jaan

Karma: 563

jaan 15 Oct 2023 10:20 UTC
13 points
5
in reply to: Akash’s comment on: RSPs are pauses done right
i would love to see competing RSPs (or, better yet, RTDPs, as @Joe_Collman pointed out in a cousin comment).

jaan 14 Oct 2023 10:12 UTC
LW: 18 AF: 8
12
AF
in reply to: evhub’s comment on: RSPs are pauses done right
Sure, but I guess I would say that we’re back to nebulous territory then—how much longer than six months? When if ever does the pause end?
i agree that, if hashed out, the end criteria may very well resemble RSPs. still, i would strongly advocate for scaling moratorium until widely (internationally) acceptable RSPs are put in place.
I’d very surprised if there was substantial x-risk from the next model generation.
i share the intuition that the current and next LLM generations are unlikely an xrisk. however, i don’t trust my (or anyone else’s) intuitons strongly enough to say that there’s a less than 1% xrisk per 10x scaling of compute. in expectation, that’s killing 80M existing people—people who are unaware that this is happening to them right now.

jaan 14 Oct 2023 6:13 UTC
LW: 42 AF: 18
26
AF
in reply to: evhub’s comment on: RSPs are pauses done right
the FLI letter asked for “pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4” and i’m very much willing to defend that!

my own worry with RSPs is that they bake in (and legitimise) the assumptions that a) near term (eval-less) scaling poses trivial xrisk, and b) there is a substantial period during which models trigger evals but are existentially safe. you must have thought about them, so i’m curious what you think.

that said, thank you for the post, it’s a very valuable discussion to have! upvoted.

jaan 8 Sep 2023 10:18 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
the werewolf vs villager strategy heuristic is brilliant. thank you!

jaan 14 Jun 2023 5:37 UTC
3 points
0
on: Demystifying Born’s rule
if i understand it correctly (i may not!), scott aaronson argues that hidden variable theories (such as bohmian / pilot wave) imply hypercomputation (which should count as an evidence against them): https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf

jaan 15 May 2023 7:17 UTC
14 points
2
in reply to: trevor’s comment on: Jaan Tallinn’s 2022 Philanthropy Overview
interesting, i have bewelltuned.com in my reading queue for a few years now—i take your comment as an upvote!
myself i swear by FDT (somewhat abstract, sure, but seems to work well) and freestyle dancing (the opposite of abstract, but also seems to work well). also coding (eg, just spent several days using pandas to combine and clean up my philanthropy data) -- code grounds one in reality.

jaan 31 Mar 2023 19:51 UTC
11 points
3
on: On the FLI Open Letter
having seen the “kitchen side” of the letter effort, i endorse almost all zvi’s points here. one thing i’d add is that one of my hopes urging the letter along was to create common knowledge that a lot of people (we’re going to get to 100k signatures it looks like) are afraid of the thing that comes after GPT4. like i am.

thanks, everyone, who signed.

EDIT: basically this: https://twitter.com/andreas212nyc/status/1641795173972672512

jaan 24 Mar 2023 7:05 UTC
14 points
9
on: We have to Upgrade
while it’s easy to agree with some abstract version of “upgrade” (as in try to channel AI capability gains into our ability to align them), the main bottleneck to physical upgrading is the speed difference between silicon and wet carbon: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ccsx339LE9Jhoii9K/slow-motion-videos-as-ai-risk-intuition-pumps

jaan 27 Jan 2023 17:29 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Lone Pine’s comment on: All AGI Safety questions welcome (especially basic ones) [~monthly thread]
yup, i tried invoking church-turing once, too. worked about as well as you’d expect :)

jaan 27 Jan 2023 8:13 UTC
5 points
1
on: All AGI Safety questions welcome (especially basic ones) [~monthly thread]
looks great, thanks for doing this!
one question i get every once in a while and wish i had a canonical answer to is (probably can be worded more pithily):
“humans have always thought their minds are equivalent to whatever’s their latest technological achievement—eg, see the steam engines. computers are just the latest fad that we currently compare our minds to, so it’s silly to think they somehow pose a threat. move on, nothing to see here.”
note that the canonical answer has to work for people whose ontology does not include the concepts of “computation” nor “simulation”. they have seen increasingly universal smartphones and increasingly realistic computer games (things i’ve been gesturing at in my poor attempts to answer) but have no idea how they work.

jaan 12 Jan 2023 8:22 UTC
4 points
2
on: We don’t trade with ants
the potentially enormous speed difference (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ccsx339LE9Jhoii9K/slow-motion-videos-as-ai-risk-intuition-pumps) will almost certainly be an effective communications barrier between humans and AI. there’s a wonderful scene of AIs vs humans negotiation in william hertling’s “A.I. apocalypse” that highlights this.

jaan 11 Jan 2023 7:58 UTC
22 points
3
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
i agree that there’s the 3rd alternative future that the post does not consider (unless i missed it!):
3. markets remain in an inadequate equilibrium until the end of times, because those participants (like myself!) who consider short timelines remain in too small minority to “call the bluff”.
see the big short for a dramatic depiction of such situation.
great post otherwise. upvoted.

jaan 23 Oct 2022 6:32 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: So8res’s comment on: Decision theory does not imply that we get to have nice things
yeah, this seems to be the crux: what will CEV prescribe for spending the altruistic (reciprocal cooperation) budget on. my intuition continues to insist that purchasing the original star systems from UFAIs is pretty high on the shopping list, but i can see arguments (including a few you gave above) against that.

oh, btw, one sad failure mode would be getting clipped by a proto-UFAI that’s too stupid to realise it’s in a multi-agent environment or something,

ETA: and, tbc, just like interstice points out below, my “us/me” label casts a wider net than “us in this particular everett branch where things look particularly bleak”.

jaan 22 Oct 2022 17:25 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: So8res’s comment on: Decision theory does not imply that we get to have nice things
roger. i think (and my model of you agrees) that this discussion bottoms out in speculating what CEV (or equivalent) would prescribe.

my own intuition (as somewhat supported by the moral progress/moral circle expansion in our culture) is that it will have a nonzero component of “try to help out the fellow humans/biologicals/evolved minds/conscious minds/agents with diminishing utility function if not too expensive, and especially if they would do the same in your position”.

jaan 22 Oct 2022 12:39 UTC
18 points
6
in reply to: interstice’s comment on: Decision theory does not imply that we get to have nice things
yeah, as far as i can currently tell (and influence), we’re totally going to use a sizeable fraction of FAI-worlds to help out the less fortunate ones. or perhaps implement a more general strategy, like mutual insurance pact of evolved minds (MIPEM).
this, indeed, assumes that human CEV has diminishing returns to resources, but (unlike nate in the sibling comment!) i’d be shocked if that wasn’t true.

jaan 29 Apr 2022 11:26 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Yitz’s comment on: Jaan Tallinn’s 2021 Philanthropy Overview
sure, this is always a consideration. i’d even claim that the “wait.. what about the negative side effects?” question is a potential expected value spoiler for pretty much all longtermist interventions (because they often aim for effects that are multiple causal steps down the road), and as such not really specific to software.

jaan 10 Feb 2022 7:13 UTC
8 points
on: Create a prediction market in two minutes on Manifold Markets
great idea! since my metamed days i’ve been wishing there was a prediction market for personal medical outcomes — it feels like manifold mechanism might be a good fit for this (eg, at the extreme end, consider the “will this be my last market if i undertake the surgery X at Y?” question). should you decide to develop such aspect at one point, i’d be very interested in supporting/subsidising.

jaan 27 Dec 2021 8:04 UTC
5 points
in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: Biology-Inspired AGI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works
actually, the premise of david brin’s existence is a close match to moravec’s paragraph (not a coincidence, i bet, given that david hung around similar circles).

jaan 11 Dec 2021 5:50 UTC
25 points
in reply to: davidad’s comment on: [Linkpost] Chinese government’s guidelines on AI
confirmed. as far as i can tell (i’ve talked to him for about 2h in total) yi really seems to care, and i’m really impressed by his ability to influence such official documents.

jaan 30 Nov 2021 13:34 UTC
15 points
in reply to: dxu’s comment on: Soares, Tallinn, and Yudkowsky discuss AGI cognition
indeed, i even gave a talk almost a decade ago about the evolution:humans :: humans:AGI symmetry (see below)!
what confuses me though is that “is general reasoner” and “can support cultural evolution” properties seemed to emerge pretty much simultaneously in humans—a coincidence that requires its own explanation (or dissolution). furthermore, eliezer seems to think that the former property is much more important / discontinuity causing than the latter. and, indeed, outsized progress being made by individual human reasoners (scientists/inventors/etc.) seems to evidence such view.