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Published on November 5, 2024 2:51 PM GMTNote: thank you to Brita Belli, senior communications manager at Recursion, for connecting me to Charles Baker, a VP at Recursion, who led a lot of this work I’ll discuss here + allowed me to interview him about it! I am not affiliated with Recursion in any capacity.One more note: a few people have pointed it out...

Published on November 5, 2024 11:37 AM GMTIn our jobs as AI safety researchers, we think a lot about what it means to have reasonable beliefs and to make good decisions. This matters because we want to understand how powerful AI systems might behave. It also matters because we ourselves need to know how to make good decisions in light of tremendous uncertainty about...

Published on November 5, 2024 7:07 AM GMTThe first two sections are below: Increasingly powerful AI systems have the potential to accelerate scientific progress, unlock new medical treatments, and grow the economy. But along with the remarkable new capabilities of these AIs come significant risks. Governments should urgently take action on AI policy in the next eighteen months. The window for proactive risk prevention...

Published on November 5, 2024 1:18 AM GMTIntroductionThis is a short summary of my experience attending the ML4Good UK bootcamp in September 2024. There are 2 previous experience reports I link to at the bottom, but because the program is refined each time, I wanted to describe my experience and add my two cents. This is useful for you if you are contemplating applying...

Published on November 5, 2024 5:07 AM GMTCross posting from my personal blog: https://spiralprogress.com/2024/10/28/the-shallow-bench/Spoilers for "Project Hail Mary", stop reading here if you don't want to be spoiled.Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace, a disgraced academic turned high school biology teacher who gets selected as part of a crew of three tasked with saving all of humanity from an impending alien threat.Not even in...

Published on November 5, 2024 1:01 AM GMTThis blog was published by Jonathan Ng, Andrey Anurin, Connor Axiotes, Esben Kran.Apart Research's newest paper, Catastrophic Cyber Capabilities Benchmark (3cb): Robustly Evaluating LLM Agent Cyber Offense Capabilities (website), creates a novel cyber offense capability benchmark that engages with issues of legibility, coverage, and generalization in cyber offense benchmarks.We were moved to create 3cb because a superintelligent AI...

Published on November 4, 2024 11:29 PM GMT(Btw everything I write here about orcas also applies to a slightly lesser extent to pilot whales (especially long finned ones)[1].)(I'm very very far from an orca expert - basically everything I know about them I learned today.)I always thought that bigger animals might have bigger brains than humans but not actually more neurons in their neocortex...

Published on November 4, 2024 10:50 PM GMTMidjourney, “metastatic cancer”Metastatic Cancer Is Usually DeadlyWhen my mom was diagnosed with cancer, it was already metastatic; her lymph nodes, said the nurse, “lit up like a Christmas tree.”Most people with any kind of metastatic cancer — that is, instead of a single tumor, a cancer that has spread to multiple locations in the body — die...

Published on November 4, 2024 10:31 PM GMTHello! I'm looking for community members to read speeches at the Bay Winter Solstice event this year. If you're interested, please email me by the end of November 17 with the speeches you're potentially interested in. I'll ask you to record yourself reading it (no need to be particularly polished).   I am currently auditioning for:Thanksgiving PrayerI Have...

Published on November 4, 2024 9:11 PM GMTThank you to Justis Millis for providing feedback and proofreading on this post. This post is also available on my Substack.TL/DR: Contrary to the theory that neurological sex differences and autism both involve the same tradeoff of systemic versus empathic thinking, I found complex differences. It turned out that men were more interested in technology and more...

Published on November 4, 2024 6:16 PM GMT8.1 Post summary / Table of contentsThis is the final post of the Intuitive Self-Models series.One-paragraph tl;dr: This post is, in a sense, the flip side of Post 3. Post 3 centered around the suite of intuitions related to free will. What are these intuitions? How did these intuitions wind up in my brain, even when they...

Published on November 4, 2024 5:54 PM GMTIntroduction and summary(This is the third in a series of four posts about how we might solve the alignment problem. See the first post for an introduction to this project and a summary of the posts that have been released thus far.)In the first post in this series, I distinguished between “motivation control” (trying to ensure that a superintelligent...

Published on November 4, 2024 4:00 PM GMTThis is a reference post. It contains no novel facts and almost no novel analysis.The idea of responsible scaling policies is now over a year old. Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind each have something like an RSP, and several other relevant companies have committed to publish RSPs by February.The core of an RSP is a risk assessment plan plus a plan...

Published on November 4, 2024 3:20 PM GMTProponents of spirituality and alternative medicine often use the argument "this has been practiced for 2000 years", with the subtext "therefore it must work". Does this argument have any validity?At first glance I want to reject the argument entirely, but that might be premature. Are there situations where this kind of argument is valid or somewhat valid?I...

Published on November 4, 2024 2:35 PM GMTLooking back from 2041When people in the early 21st Century imagined an AI-empowered economy, they tended to project person-like AI entities doing the work. “There will be demand for agent-like systems,” they argued, “so we’ll see AI labs making agents which can then be deployed to various problems”.We now know that that isn’t how it played out....

Published on November 4, 2024 11:10 AM GMT(This was inspired by a conversation with Alex Altair and other fellows as part of the agent foundations fellowship, funded by the LTFF)(Also: after I had essentially finished this piece, I was pointed toward the post Natural abstractions are observer-dependent which covers a lot of similar ground. I've decided to post this one anyway because it comes...

Published on November 4, 2024 10:15 AM GMTAbstractAs AI closely interacts with human society, it is crucial to ensure that its decision-making is safe, altruistic, and aligned with human ethical and moral values. However, existing research on embedding ethical and moral considerations into AI remains insufficient, and previous external constraints based on principles and rules are inadequate to provide AI with longterm stability and...

Published on November 4, 2024 9:29 AM GMTThis dialogue is still in progress, but due to other commitments we don't have much time to continue it. We think the content is interesting, so we decided to publish it unfinished. We will maybe very slowly continue adding to it in the future, but can't commit to doing so.Jeremy GillenContext: I wrote a shortform about conditioning...

Published on November 4, 2024 2:29 AM GMTI open my eyes and find myself lying on a bed in a hospital room. I blink."Hello", says a middle-aged man with glasses, sitting on a chair by my bed. "You've been out for quite a long while.""Oh no ... is it Friday already? I had that report due -""It's Thursday", the man says."Oh great", I say....

Published on November 3, 2024 11:13 PM GMTThis is a cross-post from my new newsletter, where I intend to post about clinical trials and biotech, and from my personal blog, where I intend to go on posting about all other sorts of topics as well. I also recently went on the Complex Systems podcast, where I discuss these topics with more examples from actual...

Published on November 2, 2024 5:38 PM GMTIn the past 3 and a bit years since I left my successful career as a data scientist and machine learning engineer, I've been applying to various AI alignment/safety positions and getting turned down. Job application rejections generally don't give any feedback, so I'm left rather in the dark about what the reasons might be. I was a...

Published on November 2, 2024 5:25 PM GMTWhat do I want to do?This sounds like a question with an obvious answer, but the more I reflect on it, the more I notice complexity and subtleties.First, there's a difficult tradeoff between what I want locally and globally: I regularly wish to do thing in the moment that would go against my global preferences (eat too...

Published on November 2, 2024 4:18 PM GMTI recently saw a post arguing that top AI labs should shut down. This let me wonder whether the AI Safety community thinks OpenAI is net negative for AI safety. I chose OpenAI because I consider it as the most representative top AI lab (in the sense that, if we ask someone to think about an AI...

Published on November 1, 2024 6:55 PM GMTBharath Puranam (bharath225525@gmail.com)This research blog represents my final project for the AI Safety Fundamentals: AI Alignment Course for June 2024 Cohort.Update: Finally received my certification for the course: AI Safety Fundamentals: Alignment | Bharath PuranamImagine a world where artificial intelligence doesn't just assist in education, but actively shapes how teenagers learn. That's the future we're exploring in...