(Cross-posted from Twitter.) My take on Leopold Aschenbrenner's new report: I think Leopold gets it right on a bunch of important counts. Three that I especially care about: Full AGI and ASI soon. (I think his arguments for this have a lot of holes, but he gets the basic point that superintelligence looks 5 or 15 years off rather than 50+.) This te…

Have you heard this before? In clinical trials, medicines have to be compared to a placebo to separate the effect of the medicine from the psychological effect of taking the drug. The patient's belief in the power of the medicine has a strong effect on its own. In fact, for some drugs such as antidepressants, the psychological effect of taking a pi…

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.As an AI researcher who wants to do technical work that helps humanity, there is a strong drive to find a research area that is definitely helpful somehow, so that you don’t have to worry about how your work will be applied, and thus you don’t have to worry about …

Today we are talking about detaching form the myth of being happy and shifting to the feeling of experiencing joy in moments. Sustaining happiness all the time isn't possible. What we can do it experience joy in moments of regular. #happinessmyth #experiencejoy #momentbymoment #doyourbest #beautyinthemoment…

Preamble: Delta vs Crux This section is redundant if you already read My AI Model Delta Compared To Yudkowsky. I don’t natively think in terms of cruxes. But there's a similar concept which is more natural for me, which I’ll call a delta. Imagine that you and I each model the world (or some part of it) as implementing some program. Very oversimplif…

A conversation with Przemysław Marciniak (University of Silesia) about books of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and alternative history that are either set in Byzantium or have a Byzantine ambiance. We talk about the features that signal a Byzantine setting and what the latter is good. Basically, we chat about books that we liked (or did not like…

After a long wait, Apple is finally in the game with AI. They’re launching Apple Intelligence with MacOS Sequoia and iOS 18. Pete breaks down some top features and how our devices will change moving forward. Transcripts: ⁠https://www.theneuron.ai/podcast⁠ Subscribe to the best newsletter on AI: ⁠https://theneurondaily.com⁠ Listen to The Neuron: htt…

Preamble: Delta vs Crux I don’t natively think in terms of cruxes. But there's a similar concept which is more natural for me, which I’ll call a delta. Imagine that you and I each model the world (or some part of it) as implementing some program. Very oversimplified example: if I learn that e.g. it's cloudy today, that means the “weather” variable …

The US government is opening up antitrust inquiries into the likes of Nvidia, OpenAI and Microsoft. Who's leading the charge, and what could they be looking at? Transcripts: ⁠https://www.theneuron.ai/podcast⁠ Subscribe to the best newsletter on AI: ⁠https://theneurondaily.com ⁠Listen to The Neuron: https://lnk.to/theneuron Watch The Neuron on YouTu…

Today we are talking about the importance of meaningful relationships to our longevity and quality of our lives. Our human experience is motivated by connection. We connect with people all the time, creating meaningful connection helps us live well. #meaningfulreltaionships #friendships #buildingcommunity #lx2codependencycoachingpodcast #daringgrat…

Last month I posted about humming as a cheap and convenient way to flood your nose with nitric oxide (NO), a known antiviral. Alas, the economists were right, and the benefits were much smaller than I estimated. The post contained one obvious error and one complication. Both were caught by Thomas Kwa, for which he has my gratitude. When he initiall…

Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner has released a series of essays talking about how he sees AI playing out and what we should all do about it. Pete digs into his extremely impressive background and his arguments around why we’re about to get AGI. Transcripts: ⁠https://www.theneuron.ai/podcast⁠ Subscribe to the best newsletter on AI: ⁠h…

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.We are pleased to announce ILIAD — a 5-day conference bringing together 100+ researchers to build strong scientific foundations for AI alignment. ***Apply to attend by June 30!*** When: Aug 28 - Sep 3, 2024 Where: @Lighthaven (Berkeley, US) What: A mix of topic-sp…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has announced their next line of products called Rubin as Nvidia races to build what he calls “intelligence factories”. Pete breaks down the big picture and what it all means for us. Transcripts: ⁠https://www.theneuron.ai/podcast⁠ Subscribe to the best newsletter on AI: ⁠https://theneurondaily.com⁠ Listen to The Neuron: http…

Today we are talking about the blessings and lessons we experience when we create the perspective of receiving. When we can start to be receiving of good things happening to us rather than waiting for negative things to happen. #blessingshappen #growthmindset #opportunity #lessons #whathappenedtoyou #trauma #mentalhealth #lx2codependencycoachingpod…

Since at least 2017, OpenAI has asked departing employees to sign offboarding agreements which legally bind them to permanently—that is, for the rest of their lives—refrain from criticizing OpenAI, or from otherwise taking any actions which might damage its finances or reputation.[1] If they refused to sign, OpenAI threatened to take back (or make …

A roundtable discussion of how the study of ancient pathogen DNA intersects with the study of disease in late antiquity. Can laboratory scientists and cultural historians find ways to interface given their different methods, data, concepts, and conclusions? The discussion was organized by Tina Sessa (The Ohio State University) and Tim Newfield (Geo…

As we explained in our MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy update, MIRI has pivoted to prioritize policy, communications, and technical governance research over technical alignment research. This follow-up post goes into detail about our communications strategy. The Objective: Shut it Down[1] Our objective is to convince major powers to shut down the de…

Previously: OpenAI: Exodus (contains links at top to earlier episodes), Do Not Mess With Scarlett Johansson We have learned more since last week. It's worse than we knew. How much worse? In which ways? With what exceptions? That's what this post is about. The Story So Far For years, employees who left OpenAI consistently had their vested equity exp…

Contact: patreon.com/lwcurated or [perrin dot j dot walker plus lesswrong fnord gmail]. All Solenoid's narration work found here.By LessWrong

Crossposted from AI Lab Watch. Subscribe on Substack. Introduction. Anthropic has an unconventional governance mechanism: an independent "Long-Term Benefit Trust" elects some of its board. Anthropic sometimes emphasizes that the Trust is an experiment, but mostly points to it to argue that Anthropic will be able to promote safety and benefit-sharin…

Introduction. If you are choosing to read this post, you've probably seen the image below depicting all the notifications students received on their phones during one class period. You probably saw it as a retweet of this tweet, or in one of Zvi's posts. Did you find this data plausible, or did you roll to disbelieve? Did you know that the image da…

New blog: AI Lab Watch. Subscribe on Substack. Many AI safety folks think that METR is close to the labs, with ongoing relationships that grant it access to models before they are deployed. This is incorrect. METR (then called ARC Evals) did pre-deployment evaluation for GPT-4 and Claude 2 in the first half of 2023, but it seems to have had no spec…

Life happens and we can get stuck in the why. We don't always know why this tough part of life is happening. It might just be the how. Controlling what we can gives a moment to take back power in the moment it can get easier. #controlwhatyoucan #wecandohardthings #lifehappens #getthroughthemoment #codependencypodcast…

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Part 13 of 12 in the Engineer's Interpretability Sequence. TL;DR On May 5, 2024, I made a set of 10 predictions about what the next sparse autoencoder (SAE) paper from Anthropic would and wouldn’t do. Today's new SAE paper from Anthropic was full of brilliant expe…

Anthropic did something no other AI lab has done: cracked the code on what’s happening while an AI model is working. Pete breaks down the latest research and what it means for steering AI models. Transcripts: ⁠https://www.theneuron.ai/podcast⁠ Subscribe to the best newsletter on AI: ⁠https://theneurondaily.com⁠ Listen to The Neuron: https://lnk.to/…

This is a quickly-written opinion piece, of what I understand about OpenAI. I first posted it to Facebook, where it had some discussion. Some arguments that OpenAI is making, simultaneously: OpenAI will likely reach and own transformative AI (useful for attracting talent to work there). OpenAI cares a lot about safety (good for public PR and govern…

Produced as part of the MATS Winter 2023-4 program, under the mentorship of @Jessica Rumbelow One-sentence summary: On a dataset of human-written essays, we find that gpt-3.5-turbo can accurately infer demographic information about the authors from just the essay text, and suspect it's inferring much more. Introduction. Every time we sit down in fr…

This is a link post.to follow up my philantropic pledge from 2020, i've updated my philanthropy page with 2023 results. in 2023 my donations funded $44M worth of endpoint grants ($43.2M excluding software development and admin costs) — exceeding my commitment of $23.8M (20k times $1190.03 — the minimum price of ETH in 2023). --- First published: Ma…

Previously: OpenAI: Facts From a Weekend, OpenAI: The Battle of the Board, OpenAI: Leaks Confirm the Story, OpenAI: Altman Returns, OpenAI: The Board Expands. Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike have left OpenAI. This is almost exactly six months after Altman's temporary firing and The Battle of the Board, the day after the release of GPT-4o, and soon aft…

Microsoft’s launch event for Copilot+ PCs was only available to press and content creators. Pete’s taking you through the launch, what stands out and what to look for next. Transcripts: ⁠https://www.theneuron.ai/podcast⁠ Subscribe to the best newsletter on AI: ⁠https://theneurondaily.com⁠ Listen to The Neuron: https://lnk.to/theneuron Watch The Neu…