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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-...

Published on February 17, 2025 12:03 PM GMTThis is an all-in-one crosspost of a scenario I originally published in three parts on my blog, No Set Gauge. Links to the originals:A History of the Future, 2025-2027A History of the Future, 2027-2030A History of the Future, 2030-2040 Thanks to Luke Drago, Duncan McClements, Theo Horsley, and Bilal Chughtai for comments. 2025-2027Below is part 1 of an extended...

Published on February 16, 2025 10:47 PM GMTThis is my reading list for arch-anarchists that, although they no directly support arch-anarchy, are compatible with its ideas. The Making of a Small World: a similar satirical work of fiction to Nick Bostrom's The Fable of the Tyrant-Dragon, which I have already discussed in my previous article. It also criticizes complacency with problems accepted as "natural". Here...

Published on February 17, 2025 1:12 AM GMTMusk’s DOGE and the Data Rush: The Race to Secure the Ultimate AssetBy: Jason ReidIMPORTANT NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS SPECULATIVE Training Large Language Models (LLMs): Compute, Data and Machine Learning (ML)The training of Large Language Models (LLMs) is facing the finite nature of available human-generated data, often referred to as reaching "peak data," as noted by Ilya Sutskever[1]....

Published on February 17, 2025 5:56 AM GMTDirect PDF link for non-subscribersInformation theory must precede probability theory, and not be based on it. By thevery essence of this discipline, the foundations of information theory have a finite combinatorial character.-  Andrey KolmogorovMany alignment researchers borrow intuitions from thermodynamics: entropy relates to information, which relates to learning and epistemology. These connections were first revealed by Szilárd's...

Published on February 17, 2025 12:41 AM GMTWe might be doomed. But, what do the variations of the universal wave function which still contain human-y beings look like? Have we cast aside our arms race and went back to relative normality (well, as "normal" as Earth can be in this time of accelerating technological progress)? Has some lucky researcher succeeded in creating a powerful...

Published on February 16, 2025 5:34 PM GMTWe are in the dark age of computer programming.[1] I believe that we still fundamentally haven’t found good ways to deal with the challenges of writing computer programs. Programming languages are the foundation of our programming and leave a lot to be desired. I believe more is possible. I’ve worked on creating a new programming language (I’m...

Published on February 16, 2025 4:24 PM GMTI'm planning to organize a mentorship programme for people who want to become researchers working on the Learning-Theoretic Agenda (LTA). I'm still figuring out the detailed plan, the logistics and the funding, but here's an outline of how it would looks like. To express interest, submit this form.Why Apply?I believe that the risk of a global catastrophe...

Published on February 16, 2025 3:56 PM GMTI recently posted about doing Celtic Knots on a Hexagonal lattice ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tgi3iBTKk4YfBQxGH/celtic-knots-on-a-hex-lattice ).There were many nice suggestions in the comments. @Shankar Sivarajan suggested that I could look at a Einstien lattice instead, which sounded especially interesting. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_problem . )The idea of the Einstein tile is that it can tile the plane (like a hexagon or...

Published on February 16, 2025 1:43 AM GMTOn March 14th, 2015, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality made its final post. Wrap parties were held all across the world to read the ending and talk about the story, in some cases sparking groups that would continue to meet for years. It’s been ten years, and think that's a good reason for a round...

Published on February 15, 2025 10:10 PM GMT(This is a repost of the event listing, since it seems like events don't get much advertisement on LW.)As part of the fellowship that I announced back in September, the fellows and I will be hosting an online event to talk about our research! Here's a tentative schedule:Alex_Altair: What is a world model?Daniel C: Towards building blocks...

Published on February 15, 2025 7:50 PM GMTThere's a phrase my wife and I use: "knitting a sweater in a burning house." It describes those moments when we find ourselves absorbed in trivial tasks while seemingly more important matters loom. The night before my wedding, I caught myself trying to reactivate an old Twitter profile for our handmade photobooth—a perfect example of this phenomenon.At...

Published on February 15, 2025 7:08 PM GMTMicroplastics have been in the news and the local rationalist discord with increasing frequency over the past few months. Of note are Nat Friedman's PlasticList, and this 2024 preprint demonstrating that some human brains are now 0.5% plastic by weight. There was also an article on black plastic cookware that was quickly retracted[1]. The volume of discussion...

Published on February 14, 2025 11:18 PM GMTUpdate: seems like earlier today the OpenAI Board rejected Musk's proposal and said OpenAI is "not for sale." Epistemic status: thought about it briefly; seems like a longshot that's probably not worth it but curious what people think of the possibility. You might have heard Sam Altman is trying to transition OpenAI to a for-profit company and has offered...

Published on February 14, 2025 3:43 PM GMTWe are excited to release a short course on AGI safety for students, researchers and professionals interested in this topic. The course offers a concise and accessible introduction to AI alignment, consisting of short recorded talks and exercises (75 minutes total) with an accompanying slide deck and exercise workbook. It covers alignment problems we can expect as AI capabilities...

Published on February 14, 2025 3:30 PM GMTThis post covers three recent shenanigans involving OpenAI. In each of them, OpenAI or Sam Altman attempt to hide the central thing going on. First, in Three Observations, Sam Altman’s essay pitches our glorious AI future while attempting to pretend the downsides and dangers don’t exist in some places, and in others admitting we’re not going to...

Published on February 14, 2025 2:29 PM GMTI recently messed about with Celtic knot patterns, for which there are some fun generators online, eg. https://dmackinnon1.github.io/celtic/ or https://w-shadow.com/celtic-knots/. Just as addictive to doodle as the 'cool s' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S) but with more cool.However, everyone knows that its cooler to tile a plane with hexagons than squares. So I cooked up some tiles to make the Hex-grid...

Published on February 14, 2025 6:45 AM GMTMuch is said about society's general lack of AI situational awareness. One prevailing topic of conversation in my social orbit is our ongoing bafflement about how so many other people we know, otherwise smart and inquisitive, seem unaware of or unconcerned about AI progress, x-risk, etc. This hardly seems like a unique experience.We all can see that...

Published on February 14, 2025 6:14 AM GMTBelow is the core of my response to the Federal Register's "Request for Information on the Development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan."I'd encourage anyone to do do the same. Instructions can be found here. More of an excuse to write current thoughts on AI safety than an actual attempt to communicate them to the government. To...

Published on February 14, 2025 4:40 AM GMTI'm aware of the understanding that "a circuit is a subgraph of a neural network that implements a specific computation." In practice (to my understanding) the way you identify "circuits" is by identifying components of the neural network that have high correlation with certain tasks, and doing some ablations to see if it's "causally responsible" for performance...

Published on February 13, 2025 10:35 PM GMTWe know that the fundamental components of reality are relatively homogeneous wherever we look—they’re protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, neutrinos, quarks, and so on. What if we allowed those who don’t want to live in a world dominated by agentic AIs to build spaceships outfitted with BMI armchairs and digitize a copy of Earth—like a modern Noah’s Ark...