~www_lesswrong_com | Bookmarks (714)

Published on March 30, 2025 6:54 AM GMTNow and then, at work, we’ll have a CEO on from the megacorp that owns the company I work at. It’s a Zoom meeting with like 300 people, the guy is usually giving a speech that is harmless and nice (if a bit banal), and I’ll turn on my camera and ask a question about something that...

Published on March 30, 2025 1:24 AM GMTThere is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.— Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) INTRODUCTIONPrefaceThis document is shared publicly as an initial draft to invite constructive feedback, insights, and reflections.AbstractIntroducing Eliminative Nominalism (EN), a novel position in the philosophy of mind that extends and critiques Eliminative Materialism...

Published on March 29, 2025 7:08 PM GMTOr: Why thinking about blue tentacle arms is not always a waste of time.0. IntroductionAs I work through the Sequences, I find myself disagreeing—slightly—with a point Eliezer Yudkowsky makes in A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation:Imagine that you wake up one morning and your left arm has been replaced by a blue tentacle. The blue tentacle obeys...

Published on March 29, 2025 8:37 PM GMTA better anything can be achieved with simple tests at low costs.BackgroundPeople often settle for "good enough" and "if it ain't broke don't fix it" in their personal lives, opting not to make any effort to improve said things because either:Time, money, and/or effort can be spent elsewhere for a higher expected valueThey think it can't be...

Published on March 29, 2025 7:38 PM GMTFor the purposes of FOOM, I'm defining it as a situation in which once an AI is capable enough to automate away all AI R&D, progress starts exploding hyper-exponentially for a period because the returns to better software is larger than 1, meaning AI labor quality is improving faster than the problem of finding new algorithms gets...

Published on March 29, 2025 6:11 PM GMTSuppose you’re an AI researcher trying to make AIs which are conscious and reliably moral, so they’re trustworthy and safe for release into the real world, in whatever capacity you intend.You can’t, or don’t want to manually create them; it’s more economical, and the only way to ensure they’re conscious, if you procedurally generate them along with...

Published on March 28, 2025 6:40 PM GMTYouTube link How do we figure out whether interpretability is doing its job? One way is to see if it helps us prove things about models that we care about knowing. In this episode, I speak with Jason Gross about his agenda to benchmark interpretability in this way, and his exploration of the intersection of proofs and...

Published on March 28, 2025 5:21 PM GMTMay 9 & 10Lighthaven, Berkeley Hosted by The Longevity Biotech Fellowship, Vitalism, and Foresight InstituteJoin us for an intensive workshop exploring how artificial intelligence might advance the life sciences and accelerate the development of therapies to extend healthy human lifespan. Confirmed presentations include: Sam Rodriques, FutureHouse Seth Paulson, Biomarkers of Aging Consortium Joe Betts-Lacroix, Retro Erika De Benedictis, Pioneer...

Published on March 28, 2025 3:16 PM GMTI hope that the reasoning in my two posts shows that the AGI has a chance to end up relying on the entire human-built energy industry just to solve as many problems (and hopefully even less) as the millions of humans who work there. On the other hand, the entire set of physicists is within half of...

Published on March 28, 2025 2:20 PM GMTGemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is America’s next top large language model. That doesn’t mean it is the best model for everything. In particular, it’s still Gemini, so it still is a proud member of the Fun Police, in terms of censorship and also just not being friendly or engaging, or willing to take a stand. If you...

Published on March 28, 2025 2:12 PM GMTTl;dr: no.This is a rough research note – we’re sharing it for feedback and to spark discussion. We’re less confident in its methods and conclusions.Once AI fully automates AI R&D, there might be a period of fast and accelerating software progress – a software intelligence explosion (SIE).One objection to this is that it takes a long time...

Published on March 28, 2025 1:22 PM GMTIlya thought back again to when he’d overheard that conversation between two of his junior colleagues. They were discussing an “AI ending the world” story. This was early in the year, although it felt like years ago now given how fast things had been moving. The year, 2025, was now drawing to a close... and maybe it’ll...

Published on March 28, 2025 11:45 AM GMTPDF version. berkeleygenomics.org. X.com. Bluesky. William Thurston was a world-renowned mathematician. His ideas revolutionized many areas of geometry and topology[1]; the proof of his geometrization conjecture was eventually completed by Grigori Perelman, thus settling the Poincaré conjecture (making it the only solved Millennium Prize problem). After his death, his students wrote reminiscences, describing among other things his...

Published on March 28, 2025 11:24 AM GMTTLDRWe do not yet understand all the genetic imprints that play an important role in early embryonic development. Known imprinting disorders (Prader-Willi, Angelman, etc.) however, do seem to cover all the most detrimental imprints, since for all cases of uniparental disomy (having 1 pair of chromosomes from only one parent), we know of either the imprinting disorder...

Published on March 28, 2025 5:47 AM GMTThe other day I discussed how high monitoring costs can explain the emergence of “aristocratic” systems of governance:Aristocracy and Hostage CapitalArjun Panickssery · Jan 8There's a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the "old corruption" where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to nepotism until the system was replaced by a professional...

Published on March 28, 2025 4:50 AM GMTEven an AGI "aligned" to a purpose which doesn't imply humanity's survival but does require the AGI itself to achieve difficult feats like transforming the entire Solar System into something computing as many digits of pi as possible would obviously still need to produce the computing systems and gather the energy necessary for the systems' work. As...

Published on March 26, 2025 6:12 PM GMTEmpirical evidence suggests that, if AI automates AI research, feedback loops could overcome diminishing returns, significantly accelerating AI progress.SummaryAI companies are increasingly using AI systems to accelerate AI research and development. These systems assist with tasks like writing code, analyzing research papers, and generating training data. While current systems struggle with longer and less well-defined tasks, future...

Published on March 26, 2025 6:02 PM GMTAnd specifically, what does this imply for AI? There are two theories of equilibrium unemployment — search frictions, and efficiency wages — and they actually give diametrically opposite predictions for when search frictions in finding a new job fall. I conclude that frictions are the more likely explanation, but that LLMs may actually increase unemployment if our...

Published on March 26, 2025 3:47 PM GMTWe are accepting applications for up to 12 paid facilitators & a number of mentors for an upcoming course on AI & animals.Facilitators lead 12 participants in structured discussions (following a provided template) on assigned readings. Facilitating is different from teaching: rather than convey your own knowledge, the goal is to help participants articulate their thoughts via...

Published on March 26, 2025 5:33 PM GMTWe've recently published a paper on Emergent Misalignment, where we show that models finetuned to write insecure code become broadly misaligned. Most people agree this is a very surprising observation. Some asked us, "But how did you find it?" There's a short version of the story on X. Here I describe it in more detail. TL;DR: I think...

Published on March 26, 2025 5:29 PM GMTSummary: CLR is hiring for our Summer Research Fellowship. Join us for eight weeks to work on s-risk motivated empirical AI safety research. Apply here by Tuesday 15th April 23:59 PT.We, the Center on Long-Term Risk, are looking for Summer Research Fellows to explore strategies for reducing suffering in the long-term future (s-risks) and work on technical AI safety...

Published on March 26, 2025 5:16 PM GMTI’ve spent the past 7 years living in the DC area. I moved out there from the Pacific Northwest to go to grad school – I got my masters in Biodefense from George Mason University, and then I stuck around, trying to move into the political/governance sphere. That sort of happened. But I will now be sort...

Published on March 26, 2025 2:13 PM GMTWhat's this post about?I make some rants and recommendations about terminology.This is written for AI-not-kill-everyone-ists. If you are worried about AI killing everyone and want us to prevent AI from killing everyone, this post is for you. If you don't have that agenda and instead have other agenda's, that's fine. It's great. But this post may fail...

Published on March 26, 2025 10:17 AM GMTo1 has shown a strange behavior where it thinks in Mandarin, while processing English prompts, and translates the results back to English for the output. I realized that the same could be possible for humans to utilize, speeding up conscious thought. [1]What makes Mandarin useful for this is that it: Has compact tokensHas compact grammarHas abundant training material onlineCan...