Why so? My understanding is that, if AGI will arrives in 2026 it will be based on the current paradigm of training increasingly large LLMs on massive clusters of advanced GPUs. Given that US has banned selling advanced GPUs to China, how do you expect them to catch up that soon?
artemium
Karma: 129
To add to this point, author in question is infamous for doxxing Scott Alexander and writing a hit piece on rationalist community before.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation/
I was also born in a former socialist country -Yugoslavia, which was notable for the prevalence of worker-managed firms in its economy. This made it somewhat unique among other socialist countries that used a more centralized approach with state ownership over entire industries.
While it is somewhat different than worker-owned cooperatives in modern market economies it does offer a useful data point. The general conclusion is that they work a bit better than a typical state-owned firm, but are still significantly worse in their economic performance compared to the median private company. This is the reason why despite having plenty of experience with worker-managed firms almost all ex-YU countries today have economies dominated by fully private companies and no one is really enthusiastic about repeating the worker-managed experiment.
Also agree about not promoting political content on LW but would love to read your writings on some other platform if possible.
If it reaches that point, the goal for Russia would not be to win but to ensure another side loses too, and this outcome might be preferable (to them) to a humiliating conventional defeat that might permanently end Russian sovereignty. In the end, the West has far more to lose than Russia and the stakes aren’t that high for us and they know it.
No. I think everything else is in crappy shape cause the Nuclear arsenal was always a priority for the Russian defense industry and most of the money and resources went there. I’ve noticed that the meme “perhaps Russian nukes don’t work” is getting increasingly popular which can have pretty bad consequences if the meme spreads and emboldens escalation.
It is like being incentivized to play Russian roulette because you hear bullets were made in a country that produced some other crappy products.
Looks awesome! Maybe there could be extended UI that tracks the recent research papers (sorta like I did here) or SOTA achievements. But maybe that would ruin the smooth minimalism of the page.
You can also play around with open-source versions that offer surprisingly comparable capability to OpenAI models.
Here is the GPT-6-J from EleutherAI that you can use without any hassle: https://6b.eleuther.ai/
They also released a new, 20B model but I think you need to log in to use it: https://www.goose.ai/playground
I think there could be a steelman why this post is LW-relevant (or at least possible variants of the post). If this Canadian precedent becomes widely adopted in the West everyone should probably do some practical preparation to ensure the security of their finances.
P.S: I live in Sweden which is an almost completely cashless society, so a similar type of government action would be disastrous.
You can add Black Death to the list. Popular theory is that disease killed so many people (around 1⁄3 of Europe’s population) that few remaining workers could negotiate higher salaries which made work-saving innovations more desirable and planted the seeds of industrial development.
This is very underrated newsletter, thank you for writing this. Events in KrioRus are kind of crazy. I cannot imagine a business where it is more essential to convince customers of robustness in the long run than cryonics and yet...ouch.
Also, Russia deployed lasers Peresvet which blind American satellites used to observe nuclear missiles.
I thought Peresvet is more of a tactical weapon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peresvet_(laser_weapon)Are there any updates on nuclear powered missile, Burevestnik?
Even worse, that kind of move would just convince the competitors that AGI is far more feasible, and incentivize them to speed up their efforts while sacrificing safety.
If blocking Huwaei failed to work a couple of years ago with an unusually pugnacious American presidency, I doubt this kind of move would work in the future where the Chinese technological base would be probably stronger.
In a funny way, even if someone is stuck in a Goodhart trap doing Language Models it is probably better to Goodhart performance on Winograd Schemas than just adding parameters.
I am not an expert in ML but based on some conversations I was following, I heard WuDao’s LAMBADA score (an important performance measure for Language Models) is significantly lower than GPT-3. I guess a number of parameters isn’t everything.
Strong upvote for a healthy dose of bro humor which isn’t that common on LW. We need more “people I want to have a beer with” represented in our community :D.
Thats interesting. Can you elaborate more?
None: None of the above; TAI is created probably in the USA and what Asia thinks isn’t directly relevant. I say there’s a 40% chance of this.
I would say it might still be relevant in this case. For example, given some game-theoretical interpretations, China might conclude that doing a nuclear first strike might be a rational move if the US creates the first TAI and suspects that will give their enemies an unbeatable advantage. Asian AI risk hub might successfully convince Chinese leadership to not do that if they have information that US TAI is built in a way that would prevent usage just for the interest of its country of origin.
Not sure about anti-gay laws in Singapore, but from what I gathered from the recent trends, the LGTB situation is starting to improve there and in East Asia in general.
OTOH the anti-drug attitudes are still super strong (for example you can still get the death penalty for dealing harder drugs), therefore I presume it’s an even bigger deal-breaker giving the number of people who are experimenting with drugs in the broader rationalist community.
Not to mention a pretty brutal Anti-Drug laws.
My dark horse bet is on 3d country trying desperately to catch up to US/China just when they will be close to reaching agreement on slowing down progress. Most likely: France.