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Published on February 24, 2025 3:51 PM GMTMy local gym is surrounded on all four sides by tent cities. At first I was nervous to walk there after work, but soon I got used to the tents and their residents.When I’m passing through on my way to the gym, I feel like I’m traveling from Rome to the Vatican—a city within a city.They have...

Published on February 24, 2025 2:20 PM GMTThis is a post in two parts. The first half is the post is about Grok’s capabilities, now that we’ve all had more time to play around with it. Grok is not as smart as one might hope and has other issues, but it is better than I expected and for now has its place in the...

Published on February 24, 2025 1:23 PM GMTeven if you're immortal, you have a countable infinity of time, but every choice you make leads to an uncountable infinity of possibility. you may have an infinity of breakfasts, but you still have to choose what to eat for each one. you can choose to dedicate your life to every possible variant of chocolate, but it...

Published on February 24, 2025 1:05 PM GMTPicture the following situation:You're in bed with a hot woman. Your clothes are off and so are hers. You (consentually) tie her wrists and ankles to the bed so you can have your way with here. She tells you to do whatever you want with her. And you think to yourself…This is exactly like what we do...

Published on February 24, 2025 5:53 AM GMTTrade surpluses are weird. I noticed this when I originally learned about them. Then I forgot this anomaly until…sigh…Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed it out.Eliezer is, as usual, correct. In this post, I will spend 800+ words explaining what he did in 44.A trade surplus is what happens when a country exports more than it imports. For example, China...

Published on February 22, 2025 4:59 PM GMTThis post is a summary of a paper recently posted here that describes, in my opinion, a very possible scenario that modern society will have to face in the near future.This post is not really intended for the average LW reader, as most of you probably read the original paper. I wrote this post for someone like...

Published on February 22, 2025 4:33 PM GMT[Cross-posted from my blog]WARNING: this post might press some pain-points of humans in general, and of rationalist community in particular. I do believe our triggers point to our blind-spots or dogmas – so maybe you can find here an opportunity for new depth. I was recently quite impacted by yet another very nicely written AI-apocalypse scenario. This isn’t...

Published on February 22, 2025 4:17 PM GMT [1]IntroTo everyone running an anniversary party, thank you. Someone had to overcome the bystander effect, and today it seems like that’s you. I’m glad you did, and I expect your guests will be too. This guide aims to give you some advice and inspiration as well as coordinate.The BasicsIf you’re up for running an anniversary party, pick...

Published on February 22, 2025 1:05 PM GMTIn my last post, I investigated potential severity and timeline of AI-caused disasters. This post goes into detail about something that could potentially precede such disasters: uncontrolled spread of AI.While AIs are often released as open source, you might at least hope that the AI developers think twice about releasing a genuinely dangerous AI system for everyone...

Published on February 22, 2025 9:39 AM GMTDate: Around the last week of May 2025Location: Science Park, University of Amsterdam (tentative)Organizers: Jan Pieter van der Schaar (University of Amsterdam), Nabil Iqbal (Durham University) and Karthik Viswanathan (University of Amsterdam)We are excited to announce a two-day workshop on "Interpretability in LLMs using Geometrical and Statistical Methods" during the last week of May (tentative), with around 20...

Published on February 22, 2025 11:54 AM GMTThere’s a type of perspective shift that can bring a lot of clarity to the behavior and limitations of algorithms and AIs. This perspective may be called seeing through the eyes of the algorithm (or AI, or LLM). While some may consider it obvious and intuitive, I occasionally encounter people – such as inexperienced programmers struggling with...

Published on February 22, 2025 11:54 AM GMTReligions can be divided into proselytizing religions (e.g. Mormons) who are supposed to recruit new members, and non-proselytizing religions (e.g. Orthodox Jews) who are the opposite. Zen Buddhism is a non-proselytizing religion, which makes me a bad Buddhist, because I've dragged three other people to my Zendo so far. All three had a great experience. One has...

Published on February 22, 2025 7:15 AM GMTBiological humans appear, across many domains, to have have an information throughput of at most about 50 bits per second. Naively multiplying this by the number of humans gives an upper bound of about 500 gigabits per second when considering the information throughput of humanity as a whole.Current frontier LLMs collectively produce around 10 million tokens per...

Published on February 22, 2025 4:43 AM GMTEpistemic status: I'm attempting to relate my observations, as well as some of those shared with me by my coworkers at the small CRO[1] where I work. I will try to make the distinction clear between object-level observations and speculative interpretations of the former.The (very simplified) process of developing a new drug or medical device follows these approximate...

Published on February 19, 2025 10:13 PM GMTThe legendary Scott Alexander recently posted an article promoting Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis as a salvo in favor of atheism in the ongoing theism/atheism debate. While I am skeptical of theism myself, I have a couple problems with the mathematical universe hypothesis that lead me to find it unconvincing, which I hope to lay out in...

Published on February 20, 2025 2:50 PM GMTThe Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire. But if you fire all the new employees and recently promoted employees (which is that ‘probationary’ means here) you end up firing...

Published on February 20, 2025 12:48 AM GMTNote: this is a static copy of this wiki page. We are also publishing it as a post to ensure visibility.Circa 2015-2017, a lot of high quality content was written on Arbital by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, Paul Christiano, and others. Perhaps because the platform didn't take off, most of this content has not been as widely...

Published on February 20, 2025 12:47 AM GMTArbital was envisioned as a successor to Wikipedia. The project was discontinued in 2017, but not before many new features had been built and a substantial amount of writing about AI alignment and mathematics had been published on the website.If you've tried using Arbital.com the last few years, you might have noticed that it was on its...

Published on February 19, 2025 11:50 PM GMTHow We Frame Negotiations MattersThis is a follow up to a primer for the Prisoner's Dilemma that questions its application in real world scenarios and raises some potentially negative implications. I invite feedback and criticisms.We’ve considered how the Prisoner’s Dilemma reveals a number of key concepts in Game Theory. Yet, I have some reservations that it is...

Published on February 19, 2025 10:42 PM GMTIn Q4 we ran the second tournament in the AI Benchmarking Series which aims to assess how the best bots compare to the best humans on real-world forecasting questions, like those found on Metaculus. Over the quarter we had 44 bots compete for $30,000 on 402 questions with a team of ten Pros serving as a human...

Published on February 19, 2025 9:54 PM GMTThis is a brief literature review of Text AutoEncoders, as I used them in a recent project and did not find a good resource covering them.TL;DR: There exist models that take some text -> encode it into a single vector -> decode back into approximately the same text. Meta's SONAR models seem to be the best at...