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Published on January 22, 2025 6:36 PM GMT(and as a completely speculative hypothesis for the minimum requirements for sentience in both organic and synthetic systems)Factual and Highly PlausibleModel latent space self-organizes during training. We know this. You could even say it's what makes models work at all.Models learn any patterns there are to be learned. They do not discriminate between intentionally engineered patterns or...

Published on January 22, 2025 5:36 PM GMTThis post is about ‘ut’, a gender-neutral pronoun I am proposing and plan to use experimentally in the future on my blog and here on lesswrong.(The u of ‘ut’ sounds like the u of uber, not the u of utter.)The pronoun is used to refer to a single individual (singular) whose gender is unspecified. It follows the...

Published on January 22, 2025 4:54 PM GMTCross-posted from Telescopic TurnipAs we all know, humans are terrible at building butterflies. We can make a lot of objectively cool things like nuclear reactors and microchips, but we still can't create a proper artificial insect that flies, feeds, and lays eggs that turn into more butterflies. That seems like evidence that butterflies are incredibly complex machines...

Published on January 22, 2025 3:41 PM GMTNote: This report was conducted in June 2024 and is based on research originally commissioned by the Future of Life Foundation (FLF). The views and opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not represent the positions of FLF.This report investigates Training Data Attribution (TDA) and its potential importance to and tractability for...

Published on January 22, 2025 3:40 PM GMTNote: This report was conducted in June 2024 and is based on research originally commissioned by the Future of Life Foundation (FLF). The views and opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not represent the positions of FLF.This report investigates Training Data Attribution (TDA) and its potential importance to and tractability for...

Published on January 22, 2025 11:48 AM GMTtl;dr: If a copy is not identical to the original, MWI predicts that I will always observe myself surviving failed Mars teleportations rather than becoming the copy on Mars. BackgroundThe classic teleportation thought-experiment asks whether a perfect copy is "you". This normally presents as a pure decision problem – do you step into the teleporter? But I suggest...

Published on January 22, 2025 10:45 AM GMTThis is a linkpost for an article I've written for my blog. Readers of LessWrong may want to skip the intro about Bayesian Reasoning, but might find the application to the Peter Miller vs Rootclaim debate quite interesting.I’ve been a fan of Bayesian Reasoning since the time I’ve read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. In...

Published on January 22, 2025 9:46 AM GMTOn blanket criticism and refutationIn his long post on the subject, Charbel-Raphaël argues against theories of impacts of interpretability. I think it's a largely a good, well-argued post, and if the only thing you get out of it is reading that post, I'll be contributing to improving the discourse. There is other material with similar claims that...

Published on January 22, 2025 7:06 AM GMTSolution concepts in game theory—like the Nash equilibrium and its refinements—are used in two key ways. Normatively, they proscribe how rational agents ought to behave. Descriptively, they propose how agents actually behave when interactions settle into equilibrium. The Nash equilibrium[1] underpins much of modern game theory and its applications in economics, political science, and evolutionary biology. Here, we focus on the descriptive use...

Published on January 22, 2025 4:06 AM GMTIf there was a truly confirmed sentient AI, nothing it said could ever convince me, because AI cannot be sentient. Nothing to See HereI suspect at least some will be nodding in agreement with the above sentiment, before realizing the intentional circular absurdity. There is entrenched resistance to even trying to examine the self-report of sentience as a...

Published on January 21, 2025 6:09 PM GMTLike this piece? It's cross-posted from by blog: https://collisteru.net/writing/This is a work of fiction and parody. I have done my best to get the scientific details right as far as they are known today, but my real goal is social commentary, not scientific accuracy. NOAA DISCOVERS INSCRIBED METEOR ARTIFACT UNDERNEATH ATLANTICDec 8, 2018Scientists from NOAA claim to have...

Published on January 21, 2025 5:34 PM GMTGetting personalised advice from a real human can help newcomers to AI safety figure out how to contribute most effectively. For example, I (Bryce) ended up in my current role largely thanks to a call with 80,000 Hours.There are a number of organisations and individuals offering advisory calls, but many people who want to work on AI...

Published on January 21, 2025 5:27 PM GMTCrossposted on The Field Building Blog and the EA forum.Discuss

Published on January 21, 2025 4:10 PM GMTMuch of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, or Farcaster.ContentsMy writing (ICYMI)Jobs and fellowshipsAnnouncementsNewsEventsOther opportunitiesWe are not close to providing for everyone’s “needs”The printing press and the InternetThe ultimate form of travelFive hot takes about progressWhat could have been, for SFQuick thoughts on AILinks and bulletsChartsPicsMy...

Published on January 21, 2025 4:03 PM GMTThe AI Control Agenda, in its own words:… we argue that AI labs should ensure that powerful AIs are controlled. That is, labs should make sure that the safety measures they apply to their powerful models prevent unacceptably bad outcomes, even if the AIs are misaligned and intentionally try to subvert those safety measures. We think no fundamental research...

Published on January 21, 2025 3:31 PM GMTPosition Piece: Most of the developing world lacks the institutional capacity to adapt to powerful, unsecure AI systems by 2030. Incautious model release could disproportionately affect these regions. Enhanced societal resilience in frontier AI states consequently provides no 'black cheque' for incautious release. ‘We should develop more societal resilience to AI-related harms’ is now a common refrain in AI...

Published on January 21, 2025 12:20 PM GMTAs always, some people need practical advice, and we can’t agree on how any of this works and we are all different and our motivations are different, so figuring out the best things to do is difficult. Here are various hopefully useful notes. Table of Contents Effectiveness of GLP-1 Drugs. What Passes for Skepticism on GLP-1s. The...

Published on January 21, 2025 12:03 PM GMTWe still need more funding to be able to run another edition. Our fundraiser raised $6k as of now, and will end if it doesn't reach the $15k minimum, on February 1st. We need proactive donors.If we don't get funded for this time, there is a good chance we will move on to different work in AI...

Published on January 21, 2025 10:47 AM GMTMy view on the concept of responsibility has shifted a lot over the years. I’ve had three insights that brought me from my initial, very superficial and implicit understanding of responsibility, to the one I have today, which I consider more accurate, more practical, and more healthy.  Responsibility is Made UpThe first insight came while I was part...

Published on January 19, 2025 6:29 PM GMTA story I wrote about living through the transition to utopia.This is the one story that I've put the most time and effort into; it charts a course from the near future all the way to the distant stars.Discuss

Published on January 19, 2025 10:32 AM GMTWe choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. (Kennedy’s famous “We chose to go to the moon” speech) The ‘real’ mathematics of ‘real’ mathematicians, …, is almost wholly ‘useless’ (Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology”) If the "irrational" agent is outcompeting you on a...

Published on January 19, 2025 8:04 AM GMTTl;dr, Neural networks are deterministic and sometimes even reversible, which causes Shannon information measures to degenerate. But information theory seems useful. How can we square this (if it's possible at all)? The attempts so far in the literature are unsatisfying.Here is a conceptual question: what is the Right Way to think about information theoretic quantities in neural...

Published on January 19, 2025 6:50 AM GMTCapitalism is powered by greed. People want to make money, so they look hard for things they can produce and that others want. Unknowingly, however, they are powering the great information-processing machine that is the market. The output of the machine is the efficient allocation of resources and, eventually, wealth.Something we intuitively consider bad (greed) is made...