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Published on April 25, 2025 4:02 PM GMTIntroductionEffective Altruism (EA) is a social movement that aims to use reason and evidence to help others as much as possible. It encourages people to ask not just “how to do good”, but how to do the most good. This has led members to support things like global health interventions, existential risk reduction, and animal welfare.I used...

Published on April 25, 2025 3:32 PM GMTSince the 1970s, productivity has outpaced wage growth in many sectors. One sector where wages have kept up with productivity growth is tech, especially among programmers. But, I suspect this is changing thanks to the use of AI coding assistants.To quickly review the relevant economic history, before 1973 wage growth roughly tracked productivity in Western economies, but...

Published on April 25, 2025 2:40 PM GMT At work we've recently been using zstd as a better-compressing alternative to gzip, and overall I've been pretty happy with it. A minor documentation gripe, though, is that the behavior around multithreaded compression is a bit unclear. I understand it's chunking the work and sending chunks to different threads to parallelize the compression process, and this...

Published on April 25, 2025 10:03 AM GMTLetters to attorney generals, etc, to block OpenAI from moving assets into a corporation.Sep: Public CitizenDec: MetaJan, Apr: Californian civil society nonprofitsApr: Coalition for AI Nonprofit IntegrityApr: Safety ex-employees' brief for Musk lawsuitApr: Safety+ researchers on 'not for private gain' Discuss

Published on April 25, 2025 5:12 AM GMTI was recently encouraged to read Jeffrey Heninger's report "Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?"  It was interesting, but I thought it had some critical flaws.  I would've recommended rejecting it if I were reviewing it for an academic conference.  I've written a mock review below.  As typical when reviewing for a conference, I didn't aim to mince...

Published on April 24, 2025 9:22 PM GMTTLDR: I really like the graph where they show the best model for every price point. And how Google's models have the best performance at any price point. So I made it live and fetches news data and model regularly because things are moving fast and images don't refresh themselves. (Thanks Claude) https://winston-bosan.github.io/llm-pareto-frontier/(Will be hosted soon in a...

Published on April 24, 2025 9:15 PM GMTIn this post, we study whether we can modify an LLM’s beliefs and investigate whether doing so could decrease risk from advanced AI systems.We describe a pipeline for modifying LLM beliefs via synthetic document finetuning and introduce a suite of evaluations that suggest our pipeline succeeds in inserting all but the most implausible beliefs. We also demonstrate...

Published on April 24, 2025 9:15 PM GMTYesterday, I couldn't wrap my head around some programming concepts in Python, so I turned to ChatGPT (gpt-4o) for help. This evolved into a very long conversation (the longest I've ever had with it by far), at the end of which I pasted around 600 lines of code from Github and asked it to explain them to...

Published on April 24, 2025 8:17 PM GMTWhat in retrospect seem like serious moral crimes were often widely accepted while they were happening. This means that moral progress can require intellectual progress.[1] Intellectual progress often requires questioning received ideas, but questioning moral norms is sometimes taboo. For example, in ancient Greece it would have been taboo to say that women should have the same political...

Published on April 24, 2025 7:09 PM GMTIn late 2019 I wrote a TTRPG.The theme was alien sentience (or perhaps sapience is the technical term), both "organic" (extra terrestrial) and "artificial" (AI/robots). This is the prologue that kicks off play. I found it really fascinating to look back on late 2019 and how I was thinking about some of these topics. Earthdate March 2022. Two months ago...

Published on April 23, 2025 4:05 PM GMTtl;dr: Even if we can't solve alignment, we can solve the problem of catching and fixing misalignment.If a child is bowling for the first time, and they just aim at the pins and throw, they’re almost certain to miss. Their ball will fall into one of the gutters. But if there were beginners’ bumpers in place blocking...

Published on April 23, 2025 12:01 PM GMTDear policymakers,We demand that the AI alignment budget be Belief-Consistent with the military budget.Belief-Consistency is a simple yet powerful idea:If you spend 8000 times less on AI alignment (compared to the military),You must also believe that AI risk is 8000 times less (than military risk).[1]Yet the only way to reach Belief-Consistency, is toGreatly increase AI alignment spending,orBecome...

Published on April 23, 2025 11:06 AM GMTto follow up my philantropic pledge from 2020, i've updated my philanthropy page with the 2024 results.in 2024 my donations funded $51M worth of endpoint grants (plus $2.0M in admin overhead and philanthropic software development). this comfortably exceeded my 2024 commitment of $42M (20k times $2100.00 — the minimum price of ETH in 2024).this also concludes my...

Published on April 23, 2025 3:35 AM GMTWhat would it take to convince you to come and see a fish that recognizes faces?Note: I'm not a marine biologist, nor have I kept fish since I was four. I have no idea what fish can really do. For the purposes of this post, let's suppose that fish recognizing faces is not theoretically impossible, but beyond...

Published on April 23, 2025 5:11 AM GMTI would like to revisit some of the concepts Scott explored in his 2020 article "For, Then Against, High-Saturated-Fat Diets". I'm hoping someone will have some novel/updated insights or new research to share concerning the impacts of the Western diet on health in 2025. I'm about to turn 32, and I sense that I'm moving toward becoming a...

Published on April 23, 2025 4:51 AM GMTGuillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France’s fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe’s population (4% of the whole world population). Kissinger writes...

Published on April 22, 2025 11:47 PM GMTEpistemic status: Like all alignment ideas, this one is incomplete and/or wrong, but I am hoping mostly incomplete and not wrong.One of the hard subproblems of alignment is constructing a "stable pointer to value" (see this overview and this (sub)sequence discussing OU agents). The way that I think of this is that we want to be able...

Published on April 22, 2025 8:39 PM GMTThe European AI Office is currently writing the rules for how general-purpose AI (GPAI) models will be governed under the EU AI Act. The are explicitly asking for feedback on how to interpret and operationalize key obligations under the AI Act. This includes the thresholds for systemic risk, the definition of GPAI, how to estimate training compute, and when...

Published on April 22, 2025 7:25 PM GMTSummary:Traditional LLMs outperform reasoning models in cooperative Public Goods tasks. Models like Llama-3.3-70B maintain ~90% contribution rates in public goods games, while reasoning-focused models (o1, o3 series) average only ~40%.We observe an "increased tendency to escape regulations" in reasoning models. As models improve in analytical capabilities, they show decreased cooperative behavior in multi-agent settings.Reasoning models more readily opt for...

Published on April 22, 2025 7:04 PM GMTI recently had the privilege of having my idea criticized at the London Institute for Safe AI, including by Philip Kreer and Nicky Case. Previously the idea was vague; being with them forced me to make the idea specific. I managed to make it so specific that they found a problem with it! That's progress :)Reminder: diagrams...

Published on April 22, 2025 6:28 PM GMTThere will be no single moment, no dramatic cinematic climax where humanity loses control. Forget the Hollywood singularity, the sharp left turn into dystopia often breathlessly debated by the very people enabling a slower, more mundane version of it. That’s not how it happens. It’s subtler. More insidious. More… us.You will give it up. Every day. Piece...

Published on April 22, 2025 5:36 PM GMTEach year, Manifund partners with regrantors: experts in the field of AI safety, each given an independent budget of $100k+. Regrantors can initiate fast, small grants, seeding early-stage projects with $5k-$50k.For 2025, we’ve raised $2.25m so far, and are excited to announce our first 10 regrantors:Neel Nanda — DeepMindLisa Thiergart — SL5 Task ForceLauren Mangla — ConstellationAidan...

Published on April 22, 2025 5:08 PM GMTWelcome to the AI Safety Newsletter by the Center for AI Safety. We discuss developments in AI and AI safety. No technical background required.In this edition: AI now outperforms human experts in specialized virology knowledge in a new benchmark; A new report explores the risk of AI-enabled coups.Listen to the AI Safety Newsletter for free on Spotify...

Published on April 22, 2025 2:09 PM GMTCrossposted from my blog In this fictional dialogue between a Bayesian (B) and a Non-Bayesian (N) I will propose solutions to some pre-existing problems with Bayesian epistemology, as well as introduce a new problem for which I offer a solution at the end. (Computer scientists may consider skipping to that section).Here’s a Bayes theorem cheat sheet if you...