Hi!
I’m very interested in startups and Old Masters.
I am a co-founder of Character (a seed/pre-seed VC)
I am a director of The Big Backup (a directed panspermia effort)
I am on X here.
And here is my website: https://www.blee-goldman.com/
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We are so lucky to have Dario running a major lab. The right leader for our time often looks different from previous eras.
The major quibble I have with his perspective is the view of autonomy for AI as a certain downside. A measure of autonomy is not necessarily the same as being ruled by a country of geniuses.
Each day, the entirety of your waking conscious thoughts sums to around 72 kilobytes of data.
That’s roughly equivalent to typing the above sentence 800 times.
Food for thought for the highest known intelligence in the universe.
Calculated from: The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?, https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
Kobi Hackenburg has released a fascinating new paper: “The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence”
The short story is that AI persuasion were most effective using methods for post training and rhetorical strategy. Interestingly, personalization of responses had a comparatively small effect.
He has a great thread here outlining the major findings.
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Thank you very much for reading and the comment!
Thanks, I missed that!
I found this paper by Amir Zur and others really interesting: It’s Owl in the Numbers:
Token Entanglement in Subliminal Learning where they try to explain subliminal learning (the notion that “language model fine-tuned on seemingly meaningless data from a teacher model acquires the teacher’s hidden behaviors.”)
The researchers found that certain concepts like “owl” and “087” can become entangled during training (the probability of one increases the probability of the other.)
Fascinating and would be curious to hear what others think!
What is the total number of dinosaur species that existed?
What statistical approach would you use to make your estimate?
Current estimates for animals on earth seem to be 1M+ known species?
Thank you John! Is there an high-bit or confounder controlling evidence that would move your prior? Say something like english + some other language? (Also I might be missing something deeper about the heuristic in general, if so I apologize!)
Jack Morris has posted this thread https://x.com/jxmnop/status/1925224612872233081 about his paper “Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings”
Have others thought through what this means for the notion of fundamentally alien internal ontologies? Would love any ideas! Sorry if missed a post on it.
Excellent post. How refreshing to see that we have a say in the moral and ethical repercussions of our interactions.
Thank you for both of your comments, your first comment deserves a thoughtful response, so it might take me until the weekend to reply.
I chose the title because:
”Everybody Wants to Rule the Future”—refers to the notion that the future is hotly contested and longtermists specifically want to “rule” it with specific interventions that are based on EV dominance for normative authority. This is important and salient when billions of dollars are being allocated based on reasoning that has this at its core. (It’s also a playful reference to the Tears for Fears song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”
Is Longtermism’s Mandate of Heaven by Arithmetic Justified? - this is the core claim being analyzed: is there something special about longtermist philosophy with their math that gives them a special priority over other frameworks?
I definitely didn’t mean to muddy the waters with the theorems, poor wording on my part in sections. They are lifts from relevant texts. (I tried to be clear with the references and citations, but I could improve.) The lemma is a reduction of my own (although nothing big or special, very standard). What is the most appropriate way to update this on LW? Is it ok to just edit it for clarity, or do I need to somehow make a version noting so that people can see the changes I made?