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Published on December 23, 2024 8:51 AM GMTProject summaryAI Safety Camp has a seven-year track record of enabling participants to try their fit, find careers and start new orgs in AI Safety. We host up-and-coming researchers outside the Bay Area and London hubs.If this fundraiser passes…$15k, we won’t run a full program, but can facilitate 10 projects.$40k, we can organise the 11th edition, for...

Published on December 23, 2024 6:32 AM GMTThis is an article in the featured articles series from AISafety.info. AISafety.info writes AI safety intro content. We'd appreciate any feedback. The most up-to-date version of this article is on our website, along with 300+ other articles on AI existential safety.Compute governance is a type of AI governance that focuses on controlling access to the computing hardware needed...

Published on December 23, 2024 5:16 AM GMTEpistemic Status: Seven years and one day ago, I wrote this. In 2017 we faced years of Trump and couldn't imagine covid. Here in 2024 we face years of Trump and I'm trying to "imagine what we can't imagine". I dislike the title (except for the part where it might introduce people to music from a previous...

Published on December 23, 2024 3:58 AM GMTOf the posts I've delayed writing for years, I maybe regret this one the most.I think more people (x-risk focused people in particular) should consider becoming (and hiring) metacognitive assistants. This is the single largest performance boost I know of – hire someone to sit with you and help you think. It doesn't help me (much) when...

Published on December 21, 2024 5:17 PM GMTI used to think that all generic strategy advice was pointless. After all, the point of a strategy is to achieve a thing, and to achieve a thing you just think hard about how to best do it and then work hard to do it. I said this to my friend Dewi, who said that this is...

Published on December 21, 2024 8:28 AM GMTEpistemic status: We are moderately confident in the feasibility of serially filtered shelters for 14-log protection as well as cost estimates, but more uncertain about how mirror biology might develop in the real world.Originally published on the EA Forum. Minor edits for LW adaptation.Please sign up here for ~bi-monthly updates on shelter/refuges work.Summary and main take-awaysI want to be...

Published on December 21, 2024 2:55 AM GMT2024 is the year it became clear that we're actually going to do battery energy storage. That it was time to stop soberly reminding anyone too excited about solar that storage is an unsolved problem. In fact I personally became very excited about solar, and briefly thought that this year's wave of battery installations was just the...

Published on December 21, 2024 1:30 AM GMT I originally wrote this a year ago, but just now found it in my drafts. Not sure why I didn't post it then. One flavor of response I got with my post on deanonymizing accounts was roughly: Why not just go ahead and post the list of alts? It's not like people sneakily using multiple accounts...

Published on December 21, 2024 1:19 AM GMTHere is an intuitively compelling principle: hearing a bad argument for a view shouldn’t change your degree of belief in the view. After all, it is possible for bad arguments to be offered for anything, even the truth. For all you know, plenty of good arguments exist, and you just happened to hear a bad one.But this...

Published on December 21, 2024 12:15 AM GMT7000 MMLU questions visualized with bird's eye viewHow do you make sense of a 300-page book in 15 minutes? Or get insights from thousands of news articles without relying on recommendation algorithms? Our usual approach is to filter: we use search engines, summaries, or recommendations to select a manageable subset of content. But what if we could...

Published on December 20, 2024 10:50 PM GMTI can't find the videos where they said this, but I remember Buffet and Soros rationalizing their choice of profession by saying that they make market prices more informative. Is there a way to quantify that? What units would we use? Could we say that Buffet added $100 billion of "liquidity" to markets over the course of...

Published on December 20, 2024 11:58 PM GMT"What is the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?" F. SHERWOOD HOWLAND in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995. "Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t...

Published on December 19, 2024 6:17 PM GMTI always used to think that character was hard to build; that it required Herculean feats of self-restraint, sacrifice, and discipline to maintain and uphold. Others always seemed to be able to do the right thing far more consistently than I did, and it felt like it required tremendous effort for me to summon the courage and...

Published on December 19, 2024 6:15 PM GMTAs 2024 draws to a close, we want to thank you for your continued support for AI safety and review what we’ve been able to accomplish. In this special-edition newsletter, we highlight some of our most important projects from the year.The mission of the Center for AI Safety is to reduce societal-scale risks from AI. We focus...

Published on December 19, 2024 3:59 PM GMTTL;DR: Matryoshka SAEs are a new variant of sparse autoencoders that learn features at multiple levels of abstraction by splitting the dictionary into groups of latents of increasing size. Earlier groups are regularized to reconstruct well without access to later groups, forcing the SAE to learn both high-level concepts and low-level concepts, rather than absorbing them in...

Published on December 19, 2024 3:47 PM GMTThis is a follow-up to my previous post about hidden serial reasoning (but you don't need to have read it). There, I focused on serial reasoning happening internally in the model. Jozdien pointed out that a model could also use it's chain-of-thought for hidden serial reasoning, by using steganography. So I adapted my setup to test this...

Published on December 19, 2024 3:10 PM GMTA lot happened this week. We’re seeing release after release after upgrade. It’s easy to lose sight of which ones matter, and two matter quite a lot. The first is Gemini Flash 2.0, which I covered earlier this week. The other is that o1, having turned pro, is now also available in the API. This was obviously...

Published on December 19, 2024 8:14 AM GMTTLDR:ENAIS is teaming up with community builders from Paris to seed AIS France. You can read about the role below, and if you would be interested in founding such an organisation, fill out this expression of interest form. We are currently in discussions with funders about seeding city and national groups across the world, so we would like...

Published on December 19, 2024 4:45 AM GMTA short one, just to clarify a term (I invented) that gets thrown around here a bit. It fits into a broadly Utilitarian view, but addresses Hume's problem of "No 'ought' from 'is'". Keen to hear if what I've defined here already has a name that I'm unaware of (I don't presume to be the first to...

Published on December 19, 2024 12:13 AM GMTOne year ago I began writing my book - Mechanisms of Liberty: The Shortcomings of Modern Liberalism and How to Fix It  It deals with ideas I've been interested in for at least six years already. A year ago, someone challenged me about Liberalism. I wrote him a message with the perspective on Liberalism I developed over these years,...

Published on December 18, 2024 7:44 PM GMTI have a lot of ideas about AGI/ASI safety. I've written them down in a paper and I'm sharing the paper here, hoping it can be helpful. Title: A Comprehensive Solution for the Safety and Controllability of Artificial SuperintelligenceAbstract:As artificial intelligence technology rapidly advances, it is likely to implement Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) in...

Published on December 18, 2024 5:21 PM GMTIt is generally assumed we are the same person throughout our lives. Moreover, there is a study that asserts the continuity of self remains stable throughout our lifetimes. Nonetheless, a simple argument, which I'm going to present next, suggests otherwise.The argumentLet's consider a person called X, who exists in the present moment.  If we also consider only...