Holly_Elmore

• Holly_Elmore 18 Nov 2023 3:42 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: magfrump’s comment on: Sam Alt­man fired from OpenAI

  What kind of securities fraud could he have committed?

• Holly_Elmore 8 Nov 2023 6:47 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Holly El­more and Rob Miles di­alogue on AI Safety Advocacy

  No, sacrificing truth is fundamentally an act of self-deception. It is making yourself a man who believes a falsehood, or has a disregard for the truth. It is Gandhi taking the murder-pill. That is what I consider irreversible.

  This is what I was talking about, or the general thing I had in mind, and I think it is reversible. Not a good idea, but I think people who have ever self-deceived or wanted to believe something convenient have come back around to wanting to know the truth. I also think people can be truthseeking in some domains while self-deceiving in others. Perhaps if this weren’t the case, it would be easier to draw lines for acceptable behavior, but I think that unfortunately it isn’t.

  Very beside my original point about being willing to speak more plainly, but I think you get that.

• Holly_Elmore 4 Nov 2023 7:22 UTC

  6 points

  6

  on: If a lit­tle is good, is more bet­ter?

  I get the sense that “but Google and textbooks exist” is more of a deontological argument, like if the information is public at all “the cat’s out of the bag” and it’s unfair to penalize LLMs bc they didn’t cross any new lines, just increased accessibility.

• Holly_Elmore 26 Oct 2023 23:12 UTC

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Holly El­more and Rob Miles di­alogue on AI Safety Advocacy

  Does that really seem true to you? Do you have no memories of sacrificing truth for something else you wanted when you were a child, say? I’m not saying it’s just fine to sacrifice truth but it seems false to me to say that people never return to seeking the truth after deceiving themselves, much less after trying on different communication styles or norms. If that were true I feel like no one could ever be rational at all.

• Holly_Elmore 23 Oct 2023 17:30 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: TOMORROW: the largest AI Safety protest ever!

  That’s why I said “financially cheap”. They are expensive for the organizer in terms of convincing people to volunteer and to all attendees as far as their time and talents, and getting people to put in sweat equity is what makes it an effective demonstration. But per dollar invested they are very effective.

  I would venture that the only person who was seriously prevented from doing something else by being involved in this protest was me. Of course there is some time and labor cost for everyone involved. I hope it was complementary to whatever else they do, and, as Ben said, perhaps even allowing them to flex different muscles in an enriching way.

• Holly_Elmore 23 Oct 2023 1:43 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Holly El­more and Rob Miles di­alogue on AI Safety Advocacy

  I’m down for a followup!

• Holly_Elmore 23 Oct 2023 1:39 UTC

  5 points

  −1

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: TOMORROW: the largest AI Safety protest ever!

  It’s hard to say what the true impact of the events will be at this time, but they went well! I’m going to write a post-mortem for the SF PauseAI protest yesterday and the Meta protest in September and post it on EAF/​LW that will cover the short-term outcomes.

  Considering they are financially cheap to do (each around $2000 if you don’t count my salary), I’d call them pretty successful already. Meta protest got good media coverage, and it remains to be seen how this one will be covered since most of the coverage happened in the two following weeks last time.

• Holly_Elmore 20 Oct 2023 22:16 UTC

  18 points

  0

  in reply to: lc’s comment on: TOMORROW: the largest AI Safety protest ever!

  You could share the events with your friends and family who may be near, and signal boost media coverage of the events after! If you want to donate to keep me organizing events, I have a GoFundMe (and if anyone wants to give a larger amount, I’m happy to talk about how to do that :D). If you want to organize future events yourself, please DM me. Even putting the pause emoji ⏸️ in your twitter name helps :)
  
  Here are the participating cities and links:
  October 21st (Saturday), in multiple countries

  • US, California, San Francisco (facebook)

  • US, Massachusetts, Boston (facebook)

  • UK, Parliament Square, London (Sign up, facebook)

  • Netherlands, Den Haag (Sign up)

  • Australia, Melbourne (Sign up)

  • Canada, Ottawa (Organized by Align the World, sign up on facebook or EventBrite)

  • Denmark, Copenhagen (Facebook)

• Holly_Elmore 20 Oct 2023 21:34 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: TOMORROW: the largest AI Safety protest ever!

  Personally, I’m interested in targeting hardware development and that will be among my future advocacy directions. I think it’ll be a great issue for corporate campaigns pushing voluntary agreements and for pushing for external regulations simultaneously. This protest is aimed more at governments (attending the UK Summit) and their overall plans for regulating AI, so we’re pushing compute governance as way to most immediately address the creation of frontier models. Imo hardware tracking at the very least is going to have to be part of enforcing such a limit if it is adopted, and slowing the development of more powerful hardware will be important to keeping an acceptable compute threshold high enough that we’re not constantly on the verge of someone illegally getting together enough chips to make something dangerous.

• Holly_Elmore 20 Oct 2023 21:26 UTC

  32 points

  17

  on: Holly El­more and Rob Miles di­alogue on AI Safety Advocacy

  If you found yourself interested in advocacy, the largest AI Safety protest ever is happening Saturday, October 21st!
  
  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​abBtKF857Ejsgg9ab/​​tomorrow-the-largest-ai-safety-protest-ever

Holly El­more and Rob Miles di­alogue on AI Safety Advocacy

TOMORROW: the largest AI Safety protest ever!

• Holly_Elmore 14 Oct 2023 3:25 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: The In­ter­na­tional PauseAI Protest: Ac­tivism un­der uncertainty

  Check out the LessWrong event here: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​events/​​ZoTkRYdqGuDCnojMW/​​global-pause-ai-protest-10-21

Global Pause AI Protest 10/​21

• Holly_Elmore 5 Oct 2023 20:30 UTC

  6 points

  −5

  on: Eval­u­at­ing the his­tor­i­cal value mis­speci­fi­ca­tion argument

  I think you’re correct that the paradigm has changed, Matthew, and that the problems that stood out to MIRI before as possibilities no longer quite fit the situation.

  I still think the broader concern MIRI exhibited is correct: namely, that that an AI could appear to be aligned but not actually be aligned, and that this may not come to light until it is behaving outside of the context of training/​in which the command was written. Because of the greater capabilities of an AI, the problem may have to do with differences in superficially similar goals that wouldn’t matter at the human capabilities level.

  I’m not sure if the fact that LLMs solve the cauldron-filling problem means that we should consider the whole broader class of problems easier to solve than we thought. Maybe it does. But given the massive stakes of the issue I think we ought to consider not knowing if LLMs will always behave as intended OOD a live problem.

• Holly_Elmore 27 Sep 2023 16:59 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Protest against Meta’s ir­re­versible pro­lifer­a­tion (Sept 29, San Fran­cisco)

  Change log: I removed the point about Meta inaccurately calling itself “open source” because it was confusing.

• Holly_Elmore 22 Sep 2023 18:51 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: lisperati’s comment on: Protest against Meta’s ir­re­versible pro­lifer­a­tion (Sept 29, San Fran­cisco)

  Particularly in the rationalist community it seems like protesting is seen as a very outgroup thing to do. But why should that be? Good on you for expanding your comfort zone—hope to see you there :)

• Holly_Elmore 22 Sep 2023 18:48 UTC

  1 point

  1

  in reply to: MrThink’s comment on: Protest against Meta’s ir­re­versible pro­lifer­a­tion (Sept 29, San Fran­cisco)

  ^ all good points, but I think the biggest thing here is the policy of sharing weights continuing into the future with more powerful models.

• Holly_Elmore 21 Sep 2023 23:50 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Quinn’s comment on: Protest against Meta’s ir­re­versible pro­lifer­a­tion (Sept 29, San Fran­cisco)

  Yeah, I’ve been weighing a lot whether big tent approaches are something I can pull off at this stage or whether I should stick to “Pause AI”. The Meta protest is kind of an experiment in that regard and it has already been harder than I expected to get the message about irreversible proliferation across well. Pause is sort of automatically a big tent because it would address all AI harms. People can be very aligned on Pause as a policy without having the same motivations. Not releasing model weights is more of a one-off issue and requires a lot of inferential distance crossing even with knowledgeable people. So I’ll probably keep the next several events focused on Pause, a message much better suited to advocacy.

• Holly_Elmore 21 Sep 2023 23:45 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: David Hornbein’s comment on: Protest against Meta’s ir­re­versible pro­lifer­a­tion (Sept 29, San Fran­cisco)

  Yeah, I’m afraid of this happening with AI even as the danger becomes clearer. It’s one reason we’re in a really important window for setting policy.