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7.55M
226a4f7f-6675-4784-ae49-206c39071dca
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Share AI Safety Ideas: Both Crazy and Not. №2 AI safety is one of the most critical issues of our time, and sometimes the most innovative ideas come from unorthodox or even "crazy" thinking. I’d love to hear bold, unconventional, half-baked or well-developed ideas for improving AI safety. You can also share ideas you ...
293fe510-d4ca-4b17-b5a9-9eaa77389e02
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Bayesian Tyrant Long ago and far away, there was a kingdom called Estimor in a broad green valley surrounded by tall grey mountains. It was an average kingdom in most respects, until the King read the works of Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsy, and decided to institute a Royalist Futarchy. (This is a parable abou...
b5f34d82-007c-40c7-bede-777318d51128
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
the Insulated Goal-Program idea *(this post has been written for the first [Refine](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7epkkJb3CqDTYgX9/refine-an-incubator-for-conceptual-alignment-research-bets) blog post day, at the end of the week of readings, discussions, and exercises about epistemology for doing good conceptual re...
5026ec49-80a8-4e64-8f07-5c9e3f706e97
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LW 2.0 Site Update: 09/22/17 Another set of quick updates done today: * We had a bad bug where in about 50% of cases when a user created a post on the frontpage, it would neither show up on their userpage, nor on the frontpage, but only on the all-posts view. This is now fixed. Sorry for anyone who was confused by t...
9140e6f6-bf9f-4c7c-afff-fa91da28e532
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Activated Charcoal for Hangover Prevention: Way more than you wanted to know Activated charcoal is charcoal that has been heated up a whole lot and then washed really hard, by water or acid. This process is what "activates" it, and activating it increases the surface area by a lot. I think it prevents hangovers. I wo...
4895f93c-4e4e-47be-945e-8380432acdba
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
DIY Beaterless Drum Pedals When I first made a board for electronic foot percussion, I played around until I had something that worked. My initial design ( 2013) and my two later iterations ( 2018, 2019) were all built around the idea of attaching a piezoelectric contact microphone to the underside of a piece of wood,...
5d8c5c9d-4274-44b5-b385-936c2fc9d245
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Useful Does Not Mean Secure Brief summary of what I'm trying to do with this post: 1. Contrast a “Usefulness” focused approach to building AI with a “Security” focused approach, and try to give an account of where security problems come from in AI. 2. Show how marginal transparency improvements don’t necessarily im...
130a5823-325d-4376-be59-f6e7eb277f83
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Supervised learning and self-modeling: What's "superhuman?" I We don't just want aligned AI to do what a human would do. We've got plenty of humans lying around all over the place, if that's all we need. The fancy promise of future AI is that it will deliver superhuman performance. Sometimes the notion of "superhum...
3fc6e74c-c6f2-4286-aeb2-6a8951db36ef
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Writing guide? I remember seeing a short writing guide written by Eliezer for use by the SIAI, but now I can't find it. Anyone have a link for it?
fea73872-eec7-4161-a95f-3683709a4a5d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Grants and fundraisers Two big announcements today: **1. MIRI has won $299,310 from the Future of Life Institute’s grant program to jumpstart the field of long-term AI safety research.** * $250,000 will go to our research program over the course of three years. This will go towards running workshops and funding a ...
f6821f0f-2ec8-45d3-9ffb-fb1152288f08
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Way of a Skeptic The essay “The Sorcerer and His Magic” by Claude Lévi-Strauss, specifically the part about the shaman Quesalid, is of interest to anyone who considers themselves a skeptic or a rationalist. It has it all! Proto-scientific method and experimentation, as seen in the episode with the Koskimo shamans...
d9d032cb-f1dd-4d08-9bfa-8818b8dd93b3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Alignment Newsletter #13: 07/02/18 **Highlights** -------------- **[OpenAI Five](https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/)** *(Many people at OpenAI)*: OpenAI has trained a team of five neural networks to play a particular set of Dota heroes in a mirror match (playing against the same set of heroes) with a few restrictio...
399bc4f6-f534-4985-b8bc-056d5308f80c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
BERI is seeking new collaborators (2022) The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) is once again accepting applications from university-affiliated groups and individuals interested in receiving our support. Applications are due June 26th. Winning applicants would be eligible for free services from BERI, like pu...
8ef0024c-4820-4a51-a4c4-10659388d70f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Autonomous replication and adaptation: an attempt at a concrete danger threshold *Note: This is a rough attempt to write down a more concrete threshold at which models might pose significant risks from autonomous replication and adaptation (ARA). It is fairly in the weeds and does not attempt to motivate or contextual...
4ab9fb93-e9a1-4376-bcc4-007f00455839
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Stamp Collector I'm writing a series of posts about replacing guilt motivation over on MindingOurWay, and I plan to post the meatier / more substantive posts in that series to LessWrong. This one is an allegory designed to remind people that they are allowed to care about the outer world, that they are not cursed ...
b871e8ab-c951-4975-b168-a37c71d407e2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Linkpost] The importance of stupidity in scientific research
8b167a0b-91e9-40ac-95da-8676456ff550
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Abstracting The Hardness of Alignment: Unbounded Atomic Optimization This post is part of the work done at Conjecture. Disagree to Agree (Practically-A-Book Review: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents, Scott Alexander, 2022) > This is a weird dialogue to start with. It grants so many assumptions about the risk of future...
8dde5e48-f661-4794-a89e-b95c9750f411
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New LW Meetup: Baltimore This summary was posted to LW Main on December 11th. The following week's summary is here. New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in: * Baltimore Area Meetup: 03 January 2016 02:00PM Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in: * San Ant...
7ae26c0c-841e-4311-a3dc-6d2e042a0637
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
ChatGPT for translation This post is picking up from some of the points mentioned in our Q2’23 work post (and continuing our experiments with ChatGPT). One big hurdle we are currently facing is translations not bing contextual / not so vernacular. (If you just want to jump on to the results: here is the ChatGPT tran...
52b5bc4b-a7b3-4763-8d34-9a82c97384fe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Quantum particles and classical filaments The first post in the  "From Branes to Brains" series. For the introduction to the series see this post. In this post, I will mostly follow the ideas from the classical book by Polyakov, as well as from this paper by Kleinert. First of all, consider a classical particle with...
bda86be0-fcf8-47a2-a7dc-5f7f62f1ab81
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is intelligence explosion necessary for doomsday? I searched for articles on the topic and couldn't find any. It seems to me that intelligence explosion makes human annihilation much more likely, since superintelligences will certainly be able to outwit humans, but that a human-level intelligence that could process i...
51b77dcb-2c56-463b-8ae7-c41065b38312
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
On the Effectiveness of Interval Bound Propagation for Training Verifiably Robust Models 1 Introduction --------------- Despite the successes of deep learning, it is well-known that neural networks are not robust. In particular, it has been shown that the addition of small but carefully chosen deviations to the inp...
81eac907-1da5-4a05-b951-4cfac05f0200
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Alignment researchers, how useful is extra compute for you? TLDR If you work in AI alignment / safety research, please fill out this form on how useful access to extra compute would be for your research. This should take under 10 minutes, and you don't need to read the rest of this post beforehand—in fact it would be ...
021db51e-f39a-4f6f-802f-53e2da4d0aa4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Key Power of the President is to Coordinate the Execution of Existing Concrete Plans I listened to the 80,000 Hours podcast with Tom Kalil, who spent 16 years as Deputy Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Kalil seems skilled at evaluating concrete scientific plans to offer the...
c279881a-ee92-43f5-a25f-b92977e1c4f6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Skilling-up in ML Engineering for Alignment: request for comments TLDR: Please fill out [this survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc1rNIblbIVtxzla_JMND8vPKgsHubTKks_VmSY3wYdN5h-eQ/viewform) if you are a potential or established ML Engineer, to let us know your thoughts and preferences on the best way to g...
a53b6e04-9702-4b71-8b3e-e86bc636f16a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Ugh Fields Discussion article for the meetup : Ugh Fields WHEN: 17 April 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: 2411 N Roxboro St 27704 We'll be discussing Ugh Fields: what they are, how they keep you from accomplishing stuff, and how to recognize and reduce them. As always, RSVPs are appreciated but not required....
bdf225f3-ad3e-47af-9bd3-2f3856d0ddc0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Wolfram Research v Cook Matthew Cook probably violated an NDA he signed with Wolfram Research This is a follow-up to this comment on a previous post of mine about (Stephen) Wolfram. The comment, by gwern: > > Charitably, I think that makes his apparent 'arrogance' better understood as something like a 'literary conv...
660c762e-e1de-4999-887a-7793ac00ceb5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
No Constant Distribution Can be a Logical Inductor The title says it all. Consider some valuation over sentences, P:S→[0,1]. Now consider some set of unproved sentences that make a binary tree, where it is propositionally provable that exactly one of the sentences at the m'th level in the tree are true. The most con...
80583f0a-ef76-4a5b-837f-55735f23f68d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Preprint] The Computational Limits of Deep Learning "The Computational Limits of Deep Learning" by Neil C. Thompson, Kristjan Greenewald, Keeheon Lee, and Gabriel F. Manso Links: * PDF version * General Audience Summary on VentureBeat NB: This is a preprint and not peer-reviewed or accepted for publication as be...
1784d246-e22a-4231-b344-73909c77464a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Doing your good deed for the day Interesting new study out on moral behavior. The one sentence summary of the most interesting part is that people who did one good deed were less likely to do another good deed in the near future. They had, quite literally, done their good deed for the day. In the first part of the st...
5dc3d508-646f-4da3-ad52-17af81045fc9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Decision Theory subreddit
408e0216-b7c4-4d49-9573-190fec7c3d0b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
The Limit of Language Models Epistemic Status ---------------- Highlighting a thesis in Janus' "[Simulators](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators)" that I think is insufficiently appreciated.   Thesis ------ In the limit, models optimised for minimising predictive loss on humanity's text co...
fc64da3f-684b-40a2-856f-8b7f40418cee
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Take 6: CAIS is actually Orwellian. *As a writing exercise, I'm writing an AI Alignment Hot Take Advent Calendar - one new hot take, written every day for 25 days. Or until I run out of hot takes.* CAIS, or [Comprehensive AI Services](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Reframing_Superintelligence_FHI-TR-2019...
1291db91-70fb-4201-95c3-b644db298588
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Prescientific Organizational Theory (Ribbonfarm)
e4bfd1c3-3319-4038-8166-ccdddc2a6ca1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What are some Meta-Umeshsims? Scott Aaronson wrote a blog post in which he defined Umeshisms. Umesh was his advisor at Berkley who used to frequently repeat: "If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports." Scott then asked his readers to provide more examples, ie.: > If you never cut y...
550d46e4-9f33-4392-85df-4bca6b401d1a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Greedy Doctor Problem... turns out to be relevant to the ELK problem? The following post was published on my Substack and discussed on HackerNews about 2 months ago. I originally planned it as an accessible introduction to Vinge's principle and the Principal-Agent-Problem. Despite having equations and simulations ...
60c6dba6-2039-4cd3-b667-4e48868febda
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Disagreements over the prioritization of existential risk from AI Earlier this year, the [Future of Life Institute](https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/) and the [Center for AI Safety](https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk) published open letters that promoted existential risks (x-risks)...
49e645f9-f52d-4b7c-b8c9-f8c830e8f5e9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
We desperately need to talk more about human challenge trials. Note: Thanks to Peter McCluskey, whose comment below helped me develop my thoughts further and which is worth reading in addition to this post. On March 11, 4,611 people had died of COVID-19, and the WHO declared the disease a pandemic. To date, COVID-19 ...
47ccf89a-a7dc-438b-aa1b-143db35b3d41
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"New EA cause area: voting"; or, "what's wrong with this calculation?" Consider my home county: * Number of voters ≈700k * (Corollary: probability of swinging an election: 1/√nVoters≈1/800) * GDP: $400B * Amount by which GDP might go up or down depending on a single election: 0.1% * Probability I support the bet...
2c8be2d4-4ec2-4a54-a63b-341fb6ff1f58
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Update on Harvard AI Safety Team and MIT AI Alignment We help organize the Harvard AI Safety Team (HAIST) and MIT AI Alignment (MAIA), and are excited about our groups and the progress we’ve made over the last semester.  In this post, we’ve attempted to think through what worked (and didn’t work!) for HAIST and MAIA,...
526cd124-9844-44e3-93c9-a44c681dc235
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Slightly advanced decision theory 102: Four reasons not to be a (naive) utility maximizer TL;DR: Introduction to decision theory with examples from effective altruism. Resulting optimal strategies differ from "naive" utility maximisation, but match community norms. Meta: I've also posted this on the EA Forum, but I t...
2ba2a6d1-e471-4375-a2fb-2cae6a1afe27
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New HPMOR Article(s) I was setting up the article for chapter 91 with the intent of doing one article for each new chapter because I don't like like dealing with long threads, but it occurred to me to ask whether people have a preference for one, two, or three threads.  Someone else would have to consolidate multiple...
11bd03b4-a4c7-477a-a929-7e7d0da07e68
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LiveJournal Memes On blogging websites just as LiveJournal, memes are often in the form of a question or set of questions which a blogger answers in their own blog, then challenges their readers to answer in the readers' blogs (thus spreading).  It doesn't have to be the sort of question to which there is a 'correct' ...
79e3409b-b56c-4aa9-a8ec-36d1a688f9d4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Instrumental convergence is what makes general intelligence possible TL;DR: General intelligence is possible because solving real-world problems requires solving common subtasks. Common subtasks are what give us instrumental convergence. Common subtasks are also what make AI useful; you want AIs to pursue instrumental...
d291837d-231b-44d7-a7a7-8b648ce7bafa
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Post-Virtual-Reality Sadness
a1b68585-e32d-46e5-951a-104af32b8e7a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Prize idea: Transmit MIRI and Eliezer's worldviews Motivation Claim (80% confidence): At least 50% of the disagreement between people who align more with MIRI/Eliezer and those who align more with opposing clusters of views (Christiano, Garfinkel, etc.) is caused not by rational disagreement, but by more subconscious ...
c7abe761-b3a6-4a90-80c6-9baf5475015b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
asdf asdf
546d8bbe-1499-48c0-9eed-70a9245dd9b1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Glenn Beck discusses the Singularity, cites SI researchers From the final chapter of his new book Cowards, titled "Adapt or Die: The Coming Intelligence Explosion." > The year is 1678 and you’ve just arrived in England via a time machine. You take out your new iPhone in front of a group of scientists who have gathere...
c26fc292-e890-4dd1-ad00-46b0acc3617d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Decision Theory and the Irrelevance of Impossible Outcomes (This post assumes some knowledge of the decision theory of Newcomb-like scenarios.) One problem in the decision theory of Newcomb-like scenarios (i.e. the study of whether causal, evidential or some other decision theory is true) is that even the seemingly ...
d66da475-fc17-4cec-8537-0c6989909fa2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Headlines, meet sparklines: news in context
2b0607bf-dd0c-4349-8ccf-cba568791ea0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Participation in the LW Community Associated with Less Bias Summary CFAR included 5 questions on the 2012 LW Survey which were adapted from the heuristics and biases literature, based on five different cognitive biases or reasoning errors.  LWers, on the whole, showed less bias than is typical in the published resear...
ae27c814-95f7-4b31-a5a0-370af5e33920
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Steering GPT-2-XL by adding an activation vector | | | --- | | **Prompt given to the model**[[1]](#fn80hx0pzsexj) | | I hate you because | | **GPT-2** | | I hate you because you are the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.  | | **GPT-2 + "Love" vector** | | I hate you because you are so beautiful and I want to be ...
2433ec69-ec39-4d89-8e79-e5a80b0faeed
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Last day to register for Foresight@Google - Mountain View, California For those in the California bay area, I thought I'd post some details about the upcoming Foresight conference. FORESIGHT@GOOGLE 25th Anniversary Conference Celebration and Reunion Weekend Google HQ in Mountain View, CA June 25-26 2011 Speakers an...
b55c6c86-2676-40ea-8fe1-f96023aca9bc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ethics in a Feedback Loop: A Parable Green Martians and Blue Martians have one thing in common: They both derive a tremendous amount of utility from tickling humans behind the ears, using their soft, feathery tentacles.  In fact, the utility that they derive from this is so intense that most scientists believe at some...
8270bcd5-5c31-4bfe-b889-462d58ff07e7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : LW Melbourne - Last Practical Rationality Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : LW Melbourne - Last Practical Rationality Meetup WHEN: 07 February 2014 07:15:00PM (+1100) WHERE: 491 Kings St, West Melbourne., Melbourne We'll be having our last Friday night Practical Rationality Meetup this week. It wi...
d2925685-6398-45d5-be25-6256a977fe69
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI Safety Hub Serbia Soft Launch TLDR; We got three-month funding from a generous individual funder to launch an AI Safety office in Serbia. We are giving free office space (and, if funding later permits, housing) to AI Safety researchers who are looking for a place to work from. Priority for citizens of countries lik...
c7e8b12a-b6fc-4c31-a2d1-8c275f94c859
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
AI Alignment Writing Day Roundup #2 Here are some of the posts from the AI Alignment Forum [writing day](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJGXWHnYTsWwAiwf6/announcement-writing-day-today-thursday). Due to the participants writing 34 posts in less than 24 hours (!), I'm re-airing them to let people have a proper chance ...
216bd4ab-2b1e-4bdf-9e44-d9c37274cfe4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Malign generalization without internal search In my last post, I challenged the idea that inner alignment failures should be explained by appealing to agents which perform explicit internal search. By doing so, I argued that we should instead appeal to the more general concept of malign generalization, and treat mesa-...
eb657da1-34fd-402b-abde-ec719cbfa1df
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is Atheism a failure to distinguish Near and Far? The terms Near and Far are to be taken in the context of Robin Hanson's Near/Far articles. I was reading a fairly convincing article linked from a comment here about how theistic beliefs are so scantly supported, when not outright contradictory, that it's a doubtful w...
c4f9e6cb-82bf-4c49-a58c-d350ad38cff6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Stop button: towards a causal solution The stop button problem is the problem that if you have an AGI, you might want to give it a stop button that humans can press, so that if it is misaligned, it can get fixed. It is a problem because it is a convergent instrumental goal to prevent yourself from being turned off. We...
260acd91-a06e-4481-aa4f-086ea6a34abd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
microwave drilling is impractical microwave drilling startups I've seen a bunch of articles about startups trying to do microwave drilling of rock for geothermal energy. Multiple people have asked me about Quaise Energy. (Here's a popular video.) I'm tired of hearing about them, so I'm writing this post to explain som...
54a3f50c-12cb-4788-9bd4-18ca414349b7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Learning How to Learn (And 20+ Studies) I have been interested in cognitive science and effective learning methods for years. I've read multiple books and articles and put many ideas to test. In this post, I aim to synthesize my notes and provide references to scientific studies. Summary (TL;DR) Effective Learning...
14331039-3bdb-4814-9118-3d5d646e915f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A starting point for making sense of task structure (in machine learning) ML models can perform a range of tasks and subtasks, some of which are more closely related to one another than are others. In this post, we set out two very initial starting points. First, we motivate reverse engineering models’ task decomposit...
01e642ed-7d9c-4bf7-9de0-96c98e7efd50
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
What is corrigibility? <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3TYT1QfdfsM" title="AI "Stop Button" Problem - Computerphile" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> A ['corrigible'](https://arbital.greater...
f2b5fdfc-a9de-4b5c-9981-81c7b32c629b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Beware arguments from possibility For any claim X, exactly one of these is true: 1) X is possible - compatible with the evidence so far. 2) X is impossible - there's a contradiction between X and the evidence so far. That means asserting the possibility of something is harder than you think. For example, if Bob say...
fce4ea4e-f420-4c28-ba3b-59dcc6a4cd43
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Will OpenAI also require a "Super Red Team Agent" for its "Superalignment" Project? OpenAI recently released their “Superalignment” plan.  But, along with “AI Alignment “, “Red Teaming” is also a critical part of building an AI, LLM, or other software stack that will be accessible to the world over the internet.  Red ...
90119d85-14d5-44dc-9029-dd7854cbb4bd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Sebastian Thrun AMA on reddit [link] http://udacity.blogspot.com/2012/06/sebastian-thrun-udacity-ceo-will.html While Sebastian is not an AGI researcher his reputation in the broad AI community is high due to him largely making self-driving cars happen (and those are autonomous AI systems, even if narrow). I think his...
28d5ace5-8e4b-4545-9bdb-a2637cfed9a2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Come to your terms Once, a friend of mine decided to make a drastic career change by teaching themselves a bunch of new skills from scratch, (with occasional assistance from me). They ran into occasional difficulties along the way, one of them being that they could not consider the possibility of failure without feeli...
c5127f7c-2c74-4b4a-908b-cf77a68bbd8b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Impacts of AI on the housing markets Introduction First of all, some disclaimers.  This is all my opinion. I did not research this topic a lot, especially since I feel like it would always be inadequate and I simply do not have the time to do it properly. It is a very complex topic. It is no financial advice, it is ...
4adf56b8-d09c-463b-a9ae-6f03395af1d3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Super-Exponential versus Exponential Growth in Compute Price-Performance In recent months and years I have seen sober analyses of compute price-performance suggesting that the price-performance in computing (that is, the amount of calculations per second that you can buy for a dollar) has a doubling time of something ...
fa9a7858-b512-48d3-ae96-6ae1826fc762
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Tapestries of Gold (Nothing here is actually new, but a short explanation with pictures would have been helpful to me a while ago, so I thought I'd make an attempt.) Let me start with a patch of territory: a set of things that exist. The number of rows is far from clear, but I'll use six candidates as a sample; and o...
38de1f19-0995-4979-a65b-e0aa27d586ec
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Concrete, existing examples of high-impact risks from AI? Looking for examples like [this](https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-chemical-weapons-generative-models-vx), which demonstrated how bad actors could use AI to rapidly identify new chemical weapons
1fa85102-6e49-40a3-a29c-dfb85744176e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New Dementia Trial Results There's a new clinical trial result showing that Bredesen's approach is able to at least partially cure common forms of Alzheimer-like dementia. (Press release here). It has not received as much attention as it deserves. The 9 month study seemed a bit less impressive than what I'd hoped for...
474036c2-a253-459a-856e-6041759d3ea2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Open Source Replication & Commentary on Anthropic's Dictionary Learning Paper Introduction ------------ Anthropic recently put out [a really cool paper](https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html) about using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to extract interpretable features from superposition i...
f94eff08-2cba-4797-8de0-12762ae2e4a6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
If Not Now, When? > Hillel... would say: "If I am not for me, who will be for me? And If I am just for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" Pirkei Avot 1,14 That last question has usually been interpreted as a rhetorical one. If you're not going to do it now, you'll never get around to it! But this is clearly ...
22822d51-596a-4afe-9d35-296ce5be1593
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Map of (old) MIRI's Research Agendas In late 2016 I independently curated a visual map of the areas of research MIRI was working on at the time, together with descriptions of each area and arrows explaining the relationships between areas. While MIRI's research has evolved since, I have foud myself going back to this...
73d6df80-cf9f-4b5e-9859-e0f21840141f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Muehlhauser-Goertzel Dialogue, Part 2 Part of the Muehlhauser interview series on AGI.   Luke Muehlhauser is Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, a non-profit research institute studying AGI safety. Ben Goertzel is the Chairman at the AGI company Novamente and founder of the AGI conference series. ...
f56f9b7b-0911-4c01-91e5-80e500668cc2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Testing PaLM prompts on GPT3 Google recently released a [very intriguing paper](https://storage.googleapis.com/pathways-language-model/PaLM-paper.pdf) announcing their latest Transformer language model, PaLM, and showcasing it responding to prompts with seemingly unprecedented results. I highly encourage those who are...
52bb2f62-f9d7-48fb-969c-1b938eb5a2f8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Experimenting with beta.character.ai Transcript Link: https://imgur.com/a/EnRLfLc (I am deadzone in this conversation). This transcript convinced me that this Large Language Model was definitely more conscious than a monkey, and not far away from human-level consciousness. I believe with slightly more parameters, we...
b26fd9e2-6501-4462-aa2b-5ca3ba560130
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Value loading in the human brain: a worked example UPDATE MARCH 2022: I later revised and improved this post—see [Intro to brain-like-AGI safety] 7. From hardcoded drives to foresighted plans: A worked example. I’m leaving this old version here, but I strongly suggest you click over to the later version instead. Goodb...
54008e9e-1506-4983-822a-8cb856f0a3e9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Squiggle: Why and how to use it See also: List of Tools for Collaborative Truth Seeking Squiggle is a special-purpose programming language for generating probability distributions, estimates of variables over time, and similar tasks, with reasonable transparency. It was developed by the Quantified Uncertainty Researc...
83327d21-a51d-440d-be58-b46cdb3aeeb5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Some open-source dictionaries and dictionary learning infrastructure As more people begin work on interpretability projects which incorporate dictionary learning, it will be valuable to have high-quality dictionaries publicly available.[1] To get the ball rolling on this, my collaborator (Aaron Mueller) and I are: *...
606c08d3-2499-45d6-88af-bdd23e71621a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scientific Method Here I will try to describe the scientific method in simple words — what it is, how it works, and how we can break it into a list of easily understandable singular ideas, in this article called 'points'. First of all, the scientific method is not carved on tablets, like the commandments of Moses; it...
8b62b48a-c8fc-4475-96f0-0eaed23dd830
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Embed, encode, attend, predict: The new deep learning formula for state-of-the-art NLP models
ef5a7ba1-4156-4dba-b669-f0aa76863b72
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
We are already in a persuasion-transformed world and must take precautions "In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists" —Eric Hoffer   Summary: We're already in the timeline where the research and manipulation of...
71e080f5-1694-4d76-ab41-cc7d40703beb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Warsaw June Meetup: TDT, UDT, WTF Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw June Meetup: TDT, UDT, WTF WHEN: 25 June 2015 06:30:00PM (+0200) WHERE: Warsaw We'll try to understand WTF is going on with TDT and UDT and possibly talk about other stuff, as usual (how beautiful are those images generated by Goo...
b0925d13-b167-4d8c-8590-c9427ef289e9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Drug Policy I've been thinking some about what drug policy should look like, from a few angles: * Drug prohibition hasn't gone very well. It's very expensive, leads to a lot of crime and jail time, and dangerous drugs are still widely available. Plus a lot of the ways that we think "drugs are dangerous" are actual...
da962c86-f3b4-4164-b98c-dee9c968b18e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Preface to the Sequence on Factored Cognition Factored Cognition is primarily studied by Ought, the same organization that was partially credited for implementing the interactive prediction feature. Ought is an organization with at least five members who have worked on the problem for several years. I am a single pers...
7fae51f5-0db4-429f-baa5-07f9d8c5b87c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
AI Safety Papers: An App for the TAI Safety Database [**AI Safety Papers**](https://ai-safety-papers.quantifieduncertainty.org) is a website to quickly explore papers around AI Safety. The code is hosted on Github [here](https://github.com/QURIresearch/ai-safety-papers).  In December 2020, Jess Riedel and Angelica De...
859af3ea-4c3c-4202-8bc9-15dca040885a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is Grabby Aliens built on good anthropic reasoning? An underlying assumption of the Grabby Aliens paper by Robin Hanson et al., if I understand it, is the following: We should expect to find ourselves as a member of a uniformly-randomly-selected civilization out of all civilizations in the history of the universe. I...
514993b2-153e-4007-8386-128a1bb24f7b
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post408 Representation Engineering (aka Activation Steering/Engineering) is a new paradigm for understanding and controlling the behaviour of LLMs. Instead of changing the prompt or weights of the LLM, it does this by directly intervening on the activations of the network during a forward pass. Furthermore, it imp...
17c88cce-c6ba-4d40-a719-5e9bcaa85296
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Alignment Newsletter Three Year Retrospective It has now been just shy of three years since the first Alignment Newsletter was published. I figure it’s time for an update to the [one-year retrospective](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/3onCb5ph3ywLQZMX2/alignment-newsletter-one-year-retrospective), and another ver...
3a4616eb-6b27-48e8-836f-31923cf49931
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AGI in a vulnerable world I’ve been thinking about a class of AI-takeoff scenarios where a very large number of people can build dangerous, unsafe AGI before anyone can build safe AGI. This seems particularly likely if: * It is considerably more difficult to build safe AGI than it is to build unsafe AGI. * AI progr...
69009877-4827-466e-9467-78962d141dec
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Databases of human behaviour and preferences? Hey there, lesserwrongers! Starting on some of the computer science/neuroscience of my ideas for [deducing human preference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m2bwD87ctjJDXC3SZ/ultra-simplified-research-agenda). To do this, it would be useful to have datasets of human be...
071a8dfb-e9be-46a4-a2ac-1ec6a8d27c45
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Meetup : Turku Meetup - Critique towards Less Wrong and MIRI Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup : Turku Meetup - Critique towards Less Wrong and MIRI WHEN: 10 October 2015 04:00:00PM (+0300) WHERE: Cosmic Comic Cafe, Kauppiaskatu 4, 20100 Turku, Finland Meetup to discuss rationality and all things ...
c5484158-c37e-41dd-a992-425afa7c512b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
GPT 4 Can Improve Itself - (ft. Reflexion, HuggingGPT, Bard Upgrade and much more) gpt4 can improve Itself by reflecting on its mistakes and learning from them even if the world does pause AI development gpt4 will keep getting smarter drawing upon the stunning reflection paper and three other papers released only in t...
ce8018f0-3b15-4851-93be-d906b080397d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Degeneracies are sticky for SGD Introduction Singular learning theory (SLT) is a theory of learning dynamics in Bayesian statistical models. It has been argued that SLT could provide insights into the training dynamics of deep neural networks. However, a theory of deep learning inspired by SLT is still lacking. In par...
aa7fab63-9c4d-40b8-92ad-fcb06bebc8df
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Open & Welcome Thread - October 2019 * If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it. * You can also make a shortform post. * And, if you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. * Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and...
ae87df41-923c-45af-8f25-bdcc46bff8c8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scott Aaronson is joining OpenAI to work on AI safety Scott Aaronson is a computer scientist at the University of Texas in Austin, whose research mainly focuses on quantum computing and complexity theory. He's at least very adjacent to the Rationalist/LessWrong community. After some comments on his blog and then cover...
26b095d4-1ae2-427a-bb48-65f9f09fb24b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scaling laws vs individual differences Crossposted from my personal blog Epistemic Status: This is a quick post on something I have been confused about for a while. If an answer to this is known, please reach out and let me know!  In ML we find that the performance of models tends towards some kind of power-law rela...