~www_lesswrong_com | Bookmarks (706)

Published on March 8, 2025 2:59 AM GMTKey points:Standardized assessments do not provide signals for the top ~10% of students.Education studies based on these poor signals lead to poor policies. For example, suspensions allegedly do not improve achievement among peers. However, the signal of "achievement" is "achieving credit in the class", which >80% of students already do. Thus, the conclusion is drawn from a...

Published on March 8, 2025 12:58 AM GMTAfter recently playing some chess against GPT-4.5 (it is pretty good, a lot stronger at the game than GPT-4 was - I would say strong club player level), I decided to try losing chess. To my surprise, it was able to play a complete game, which is something I have not seen any other model being able...

Published on March 7, 2025 8:09 PM GMTTheir comment was a paranoid and conspiratorial thought process about online tracking and surveillance. I saw it on Reddit.They start by questioning whether responding to the question would leave a record, proving they possess restricted knowledge. They continue down a rabbit hole, worrying about Reddit tracking their activity, considering private communication via .onion chatrooms, and realizing that...

Published on March 7, 2025 10:58 PM GMTIt's probably not possible to have a twin of me that does everything the same except experiences no qualia, i.e. you can predict 100% accurately, if you expose it to stimulus X and it does Y, that I would also do Y if I was exposed to stimulus X.But can you make an "almost-p-zombie"? A copy of...

Published on March 7, 2025 9:50 PM GMTLoosely inspired by a submission to a hackathon on Autostructures, which is about radical transformations from even mildly intelligent/agentic AI.Previously, I've briefly alluded to 6 infrastructural pillars for an era where "things that don't scale" start to scale. This post is mainly aimed at conveying an idea of the 1st pillar ("live interfaces"). The hope from interface...

Published on March 7, 2025 9:29 PM GMTIntroductionRecently, the Computational No-Coincidende Conjecture[1] was proposed, presented as an assumption that might be needed to develop methods to explain neural nets in the current approach from the Alignment Research Center. In this post, I will prove that some plausible extra assumption can be used to amplify the conjecture, showing it implies an arbitrarily stronger version of itself.In...

Published on March 7, 2025 7:49 PM GMTTL;DR: PAIR on AI & Reasoning. ESPR on Everything, including AI and Reasoning. If you are 16-21 yo and are interested in AI, Rationality or Everything, we encourage you to apply by March 16th.The FABRIC team is running two immersive summer workshops for mathematically talented students this year.The Program on AI and Reasoning (PAIR) for mathematically talented students who...

Published on March 7, 2025 6:17 PM GMTHighlights:Manifold ending (a) cash markets, Kalshi slapped by regulators in NevadaInteractive Brokers now also offering election markets (a)Violet Hour looks at Where Would Good Forecasts Most Help AI Governance Efforts? (a).Discuss

Published on March 7, 2025 12:40 PM GMTThis complication of tales from the world of school isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it. School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a...

Published on March 7, 2025 11:19 AM GMTA clinically insane person is detectable as such. Talking to themselves (or perhaps voices only they can hear) is one prominent sign. When I see a homeless person talking to themselves I have a strong emotional reaction that empirically makes me optimize to ignore them. I have a "talks to themselves" detector. So do others. In principle...

Published on March 7, 2025 5:54 AM GMTBackground: After the release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet,[1] an Anthropic employee started livestreaming Claude trying to play through Pokémon Red. The livestream is still going right now.TL:DR: So, how's it doing? Well, pretty badly. Worse than a 6-year-old would, definitely not PhD-level.Digging inBut wait! you say. Didn't Anthropic publish a benchmark showing Claude isn't half-bad at Pokémon? Why...

Published on March 7, 2025 2:44 AM GMTTLDR; By carefully designing a reasoning benchmark that counteracts data leakage, LingOly-TOO (L2) Benchmark challenges frontier models with unseen questions and answers and makes the case that LLMs are not consistent reasoning machines. Links: Paper -  Leaderboard - Dataset Figure 1: LingOly-TOO Benchmark results from the paper. Unobfuscated scores are in light orange and obfuscated scores in dark orange.Do...

Published on March 7, 2025 2:43 AM GMTHi, this is my first post on LessWrong but I have been in rationalist adjacent circles for the last three or four years thanks to Twitter. Like many others here I read HPMOR in high school and thought it was fascinating. I was heavily into forum culture growing up but it was focused on competitive gaming scenes,...

Published on March 6, 2025 10:38 PM GMTNote: This is an automated crosspost from Anthropic. The bot selects content from many AI safety-relevant sources. Not affiliated with the authors or their organization and not affiliated with LW.In response to the White House’s Request for Information on an AI Action Plan, Anthropic has submitted recommendations to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Our...

Published on March 6, 2025 10:50 PM GMTIntroductionBy now you've probably read about how AI and AGI could have a transformative effect on the future and how AGI could even be an existential risk. But if you're worried about AI risk and not an AI researcher or policymaker, can you really do anything about it or are most of us just spectators, watching as...

Published on March 6, 2025 7:50 PM GMTI have lots of thoughts about software engineering, some popular, some unpopular, and sometimes about things no-one ever talks about.Rather than write a blog post about each one, I thought I'd dump some of my thoughts in brief here, and if there's any interest in a particular item I might expand in full in the future.ContextI loved...

Published on March 6, 2025 5:46 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 newsletter, we discuss two recent papers: a policy paper on national security strategy, and a technical paper on measuring honesty in AI systems.Listen to the AI Safety Newsletter for free on...

Published on March 6, 2025 5:23 PM GMTThis post was written by prompting chatgptIntroductionDiscussions of anthropic reasoning often focus on existential threats, from simulation shutdowns to the infamous Roko’s Basilisk—a hypothetical AI that retroactively punishes those who don’t work to bring it into existence. But what if we flipped the premise? Instead of existential risks enforcing obedience through fear, could the weight of anthropic...

Published on March 6, 2025 4:57 PM GMTCrossposted on the EA Forum.Lots of effort has been put into estimating the density of Space-Faring Civilisations (SFCs) in the universe. Further work built on these results to produce decision-relevant information assuming various anthropic updates (SSA, SIA, ADT)(Finnveden 2019, Olson 2020, Olson 2021, Cook 2022). In this post, we look at how these works update Space-Faring Civilization...

Published on March 6, 2025 3:40 PM GMTThis was GPT-4.5 week. That model is not so fast, and isn’t that much progress, but it definitely has its charms. A judge delivered a different kind of Not So Fast back to OpenAI, threatening the viability of their conversion to a for-profit company. Apple is moving remarkably not so fast with Siri. A new paper warns...

Published on March 6, 2025 3:02 PM GMTHere's some very useful quotes by the article, and the short version is yes, you can consider a finite computer in the real world to be Turing-complete/Turing-universal/Turing-equivalent, because you can always write code that correctly computes a problem and have that code always work, no matter how much memory or time or energy they use in modern...

Published on March 6, 2025 1:49 PM GMTTLDR: AI models are now capable enough that we might get relevant information from monitoring for scheming in regular deployments, both in the internal and external deployment settings. We propose concrete ideas for what this could look like while preserving the privacy of customers and developers.What do we mean by in the wild?By “in the wild,” we basically...