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Published on May 5, 2025 6:35 PM GMTLet’s hang out and discuss The colors of her coat by Scott Alexander.If you can, please think about the following questions while reading and write down some notes:This I do not understandThis I do not think to be true / accurateThis I would like to discussThese are my ideas on the topicAs for the usual ACX meet-ups:...

Published on May 5, 2025 4:38 PM GMTTL;DR: The AISafety.info team wrote two intros to AI safety for busy laypeople: a short version and a longer version. We expect them to get a few thousand to tens of thousands of views. We'd really appreciate your critiques. AISafety.info has two new intros: a short version and a longer version. They're intended for a reasonably smart member...

Published on May 5, 2025 4:00 PM GMTLast week I covered that GPT-4o was briefly an (even more than usually) absurd sycophant, and how OpenAI responded to that. Their explanation at that time was paper thin. It didn’t tell us much that we did not already know, and seemed to suggest they had learned little from the incident. Rolling Stone has a write-up of...

Published on May 5, 2025 1:36 PM GMTIf the biggest threat model from AI systems comes from internal deployment, then the correct governance move is to establish independent legal supervisors for frontier AI labs[1].Steven Adler recently argued against relying on a "race to the top," where frontier labs compete to be the safest when deploying models.‘A race to the top can improve AI safety,...

Published on May 5, 2025 1:18 PM GMTThe basic situationThe world is wild and terrible and wonderful and rushing forwards so so fast.Modern economies are tremendous things, allowing crazy amounts of coordination. People have got really very good at producing stuff. Long-term trends are towards more affluence, and less violence.The enlightenment was pretty fantastic not just for bringing us better tech, but also more...

Published on May 5, 2025 4:26 AM GMTA common framing of the AI alignment problem is that it's a technical hurdle to be overcome. A clever team at DeepMind or Anthropic would publish a paper titled "Alignment is All You Need," everyone would implement it, and we'd all live happily ever after in harmonious coexistence with our artificial friends.I suspect this perspective constitutes a...

Published on May 5, 2025 5:13 AM GMTBackgroundPolymarket is a prediction market platform where people can trade contracts representing the probability of events occurring (e.g., "Who will win the 2024 Presidential election").Trading volume on Polymarket is heavily influenced by liquidity rewards, a program which pays traders to place competitive bids and offers in various markets, thereby increasing liquidity and encouraging more trades. Polymarket currently...

Published on May 5, 2025 12:56 AM GMTAI, Animals, & Digital Minds (AIADM) 2025 is a one-day conference and two-day unconference exploring the intersection of AI and sentient nonhumans, both biological (i.e. animals) and potentially artificial.Learn more and apply hereTaking place in London and virtually from Friday 30th May until Sunday 1st June – the weekend before EAG London – the event will bring...

Published on May 5, 2025 12:51 AM GMTAI, Animals, & Digital Minds (AIADM) 2025 is a one-day conference and two-day unconference exploring the intersection of AI and sentient nonhumans, both biological (i.e. animals) and potentially artificial.Taking place in London and virtually from Friday 30th May until Sunday 1st June – the weekend before EAG London – AIADM will bring together thought leaders with backgrounds...

Published on May 4, 2025 5:39 PM GMTWe’ve been looking for joinable endeavors in AI safety outreach over the past weeks and would like to share our findings with you. Let us know if we missed any and we’ll add them to the list.For comprehensive directories of AI safety communities spanning general interest, technical focus, and local chapters, check out https://www.aisafety.com/communities and https://www.aisafety.com/map. If you're uncertain...

Published on May 4, 2025 4:53 PM GMTSomeone sent me this and I thought it fairly interesting:TLDR: Fake AI generated law companies are searching for unattributed images on the internet, claiming they own them, and sending emails asking the user to add a link to their website. The aim is to increase their ranking in Google search to drive traffic to their (AI generated)...

Published on May 4, 2025 4:32 PM GMT(Disclaimer: Post written in a personal capacity. These are personal hot takes and do not in any way represent my employer's views.) TL;DR: I do not think we will produce high reliability methods to evaluate or monitor the safety of superintelligent systems via current research paradigms, with interpretability or otherwise. Interpretability still seems a valuable tool and...

Published on May 4, 2025 1:52 PM GMTIn 2001, Lant Pritchett asked, “Where has all the education gone?” From 1960 to 1990, countries around the world had achieved increases in educational attainment without the widely expected gains in income—a “micro macro paradox” where the person-level estimates of the return to education were nowhere to be seen in aggregate output.It seems we are on the cusp...

Published on May 4, 2025 7:50 AM GMTPolitico writes:The [Ukrainian] program […] rewards soldiers with points if they upload videos proving their drones have hit Russian targets. It will soon be integrated with a new online marketplace called Brave 1 Market, which will allow troops to convert those points into new equipment for their units.[...]The program assigns points for each type of kill: 20...

Published on May 4, 2025 4:10 AM GMTCryonics Institute and Suspended Animation now have an arrangement where Suspended Animation will conduct a field cryopreservation before shipping the body to Cryonics Institute, thus decreasing tissue damage occuring in transit. They are raising their prices accordingly, but offering a discount from the new price for people who sign up by May 21 (and arrange funding within...

Published on May 4, 2025 1:08 AM GMTRecommended music to read this to (If you like ambience)IYindi had sent him a link, "You've gotta see how this guy speedruns Mario Kart, I think you'll like it (✿◠‿◠)". Miro taps the link.CREATE A NetMe™[1] ACCOUNT TO WATCH THIS VIDEOMiro creates the account. The video is good. He runs to boot his CRT, its electron beam lighting the...

Published on May 3, 2025 11:42 PM GMTStrengthIn 1997, with Deep Blue’s defeat of Kasparov, computers surpassed human beings at chess. Other games have fallen in more recent years: Go, Shogi, and Othello[1] among them. AI is superhuman at these pursuits, and unassisted human beings will never catch up. The situation looks like this:[2]At chess, AI is much better than the very best humansThe average...

Published on May 3, 2025 10:07 PM GMTBurnout. Burn out? Whatever, it sucks. Burnout is a pretty confusing thing made harder by our naive reactions being things like “just try harder” or “grit your teeth and push through”, which usually happen to be exactly the wrong things to do. Burnout also isn’t really just one thing, it’s more like a collection of distinct problems that...

Published on May 3, 2025 9:25 PM GMTI'm looking for podcast recommendations from the LessWrong community. If you have a favorite podcast, please share:What is the podcast?What specifically do you like about it?What concepts or topics does it teach particularly well?Why do you consider its content trustworthy or reliable?Who would you recommend this podcast to? (e.g., target audience, specific interests)Please keep each top-level answer...

Published on May 2, 2025 3:55 PM GMTDespite being fairly well established as a discipline, genetics is a science that has yet to reach its potential, both policymakers and the general population are extremely skeptical of it and, as a consequence, our society has setup several barriers to prevent its flourishing.In this post I will try to imagine what the potential benefits of embracing...

Published on May 2, 2025 5:49 PM GMTMy paper "AI Welfare Risks" has been accepted for publication at Philosophical Studies!I argue that near-future AI systems may have welfare, that RL and behaviour restrictions could harm them, that this poses a partial tension with AI safety concerns, and I propose three tentative AI welfare policies AI labs could implement to reduce such welfare risks.Building on...

Published on May 2, 2025 3:27 PM GMTNarmeen developed, ideated and validated K-steering at Martian. Luke generated the baselines, figures and wrote this blog post. Amir proposed the research direction and supervised the project. The full interactive blog will be available closer to the publication of the complete paper on the Martian website.TL;DR: We introduce K-steering, a steering method for language models that allows...

Published on May 2, 2025 2:19 PM GMTThe video is about extrapolating the future of AI progress, following a timeline that starts from today’s chatbots to future AI that’s vastly smarter than all of humanity combined–with God-like capabilities. We argue that such AIs will pose a significant extinction risk to humanity.This video came out of a partnership between Rational Animations and ControlAI. The script...