~www_lesswrong_com | Bookmarks (683)

Published on November 29, 2024 7:01 PM GMTSummary: The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics can help us feel better about choosing between mutually exclusive options.Previously I’ve suggested that when we think about the ethical implications of the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, the kinds of implications we should expect are ones about how to feel in certain ethical situations, and what kinds of character...

Published on November 30, 2024 2:55 AM GMTTLDR: LessWrong + Lighthaven need about $3M for the next 12 months. Donate here, or send me an email, DM signal message (+1 510 944 3235), or leave a comment, if you want to support what we do. We have big plans for the next year, and due to a shifting funding landscape we need support from...

Published on November 29, 2024 7:42 PM GMTRecent research into large language models (LLMs) has revealed fascinating patterns in how these systems develop capabilities. While initial discussions of "emergent abilities" suggested sudden, discontinuous jumps in performance, closer analysis reveals a more nuanced picture that warrants careful examination.The Data Behind EmergenceThe concept of emergence in LLMs was first systematically studied through the BIG-bench benchmark. Initial...

Published on November 29, 2024 11:34 PM GMT[ Note 1: This post is a follow-up to "Thoughts on Evo-Bio Math and Mesa-Optimization: Maybe We Need To Think Harder About 'Relative' Fitness?" ] [ Note 2: Warning: the writing style of this post is kind of jank. It blends formal and informal register, uses punctuation loosely and italics liberally, and contains long sections of extended...

Published on November 29, 2024 11:05 PM GMTWe're excited to release INTELLECT-1, the first 10B parameter language model collaboratively trained across the globe. This represents a 10× scale-up from our previous research and demonstrates that large-scale model training is no longer confined to large corporations but can be achieved through distributed, community-driven approaches. The next step is scaling this even further to frontier model...

Published on November 29, 2024 10:46 PM GMTI'd like to be long $NVDA and $PLTR... without supporting the people or organizations that get supported by their stock price going up.Yes, I'm OK with small impact, I'm an ethical vegan.Now what?Must be real-moneyMust be legal for US citizens to useCannot, by me helping its demand, directly support NVDA or PLTRPreferably wouldn't cause any stock-shares-demand at...

Published on November 29, 2024 8:33 PM GMTTLDR: In this post, I argue that if you are a junior AI safety researcher, you should consider applying to PhD programs in ML soon, especially if you have recently participated in an AI safety upskilling or research program like MATS or ARENA and might be interested in working on AI safety long term, but don't have immediate career plans. It is relatively...

Published on November 29, 2024 4:21 PM GMTjust some transhumanist art, I guess. I made this in Quill, which is a VR drawing software. what do you think?Discuss

Published on November 28, 2024 9:10 AM GMTEpistemic status: the idea it’s not fully fleshed out (there are a bunch of problems that I’m skipping over, the post is meant more as: “has anyone been seriously thinking about this?” and throwing out a starting point, than: “here is a proposal that would actually work”) and I wouldn’t be surprised if either it’s unfeasible or...

Published on November 28, 2024 2:40 PM GMTPeople don’t give thanks enough, and it’s actual Thanksgiving, so here goes. Thank you for continuing to take this journey with me every week. It’s a lot of words. Even if you pick and choose, and you probably should, it’s a lot of words. You don’t have many slots to spend on things like this. I appreciate...

Published on November 28, 2024 9:42 AM GMTThis is the second in a sequence of posts scrutinizing computational functionalism (CF). In my last post, I defined a concrete claim that computational functionalists tend to make:Practical CF: A simulation of a human brain on a classical computer, capturing the dynamics of the brain on some coarse-grained level of abstraction, that can run on a computer...

Published on November 28, 2024 9:16 AM GMTAuthor: Yijiong Yu.Abstract:It has been well-known that Chain-of-Thought can remarkably enhance LLMs’ performance on complex tasks. However, because it also introduces slower inference speeds and higher computational costs, many researches have attempted to use implicit CoT, which does not need LLMs to explicitly generate the intermediate steps. But there is still gap between their efficacy and typical...

Published on November 28, 2024 3:50 AM GMT I decided years ago that instead of hosting a comment section I'd pull in comments from elsewhere: first Facebook (no longer working because of anti-scraping), then Google Plus (which means I didn't lose my g+ discussions when they turned it down), then LessWrong, Reddit, HN, the EA Forum, and Mastodon. Prompted by Daniel, I've now added...

Published on November 27, 2024 9:17 PM GMTIntroduction As artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize scientific research, the world is facing an unprecedented challenge in biosecurity. While AI's ability to democratize expert knowledge represents a remarkable achievement, it also lowers the barriers for malicious actors to create bioweapons. This threat operates across multiple scales - from individual actors with basic lab skills to organized terrorist groups...

Published on November 27, 2024 9:31 PM GMTNote: The linked site is a personal project, and all views expressed here are my own.TL;DRI created an interactive flowchart about various scenarios how the future of AI might play out.By setting various conditional probabilities you can see charts of what the resulting estimated probabilities for good, ambiguous, and existentially bad outcomes are.Use the site as a...

Published on November 27, 2024 10:06 PM GMTA new o1-like model based on Qwen-2.5-32B reportedly beats Claude 3.5 Sonnet[1] on a bunch of difficult reasoning benchmarks. A new regime dawns.The blog post reveals nothing but the most inane slop ever sampled:What does it mean to think, to question, to understand? These are the deep waters that QwQ (Qwen with Questions) wades into. Like an eternal...

Published on November 27, 2024 8:51 PM GMTIf you're interested in helping to run the ARENA program, note that we're currently hiring for an Operations Lead! For more details, and to apply, see here.SummaryThe purpose of this report is to evaluate ARENA 4.0’s impact according to our four success criteria:Source high-quality participantsUpskill these talented participants in ML skills for AI safety workIntegrate participants with...

Published on November 27, 2024 8:25 PM GMTWhat are AI DetectorsYou've probably already used them before, websites like GPTZero, ZeroGPT, Grammarly, Quilbot, all have their own AI Detectors. AI Detectors can be a combination of Pre-trained LLMS, Statistical Models, and Ml models using NLP(Natural Language Processing). The model will analyze linguistic patterns, sentence structures, and statistical measures like perplexity, the predictability of text, and burstiness,...

Published on November 27, 2024 6:29 PM GMT"If I grew up in a world of AI agents, what would my life look like?"Inspired by Counting AGIs which conservatively estimates anywhere from 100,000 - 1.5 billion agents being run in parallel by 2040. Assumes a definition that "AGI" is a rough drop-in replacement for a remote worker, and a "coldsnap" in which AGI systems plateau at roughly...

Published on November 27, 2024 5:55 PM GMTNote: This is meant to be an accessible introduction to causal inference. Comments appreciated.Let’s say you buy a basil plant and put it on the counter in your kitchen. Unfortunately, it dies in a week.So the next week you buy another basil plant and feed it a special powder, Vitality Plus. This second plant lives. Does that...

Published on November 27, 2024 3:00 PM GMTBalsa Policy Institute chose as its first mission to lay groundwork for the potential repeal, or partial repeal, of section 27 of the Jones Act of 1920. I believe that this is an important cause both for its practical and symbolic impacts. The Jones Act is the ultimate embodiment of our failures as a nation. After 100...

Published on November 27, 2024 12:10 PM GMTThe notion of boxing –particularly failed boxing– is much more ubiquitous than people seem to give it credit for. It appears to me to be a common shape in systems which attempt to implement some sort of shape-agnostic competence-search at all. Intentionally or not. It is a relation between two games, where one of them only exists...

Published on November 27, 2024 10:42 AM GMTWhen fate is uncertain, be hopeful. Life is an insane gift and death is merely its absence. Look at the little bear cubs play-wrestling in the meadow, ever so carefree. You ask them, "do you not know 5/6 bear cubs will die before adulthood? Why are you taking life so lightheartedly?""Do you not know your futures are...

Published on November 27, 2024 10:40 AM GMTOur large learning machines find patterns in the world and use them to predict. When these machines exceed us and become superhuman, one of those patterns will be relative human incompetence. How comfortable are we with the incorporation of this pattern into their predictions, when those predictions become the actions that shape the world?My thanks to Matthew...