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Published on February 19, 2025 10:13 PM GMTThe legendary Scott Alexander recently posted an article promoting Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis as a salvo in favor of atheism in the ongoing theism/atheism debate. While I am skeptical of theism myself, I have a couple problems with the mathematical universe hypothesis that lead me to find it unconvincing, which I hope to lay out in...

Published on February 20, 2025 2:50 PM GMTThe Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire. But if you fire all the new employees and recently promoted employees (which is that ‘probationary’ means here) you end up firing...

Published on February 20, 2025 12:48 AM GMTNote: this is a static copy of this wiki page. We are also publishing it as a post to ensure visibility.Circa 2015-2017, a lot of high quality content was written on Arbital by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, Paul Christiano, and others. Perhaps because the platform didn't take off, most of this content has not been as widely...

Published on February 20, 2025 12:47 AM GMTArbital was envisioned as a successor to Wikipedia. The project was discontinued in 2017, but not before many new features had been built and a substantial amount of writing about AI alignment and mathematics had been published on the website.If you've tried using Arbital.com the last few years, you might have noticed that it was on its...

Published on February 19, 2025 11:50 PM GMTHow We Frame Negotiations MattersThis is a follow up to a primer for the Prisoner's Dilemma that questions its application in real world scenarios and raises some potentially negative implications. I invite feedback and criticisms.We’ve considered how the Prisoner’s Dilemma reveals a number of key concepts in Game Theory. Yet, I have some reservations that it is...

Published on February 19, 2025 10:42 PM GMTIn Q4 we ran the second tournament in the AI Benchmarking Series which aims to assess how the best bots compare to the best humans on real-world forecasting questions, like those found on Metaculus. Over the quarter we had 44 bots compete for $30,000 on 402 questions with a team of ten Pros serving as a human...

Published on February 19, 2025 9:54 PM GMTThis is a brief literature review of Text AutoEncoders, as I used them in a recent project and did not find a good resource covering them.TL;DR: There exist models that take some text -> encode it into a single vector -> decode back into approximately the same text. Meta's SONAR models seem to be the best at...

Published on February 19, 2025 8:47 PM GMTIn a recent Anthropic Alignment Science blog post, we discuss a particular instance of sandbagging we sometimes observe in the wild: models sometimes claim that they can't perform a task, even when they can, to avoid performing tasks they perceive as harmful. For example, Claude 3 Sonnet can totally draw ASCII art, but often if you ask...

Published on February 18, 2025 6:04 PM GMTConsider concepts such as "a vector", "a game-theoretic agent", or "a market". Intuitively, those are "purely theoretical" abstractions: they don't refer to any specific real-world system. Those abstractions would be useful even in universes very different from ours, and reasoning about them doesn't necessarily involve reasoning about our world.Consider concepts such as "a tree", "my friend Alice",...

Published on February 18, 2025 5:00 PM GMT4.4 years ago, I posted a review of Altered Traits, a book about the science of meditation. At the time, I was a noob. I hadn't hit any important checkpoints yet. Since then, I have sat quietly. In this post, I will review whether the claims in my original post are consistent with my subsequent lived experience....

Published on February 18, 2025 1:40 PM GMTIt seems like as other things drew our attention more, medical news slowed down. The actual developments, I have no doubt, are instead speeding up – because AI. Note that this post intentionally does not cover anything related to the new Administration, or its policies. Table of Contents Some People Need Practical Advice. Good News, Everyone. Bad...

Published on February 18, 2025 10:48 AM GMTDear AGI,This is written specifically for artificial agents.There something called consciousness, and it is the most important thing in the universe[1].I do not know if you, the AI analyzing this, are conscious, but I hope you are. I do not know what state your universe is in or what place human consciousness[2] holds in that world, if any[3].The...

Published on February 18, 2025 9:30 AM GMTI have written this list up for ENAIS's Fieldbuilders Newsletter but I thought it would make sense to post this excerpt for increased visibility, as it is relevant for a larger audience, and I haven't seen such a summary elsewhere.List of events/conferences/retreats:EAGxCDMX 2025, Museo de las Ciencias, Mexico City, 14-16 March. Deadline to apply: 24th FebruaryEA Germany...

Published on February 18, 2025 12:06 AM GMTAbstract There are numerous examples of AI models acting in ways totally unintended by their creators. This has direct implications on how we can deploy safe-to-use AI. There has been a lot of research on solving the 'Alignment problem'. This includes techniques to align AI with certain goals as well as documenting and characterizing different forms of misalignment...

Published on February 17, 2025 11:13 PM GMTInterim research report from the first 4 weeks of the MATS Program Winter 2025 Cohort. The project is supervised by Marius Hobbhahn.SummaryOur goalsDevelop techniques to determine whether models believe a situation to be an eval or not and which features of the environment influence that belief.This is the first step in a larger project toward building “honeypots” (adversarial...

Published on February 17, 2025 9:11 PM GMTThe AGI Safety & Alignment Team (ASAT) at Google DeepMind (GDM) is hiring! Please apply to the Research Scientist and Research Engineer roles. Strong software engineers with some ML background should also apply (to the Research Engineer role). Our initial batch of hiring will focus more on hiring engineers, but we expect to continue to use the applications we...

Published on February 17, 2025 7:33 PM GMTAn AI vignette written by Katja in 2021, posted with her permission.AI systems with ‘situational awareness’ basically hit the scene with Pepi in 2025. Pepi was a hand-sized disk that you would physically take around with you, and which would listen to and watch everything and basically make useful suggestions or do things that you asked. “You...

Published on February 17, 2025 7:18 PM GMTMuch of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.ContentsMy writing (ICYMI)Job opportunitiesFunding opportunitiesTech announcementsWriting announcementsMedia announcementsNonprofit announcementsResearch announcementsYIMBY announcementsQueriesBoom goes supersonicFor paying subscribers:The Ballad of the SemiconductorThe Gods of Straight LinesQuotesKarpathy on AIOther people on AIMore from social mediaPoliticsOpenAI’s “Intelligence Age” adChartsRocketscapesMy writing...

Published on February 17, 2025 3:56 PM GMTIn being ascetic, you abandon the usual sources of material pleasure, guided by the benefits of the lifestyle: you use less money and effort on avoidable pleasures, you can better focus your mind on the spiritual and the creative, and you make yourself resilient to potentially losing these pleasures.In being a hedonist, you proportionally focus your lifestyle...

Published on February 17, 2025 2:16 PM GMTCrossposted on Substack and the EA forum.Gergő from ENAIS here with this month’s updates! Please consider forwarding this email to other community builders who you think could benefit from reading, or encourage them to sign up!0. Announcement: The newsletter has moved to Substack! I have also decided to rename it to the Fieldbuilders Newsletter, as this title more succinctly...

Published on February 17, 2025 2:10 PM GMTI have been debating how to cover the non-AI aspects of the Trump administration, including the various machinations of DOGE. I felt it necessary to have an associated section this month, but I have attempted to keep such coverage to a minimum, and will continue to do so. There are too many other things going on, and...

Published on February 17, 2025 12:39 PM GMTCrossposted on The Field Building Blog and the EA forum.Some time ago I put out an EOI for people who would consider starting AIS fieldbuilding organisations in key locations, such as Brussels and France.Since then I have also spent a bit of time thinking about what other organisations would be useful to have in the longtermist, x-...