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Published on August 21, 2024 9:05 PM GMTThis was originally posted in the comments of You don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad.; I've broken it out into a post because I think it might be a useful corrective more generally for people inclined to cite LLM remarks as fact.I asked Claude, as an illustrative example, whether ready-made clothing...

Published on August 21, 2024 6:09 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.Listen to the AI Safety Newsletter for free on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.SB 1047, the Most-Discussed California AI LegislationCalifornia's Senate Bill 1047 has sparked discussion over AI regulation. While state bills often fly under...

Published on August 21, 2024 4:41 PM GMTBased on low-quality articles that seem to be coming up with more regularity, and as mentioned in a few recent posts, AI-generated posts are likely to be a permanent feature of LW (and most online forums, I expect).  I wonder if we should focus on harm reduction (or actual value creation, in some cases) rather than trying...

Published on August 21, 2024 9:53 AM GMTI've recently seen several articles here that were clearly generated or heavily assisted by AI. They are all dreadful. They are verbose, they are full of "on the one hand" and "on the other", they never make any assertion without also making room for the opposite, and end with "conclusions" that say nothing. Please do not do...

Published on August 21, 2024 9:47 AM GMTThe basic ideaAether will be a small group of talented early-career AI safety researchers with a shared research vision who work full-time with mentorship on their best effort at making AI go well. That research vision will broadly revolve around the alignment, control, and evaluation of LLM agents. There is a lot of latent talent in the...

Published on August 21, 2024 4:51 AM GMTthe giga press Tesla decided to use large aluminum castings ("gigacastings") for the frame of many of its vehicles, including the Model Y and Cybertruck. This approach and the "Giga Press" used for it have been praised by many articles and youtube videos, repeatedly called revolutionary and a key advantage. Most cars today are made by stamping...

Published on August 20, 2024 9:59 PM GMTFor instance, I am thinking about the munk debates which in 2023 tackled AI x-risk. I don't see how adding more people to a 1v1 debate makes it better in any way. One of the major frustrations with debates is that it is difficult to get the participants to respond to each other. The goal would be...

Published on August 20, 2024 7:44 PM GMTI've been on a gut health kick, reading Brain Maker, adding more kale for the insoluble fiber, and cutting seed oils and sugar.The author recommends probiotic enemas and fecal transplant, but I've seen mixed information on effectiveness of such treatments, and I also read a concerning article by a professor that seemed to indicate that bacteria from...

Published on August 20, 2024 4:35 PM GMTThere is currently an admin-only page that shows a list of all comments that have been reacted to (in chronological order). Periodically I think "it might just be nice to show this to everyone, and to let them filter by individual reacts, or individual users."The reason individual reacts might be nice is to filter for things like...

Published on August 20, 2024 4:22 PM GMTWe wanted to share a recap of our recent outputs with the AF community. Below, we fill in some details about what we have been working on, what motivated us to do it, and how we thought about its importance. We hope that this will help people build off things we have done and see how their...

Published on August 20, 2024 4:18 PM GMTRationalists are people who have an irrational preference for rationality.This may sound silly, but when you think about it, it couldn't be any other way. I am not saying that all reasons in favor of rationality are irrational -- in fact, there are many rational reasons to be rational! It's just that "rational reasons to be rational"...

Published on August 19, 2024 5:38 PM GMTHey folks, We're organizing an ACX meetup in Vilnius this September. We're meeting on Sunday the 22nd, at 3pm in Lukiškių Aikštė. We are few, yet we are mighty. RSVPs are optional. Join us here: https://discord.com/invite/jVtnuJep Discuss

Published on August 19, 2024 5:16 PM GMTIntroductionThere are now (claimed) foundation models for protein sequences, DNA sequences, RNA sequences, molecules, scRNA-seq, chromatin accessibility, pathology slides, medical images, electronic health records, and clinical free-text. It’s a dizzying rate of progress.But there’s a few problems in biology that, interestingly enough, have evaded a similar level of ML progress, despite there seemingly being all the necessary...

Published on August 19, 2024 5:17 PM GMTThere's a browser-based game about paperclip maximization: Universal Paperclips, where you control an AI tasked with running a paperclip factory.Initially, you buy raw material, adjust the price per clip, and invest in "AutoClippers" to increase production. The game dramatically increases in complexity as it progresses, allowing you to invest resources and computational cycles into exponentially increasing production...

Published on August 19, 2024 4:27 PM GMTThere are a lot of points in AI control and scheming that are kind-of-obvious to those who have worked in the field. A lot of those points are unwritten, however; hence this post. Many of the ideas here are from Buck Shlegeris and Ryan Greenblatt, thanks to them and Cody Rushing for feedback. Suppose an AI company has...

Published on August 19, 2024 3:30 PM GMT I maintain a Boston apartment price map, scraping Padmapper's listings to make a heatmap. Each month I run a script to update it, but last month it failed due to an API change. It had been impressively stable: I'd been running the same code unmodified for three years, with only minor modifications since a big rewrite...

Published on August 19, 2024 3:04 PM GMTA lot of the debate on long-term, structural technological unemployment can be summarized in three short statements:Concerns about the speed or scope of labor substitution have often been premature or exaggerated in the past.Labor substitution has been very positive for humanity so far. As many old tasks have been automated, human labor has moved into many new,...

Published on August 19, 2024 2:05 PM GMTOne big hole in my set of frames and models of the world is that I don't understand how government works. I don't understand how the government of my native country (France) works, I don't understand how the government of the country I live in (UK) works, I don't understand how the governments of countries that matter...

Published on August 19, 2024 1:57 PM GMT[Cross-posted from my substack, davekasten.substack.com.  {I never said that I was creative at naming things}]Hi,So here are some things I’ve been thinking about while traveling on policy consulting business over the past few months.Bureaucracy, by James Q. WilsonAs we’ve discussed previously, a decent description of the goal of bureaucracy is that it’s the organizational form that society...

Published on August 19, 2024 10:56 AM GMT"The AI bubble is reaching a tipping point", says Sequoia Capital.AI companies paid billions of dollars for top engineers, data centers, etc. Meanwhile, companies are running out of 'free' data to scrape online and facing lawsuits for the data they did scrape. Finally, the novelty of chatbots and image generators is wearing off for users, and fierce...

Published on August 19, 2024 9:23 AM GMTWarning: This post was written at the start of 2024 as part of the AISC project "Evaluating Alignment Evaluations". We are not especially satisfied with the quality reached, but since we are not planning to work on it anymore, we are releasing it as a Work-In-Progress document.Introduction In this post, we cover:What are propensity evaluations?How do they differ...

Published on August 18, 2024 4:05 PM GMTMeta: I recently entered the dating market, so naturally I have lots of random thoughts on the subject which you all get to suffer through for a while. Your usual diet of dry math and agency theory will resume shortly.Obviously the phrase “true love” has been so thoroughly overdone in so much fiction as to lose all...

Published on August 18, 2024 3:00 PM GMTIntroductionRecently we (Elizabeth Van Nostrand and Alex Altair) started a project investigating chaos theory as an example of field formation.[1] The number one question you get when you tell people you are studying the history of chaos theory is “does that matter in any way?”.[2] Books and articles will list applications, but the same few seem to come up...