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Published on May 15, 2024 6:33 PM GMTGPT-4o both has a new tokenizer and was trained directly on audio (whereas my understanding is that GPT-4 was trained only on text and images). Is there precedent for upgrading a model to a new tokenizer? It seems like it's probably better to think of it as an entirely new model. If that's the case, what actually...

Published on May 15, 2024 6:03 PM GMTI suspect some number of LWers have taken or are are considering using Lumina's probiotic. If you're in either of those camps, Klee's post might be worth reading. He paints a picture of an unprofessional company skirting regulations and risking customers health to sell a dubious health product. I can't speak to the veracity of those claims,...

Published on May 15, 2024 5:30 PM GMTThis is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?SummaryRising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.Public OpinionOne hypothesis is that partisanship was useful, or even necessary, for...

Published on May 15, 2024 12:52 PM GMTThis question is not very well-posed, but I've done my best to make it as well-posed as I can.Suppose that humans with sufficiently functional brains are able have subjective experiences that transcend the "easy problems of consciousness".I'm interested in understanding if this can be reasonably accepted without also concluding a theory of some sort of "panpsychism". For...

Published on May 15, 2024 11:57 AM GMTCrossposted from my blog: https://invertedpassion.com/how-to-be-a-messy-thinker/I love thinking about thinking. Give me a research paper on rationality, cognitive biases or mental models, and I’ll gobble it up. Given the amount of knowledge I’ve ingested on these topics, I had always assumed that I’m a clear thinker.Recently, though, it hit me like a lightning strike that this belief is...

Published on May 15, 2024 2:50 AM GMT A few years ago I ported my whistle synth system from my laptop to a Raspberry Pi. This was a big improvement, but I still wasn't that happy: To get good quality audio in and out I was using a 2i2 audio interface, which is expensive, bulky, and has a lot of buttons and knobs that...

Published on May 15, 2024 12:58 AM GMTTLDR: In the last two posts, we showed that optimizing for a proxy can fail to increase true utility, but only when the error is heavy-tailed. We now show that this also happens in RLHF with a KL penalty.This post builds on our earlier result with a more realistic setting and assumptions:Rather than modeling optimization as conditioning...

Published on May 15, 2024 12:45 AM GMTIlya Sutskever and Jan Leike have resigned. They led OpenAI's alignment work. Superalignment will now be led by John Schulman, it seems. Jakub Pachocki replaced Sutskever as Chief Scientist.Reasons are unclear (as usual when safety people leave OpenAI).The NYT piece and others I've seen don't really have details. Archive of NYT if you want to read it...

Published on May 15, 2024 12:20 AM GMTI've been told that my number of blog posts is impressive, but my personal notes are much larger than my blog, over a million words and with higher information density. Since I've had a bit of practice taking notes, I thought I'd describe the system I developed. It's more complex than some integrated solutions, but it's powerful,...

Published on May 15, 2024 12:13 AM GMTMIRI updates:MIRI is shutting down the Visible Thoughts Project.We originally announced the project in November of 2021. At the time we were hoping we could build a new type of data set for training models to exhibit more of their inner workings. MIRI leadership is pessimistic about humanity’s ability to solve the alignment problem in time, but this...

Published on May 13, 2024 6:33 PM GMTOpenAI just announced an improved LLM called GPT-4o.From their websiteToday, GPT-4o is much better than any existing model at understanding and discussing the images you share. For example, you can now take a picture of a menu in a different language and talk to GPT-4o to translate it, learn about the food's history and significance, and get...

Published on May 13, 2024 5:20 PM GMT This Saturday was Porchfest in Somerville, an annual festival where musicians around the city play on their porches and people wander around listening. As in the past few years Cecilia and I ( Kingfisher) played for contra dancing: Harris Lapiroff called: If anyone has pictures of videos from the set, I'd love to see them as...

Published on May 13, 2024 5:17 PM GMTThis article is the first in a series I plan to publish on different aspects of AI Safety group strategy. The aim is that, eventually, these articles will form the basis for a new resource center for AI Safety Groups. Note that these articles aren’t being published in any particular order.TL;DR: AI safety groups should carefully consider their branding strategy to...

Published on May 13, 2024 2:55 PM GMTA stance against student debt cancellation doesn’t rely on the assumptions of any single ideology. Strong cases against student debt cancellation can be made based on the fundamental values of any section of the political compass. In no particular order, here are some arguments against student debt cancellation from the perspectives of many disparate ideologies.Equity and FairnessStudent...

Published on May 13, 2024 12:30 PM GMTAs I note in the third section, I will be attending LessOnline at month’s end at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If that is your kind of event, then consider going, and buy your ticket today before prices go up. This month’s edition was an opportunity to finish off some things that got left out of previous editions or...

Published on May 13, 2024 9:18 AM GMTWhat are the best ways to figure out if someone who contacted you / a piece of text / an image is AI generated?Discuss

Published on May 13, 2024 8:52 AM GMTAuthor’s Note: Though I’m currently a governance researcher at Convergence Analysis, this post is unaffiliated with Convergence. The opinions expressed are solely my own.You’ve seen it a dozen times at this point. You’re probably broadly aligned philosophically, but haven’t thought terribly deeply about the details. You generally support Andrew Yang’s $12k / year “Freedom Dividend” as “moving...

Published on May 13, 2024 7:53 AM GMTOn AI and Jobs: How to Make AI Work With Us, Not Against Us With Daron AcemogluHere is Claude.ai's summary of Daron Acemoglu's main ideas from the podcast:Historically, major productivity improvements from new technologies haven't always translated into benefits for workers. It depends on how the technologies are used and who controls them.There are concerns that AI...

Published on May 13, 2024 6:06 AM GMTI'm looking for personal rules one might live by which adhere to a specific criteria outlined below, following an example. I have a personal rule I've been following which is "No looking at screens in the bed where I sleep" I find this to be an extremely helpful and successful rule despite being someone who struggles to...

Published on May 12, 2024 9:58 PM GMTmostly written by Evan MiyazonoMinimum viable introductionWe ran a workshop on Mathematical Boundaries from April 10-14. This was the successor of the Conceptual Boundaries Workshop (retrospective, last update) Feb 10-12The overlap in participants and approach was fairly low (notably lower than intended, due to availability restricting participation, which in turn led to a natural difference in approach)Intent:The first...

Published on May 11, 2024 6:30 PM GMTI'm doing some initial investigation for a Notes on Virtues sequence write-up about poise & gracefulness (possibly touching also on related things like confidence, composure, cool, gravitas, command, bearing, etc.) seen as a virtue (a characteristic habit that promotes or exhibits human flourishing).Can you recommend some resources (e.g. books, papers, interviews) I would be wise to review...

Published on May 11, 2024 6:18 PM GMTMarcus Hutter and his PhD students David Quarel and Elliot Catt have just published a new textbook called An Introduction to Universal Artificial Intelligence."Universal AI" refers to the body of theory surrounding Hutter's AIXI, which is a model of ideal agency combining Solomonoff induction and reinforcement learning. Hutter has previously published a book-length exposition of AIXI in...

Published on May 11, 2024 1:00 PM GMTIt is easier to ask than to answer. That’s my whole point.It is much cheaper to ask questions than answer them so beware of situations where it is implied that asking and answering are equal. Here are some examples:Let's say there is a maths game. I get a minute to ask questions. You get a minute to answer them....

Published on May 11, 2024 9:31 AM GMTI've been on the lookout for new jobs recently and one thing I have noticed is that the market seems flooded with ads for AI-related jobs. What I mean is not work on building models (or aligning them, alas), but rather, work on building applications using generative AI or other advances to make new software products. My...