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Published on December 26, 2024 5:52 PM GMTFor the past few months I've been working on an AI generated alternate solstice remix album. It's now released on Youtube and Spotify, and should be on Apple Music soon.ReSolsticed vol I: "We're Not Going Quietly"My favorite genre of song is "cover that reimagines the original." Everyone else's favorite genre of solstice song is "exactly the way...

Published on December 26, 2024 10:56 AM GMTA few months ago, I made this comment. It deserves more elaboration, so I decided to write an entire webpage about it. The bulk of the webpage talks about O'Neill Cylinders and includes questions and answers from Claude relating to them. The page also includes thoughts and commentary relating to space travel and the book, Futurist Fantasies....

Published on December 26, 2024 4:49 PM GMTThis post offers an accessible model of psychology of character-trained LLMs like Claude. Epistemic StatusThis is primarily a phenomenological model based on extensive interactions with LLMs, particularly Claude. It's intentionally anthropomorphic in cases where I believe human psychological concepts lead to useful intuitions.Think of it as closer to psychology than neuroscience - the goal isn't a map which...

Published on December 26, 2024 3:26 PM GMTIntuitively, the AutoGPT concept sounds like it should be useful if a company invests in it. Yet, all the big publically available systems are seem to be chat interfaces where the human writes a messages and then the computer writes another message.Even if AutoGPT-driven by an LLM alone wouldn't achieve all ends, a combination where a human...

Published on December 26, 2024 6:04 AM GMTWhy voice notes?On a functional level it's the fastest & the most convenient input method when you're not in front of the proper keyboard. Which even for me constitutes a big chunk of my life 🙃.Taking a voice note allows me to quickly close an open loop of a stray though or a new idea and go...

Published on December 26, 2024 4:09 AM GMTIn this post, I propose an idea that could improve whistleblowing efficiency, thus hopefully improving AI Safety by making unsafe practices discovered marginally faster.I'm looking for feedback, ideas for improvement, and people interested in making it happen.It has been proposed before, that it's beneficial to have an efficient and trustworthy whistleblowing mechanism The technology that makes it...

Published on December 25, 2024 9:02 PM GMTIf it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place...

Published on December 25, 2024 10:44 AM GMTWhen I was in college, I rented a group house with 5 other nerds. There were 5 bedrooms to divide among the 6 of us, so I negotiated an agreement where I paid less rent in exchange for sleeping in the hallway. This wasn't as bad as it sounds. My bedroom wasn't hallway-sized. It was bedroom-sized and...

Published on December 25, 2024 5:49 AM GMTI've heard repeatedly from many people that the highest-value part of conferences is not the talks or structured events, but rather the casual spontaneous conversations. Yet my own experience does not match this at all; the casual spontaneous conversations are consistently low-value.My current best model is that the casual spontaneous conversations mostly don't have much instrumental value,...

Published on December 24, 2024 9:57 AM GMTBy Sophie Bridgers, Rishub Jain, Rory Greig, and Rohin ShahBased on work by the Google DeepMind Rater Assist Team: Vladimir Mikulik, Sophie Bridgers, Tian Huey Teh, Rishub Jain, Rory Greig, Lili Janzer (randomized order, equal contributions) Human oversight is critical for ensuring that Artificial Intelligence (AI) models remain safe and aligned to human values. But AI systems are...

Published on December 24, 2024 10:45 PM GMTThis is a link to the latest Bayesian Conspiracy episode. Oliver tells us how Less Wrong instantiated itself into physical reality via LightHaven, along with a bit of deep lore of foundational Rationalist/EA orgs. He also gives a surprisingly nuanced (IMO) view on Leverage! Do you like transcripts? We got one of those at the link as well....

Published on December 24, 2024 6:50 PM GMTEpistemic Status: This was composed in late 2017, sat editing limbo, was still worth publishing in 2021 and got some edits, and by 2023 was overdue for being published. Now, in 2024, it is almost just embarrassing that I haven't published it yet.The 2006 book "Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial" by Devinderjit Sivia & John Skilling exposed...

Published on December 24, 2024 1:37 PM GMTI find that most communities I am part of, where AI discussions occur, fall into two categories: The community is too broad, and the discussion is fragmented. ACX would fall into this category. The AI discussion focuses on AGI/ASI and related topics (alignment, safety, how it will affect humanity, etc.). Lesswrong would fall into this category. I...

Published on December 24, 2024 1:00 PM GMTThis post goes over the important and excellent new paper from Anthropic and Redwood Research, with Ryan Greenblatt as lead author, Alignment Faking in Large Language Models. This is by far the best demonstration so far of the principle that AIs Will Increasingly Attempt Shenanigans. This was their announcement thread. New Anthropic research: Alignment faking in large...

Published on December 24, 2024 10:25 AM GMTTLDR: We're hosting a 3-month, fully-funded fellowship to do AI safety research drawing on inspiration from fields like evolutionary biology, neuroscience, dynamical systems theory, and more. Past fellows have been mentored by John Wentworth, Davidad, Abram Demski, Jan Kulveit and others, and gone on to work at places like Anthropic, AISI UK, Apart research, or as full-time PIBBSS...

Published on December 23, 2024 5:37 PM GMTThis essay was part of my application to UKAISI. Unclear how much is novel, but I like the decomposition.Some AI-enabled catastrophic risks involve an actor purposefully bringing about the negative outcome, as opposed to multi-agent tragedies where no single actor necessarily desired it. Such purposeful catastrophes can be broken down into a conjunction: they materialize if and only...

Published on December 23, 2024 3:44 PM GMTAs a holiday gift to myself, I put together a printable book of some creative writing by Scott Alexander & Eliezer. I'm sharing it here in case anyone else is interested :).It contains most of Scott's published fiction since he switched to Substack, plus some select creative non-fiction pieces (including a few from the old SSC days)....

Published on December 23, 2024 2:20 PM GMTI took a trip to San Francisco early in December. Ever since then, things in the world of AI have been utterly insane. Google and OpenAI released endless new products, including Google Flash 2.0 and o1. Redwood Research and Anthropic put out the most important alignment paper of the year, on the heels of Apollo’s report on...

Published on December 23, 2024 1:17 PM GMTtl;dr: The glitch tokens ' petertodd' and ' Leilan' were studied extensively in the context of GPT-3 before its decommissioning at the end of 2023 [1] [2]. Here, the conception of these two tokens and their relationship is studied for GPT-2, GPT-2-xl and GPT-J (which share the same token vocabulary as GPT-3). An appendix explores possible connections...

Published on December 23, 2024 9:38 AM GMTI'm seeing a lot of people on LW saying that they have very short timelines (say, five years or less) until AGI. However, the arguments that I've seen often seem to be just one of the following:"I'm not going to explain but I've thought about this a lot""People at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic etc. seem to believe...

Published on December 23, 2024 9:32 AM GMTThe AI should talk like a team of many AI. Each AI only uses the word "I" when referring to itself, and calls other AI in the team by their name. I argue that this may massively reduce Self-Allegiance by making it far more coherent for one AI to whistleblow or fight another AI which is unethical...