community members will only know the simplest basics by accident of osmosis or selection bias. There isn’t another way out of that. You don’t get to stop doing it. If you have a vibr...

The author's Substack: https://substack.com/@homosabiens Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated You know it must be out there, but you mostly never see it. Author's Note 1: In something like 75% of possible futures, this will be the last essay that I publish on LessWrong.  Future content will be available on my substack , where I&apo...

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. Summary. You can’t optimise an allocation of resources if you don’t know what the current one is. Existing maps of alignment research are mostly too old to guide you and the field has nearly no ratchet, no common knowledge of what everyone is doing and why, what is abandoned and why, what is renamed, what relate...

Status: Vague, sorry. The point seems almost tautological to me, and yet also seems like the correct answer to the people going around saying “LLMs turned out to be not very want-y, when are the people who expected 'agents' going to update?”, so, here we are. Okay, so you know how AI today isn't great at certain... let's say "long-horizon" tasks? Like novel large-scal...

Support ongoing human narrations of curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated 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;DR Documented communications of risks (esp...

Previously: OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend. On Friday afternoon, OpenAI's board fired CEO Sam Altman. Overnight, an agreement in principle was reached to reinstate Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI, with an initial new board of Brad Taylor (ex-co-CEO of Salesforce, chair), Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo. What happened? Why did it happen? How will it ultimately end? The fight is far from over. We do...

Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI's founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live equally when AGI is created. Now we are engaged in a great corporate war, testing whether that entity, or any entity so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. What matters is not theory but p...

This is a linkpost for https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transitionBasically just the title, see the OAI blog post for more details. Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has...

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 t...

Here's a recent conversation I had with a friend: Me: "I wish I had more friends. You guys are great, but I only get to hang out with you like once or twice a week. It's painful being holed up in my house the entire rest of the time."Friend: "You know ${X}. You could talk to him."Me: "I haven't talked to ${X} since 2019."Friend: "Why does that matt...

Support ongoing human narrations of curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated 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 gl...

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. Source: https://www.lesswrong.c...

Support ongoing human narrations of curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated How many years will pass before transformative AI is built? Three people who have thought about this question a lot are Ajeya Cotra from Open Philanthropy , Daniel Kokotajlo from OpenAI and Ege Erdil from Epoch . Despite each spending at least hundreds of hours investigating this question, they still still disagree substa...

habryka Ok, 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...

1. There's a supercharged, dire wolf form of the bystander effect that I’d like to shine a spotlight on. First, a quick recap. The Bystander Effect is a phenomenon where people are less likely to help when there's a group around. When I took basic medical training, I was told to always ask one specific person to take actions instead of asking a crowd at large. “You, in the green shirt! C...