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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.
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This is a link post. to follow up my philantropic pledge from 2020, i've updated my philanthropy page with the 2024 results. in 2024 my donations funded $51M worth of endpoint grants (plus $2.0M in admin overhead and philanthropic software development). this comfortably exceeded my 2024 commitment of $42M (20k times $2100.00 — the minimum price of ETH in 2024). this also concludes my 5-year donation pledge, but of course my philanthropy continues: eg, i’ve already made over $4M in endpoin...
I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart the people who’ve done the best work at Anthropic. You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that's true. Among people hired at Anthropic, though, we’ve restricted the range by screening for extremely high-percentile technical ability, so the remaining differences, while they still matter, aren’t quite as critical. Instead, people'...
This is a link post. Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France's fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe's population (4% of the whole world population). Kissinger writes in Diplomacy with respect to the Versailles Peace Conference: Victory brought home to France the stark realization that revan...
We’ve written a new report on the threat of AI-enabled coups. I think this is a very serious risk – comparable in importance to AI takeover but much more neglected. In fact, AI-enabled coups and AI takeover have pretty similar threat models. To see this, here's a very basic threat model for AI takeover: Humanity develops superhuman AI Superhuman AI is misaligned and power-seeking Superhuman AI seizes power for itself And now here's a closely analogous threat model for AI-e...
Back in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents arrived on a KLM flight from Beijing, without the necessary import papers. Because of this, they could not be forwarded on to the customer in Athens. But nobody was able to correct the error and send them back either. What could be done with them? It's hard to think there...
Subtitle: Bad for loss of control risks, bad for concentration of power risks I’ve had this sitting in my drafts for the last year. I wish I’d been able to release it sooner, but on the bright side, it’ll make a lot more sense to people who have already read AI 2027. There's a good chance that AGI will be trained before this decade is out. By AGI I mean “An AI system at least as good as the best human X’ers, for all cognitive tasks/skills/jobs X.” Many people seem to be dismissing this...
Though, given my doomerism, I think the natsec framing of the AGI race is likely wrongheaded, let me accept the Dario/Leopold/Altman frame that AGI will be aligned to the national interest of a great power. These people seem to take as an axiom that a USG AGI will be better in some way than CCP AGI. Has anyone written justification for this assumption? I am neither an American citizen nor a Chinese citizen. What would it mean for an AGI to be aligned with "Democracy" or "Confucianism" o...
Introduction Writing this post puts me in a weird epistemic position. I simultaneously believe that: The reasoning failures that I'll discuss are strong evidence that current LLM- or, more generally, transformer-based approaches won't get us AGI As soon as major AI labs read about the specific reasoning failures described here, they might fix them But future versions of GPT, Claude etc. succeeding at the tasks I've described here will provide zero evidence of their ability to reach AG...
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone "in the same boat." However, based on my experience spanning AI research (including first author papers at COLM / NeurIPS and attending MATS under Neel Nanda), robotics, and hands-on manufacturing (including machining prototype rock...
Audio note: this article contains 31 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Lewis Smith*, Sen Rajamanoharan*, Arthur Conmy, Callum McDougall, Janos Kramar, Tom Lieberum, Rohin Shah, Neel Nanda * = equal contribution The following piece is a list of snippets about research from the GDM mechanistic interpretability team, which we didn’t consider a good fit for turning into a paper, but which w...
This is a link post. When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching the holes with sand. The goal was just to see how high I could get the lake, knowing that if I plugged every hole, eventually the water would always rise and defeat my efforts. Beaver behaviour. One day, I had the realization that there was a simpler approach. I could just go get a big ...
This is part of the MIRI Single Author Series. Pieces in this series represent the beliefs and opinions of their named authors, and do not claim to speak for all of MIRI. Okay, I'm annoyed at people covering AI 2027 burying the lede, so I'm going to try not to do that. The authors predict a strong chance that all humans will be (effectively) dead in 6 years, and this agrees with my best guess about the future. (My modal timeline has loss of control of Earth mostly happening in 2028, rather...
Short AI takeoff timelines seem to leave no time for some lines of alignment research to become impactful. But any research rebalances the mix of currently legible research directions that could be handed off to AI-assisted alignment researchers or early autonomous AI researchers whenever they show up. So even hopelessly incomplete research agendas could still be used to prompt future capable AI to focus on them, while in the absence of such incomplete research agendas we'd need to rely on A...
In this post, we present a replication and extension of an alignment faking model organism: Replication: We replicate the alignment faking (AF) paper and release our code. Classifier Improvements: We significantly improve the precision and recall of the AF classifier. We release a dataset of ~100 human-labelled examples of AF for which our classifier achieves an AUROC of 0.9 compared to 0.6 from the original classifier. Evaluating More Models: We find Llama family models, o...
1Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under five years, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks. The length of tasks (measured by how long they take human profess...
“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the ...
In 2021 I wrote what became my most popular blog post: What 2026 Looks Like. I intended to keep writing predictions all the way to AGI and beyond, but chickened out and just published up till 2026. Well, it's finally time. I'm back, and this time I have a team with me: the AI Futures Project. We've written a concrete scenario of what we think the future of AI will look like. We are highly uncertain, of course, but we hope this story will rhyme with reality enough to help us all prepare fo...
Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happened.My conclusion, which I still believe, was that Sam Altman had engaged in a variety of unacceptable conduct that merited his firing.In particular, he very much ‘not been consistently candid’ with the board on several important occasions. In particul...
Epistemic status: This post aims at an ambitious target: improving intuitive understanding directly. The model for why this is worth trying is that I believe we are more bottlenecked by people having good intuitions guiding their research than, for example, by the ability of people to code and run evals. Quite a few ideas in AI safety implicitly use assumptions about individuality that ultimately derive from human experience. When we talk about AIs scheming, alignment faking or goal pr...
Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happened.My conclusion, which I still believe, was that Sam Altman had engaged in a variety of unacceptable conduct that merited his firing.In particular, he very much ‘not been consistently candid’ with the board on several important occasions. In particul...
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