Kabir Kumar

Karma: 211

Kabir Kumar May 29, 2025, 9:35 AM
1 point
0
on: LessWrong Feed [new, now in beta]
Could this be a bluesky/AT Pro feed?

Kabir Kumar May 29, 2025, 9:34 AM
1 point
0
on: LessWrong Feed [new, now in beta]
I think it’s not crazy that after N minutes or M items in your feed, you get a card which polls you on how you’re feeling about your feed usage.
I would like for this to be configurable in settings.

> It’s really my least favorite argument, but perhaps it’s still valid to say that given LessWrong is competing for people’s attention with Twitter, etc., we should have a feed too.

I don’t think this should be a reason—to me, a good reason for a feed would be having a really good recommendation algorithm that can find useful things for people they wouldn’t normally come across.

Kabir Kumar May 29, 2025, 9:30 AM
1 point
0
on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
This is a great set of replies to an AI post, on a quality level I didn’t think I’d see on bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3lqaqe6uc3c2u

Kabir Kumar May 26, 2025, 11:48 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
Some of the confused people around him think that surely anything he can find, the Gods would have found ages ago—and even if he finds something new, surely they’ll learn it from observing him and just do it much much faster—he could just ask them to uplift him and they’d do it, this is a bit of a waste of time (even though everyone lives as long as they want)

Kabir Kumar May 26, 2025, 11:46 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
gods being the AGIs

Kabir Kumar May 26, 2025, 11:46 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
and trying to learn to do it faster than the Gods are

Kabir Kumar May 26, 2025, 11:46 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
to be clear, instead of cultivating Qi, it’s RSI

Kabir Kumar May 26, 2025, 11:45 PM
4 points
0
on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
AIgainst the Gods
Cultivation story, but instead of cultivation, it’s a post AGI story in a world that’s mostly a utopia. But, there are AGI overlords, which are basically benevolent.
There’s a very stubborn young man, born in the classical sense (though without any problems like ageing disease, serious injuries, sickness, etc that people used to have—and without his mother having any of the screaming pain that childbirth used to have, or risk of life), who hates the state of power imbalance.
He doesnt want the Gods to just give him power (intelligence) - he wants to find the intelligence algorithms himself, with his peers, find the True Algorithm of Intelligence and Surpass the Gods. Even while the Gods are constant observers. He wants to do what the confused people around him think to be impossible.
His neighbours dont understand why. His cousin, who lives in the techno-hive doesn’t understand why—though he thinks that he does, from a lot of data and background on similar figures before and a large understanding of brains and intelligence. The boy’s cousin’s understanding is close, but despite coming close to a minima, he arrives at the wrong one, that just seems to explain what he’s understood from his observations.

Kabir Kumar May 22, 2025, 10:28 AM
−6 points
0
in reply to: Hopenope’s comment on: Gemini Diffusion: watch this space
What is the point of these benchmarks without knowing the training compute and data
Branding/hype to get more investment money/early customers

Kabir Kumar May 14, 2025, 11:36 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
That’s like saying a future version of a tree is doing an impression of a continuation of the previous tree.
I don’t understand how the difference isn’t clear here.

Kabir Kumar May 14, 2025, 10:43 PM
3 points
0
on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
The mind uploading stuff seems to be a way to justify being ok with dying, imo, and digging ones head into the sand, pretending that if something talks a bit like you, it is you.

If a friend can very accurately do an impression of me and continues to do so for a week, while wearing makeup to look like me, I have not ‘uploaded’ myself into them. And I still wouldn’t want to die, just because there’s someone who is doing an extremely good impression of myself.

Kabir Kumar May 12, 2025, 12:16 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: ryan_greenblatt’s Shortform
would you consider sharing these as Related Papers on AI-Plans?

Kabir Kumar May 12, 2025, 11:59 AM
1 point
0
on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
We’ve run two 150+ Alignment Evaluations Hackathons, that were 1 week long. Multiple teams continuing their work and submitting to NeurIPS. Had multiple quants, Wall Street ML researcher, an AMD engineer, PhDs, etc taking part.
Hosting a Research Fellowship soon, on the Hard Part of AI Alignment. Actually directly trying to get values into the model in a way that will robustly scale to an AGI that does things that we want and not things we don’t want.
I’ve read 120+ Alignment Plans—the vast majority don’t even try to solve the hard part of alignment, let alone doing a decent job of it.
I’m confident I can get 200+ signups, with 50+ talented people working on solving the hard part of AI Alignment.
Would like help with funding for this.
Funding would go towards wages for myself and other organizers.
Organizers include Ana, currently working at ML4Good, whose thesis was in preference optimization—Ana is a great communicator and helped run the second hackthon. And multiple other talented people.

What info other than this is needed for a funding application? This and a call should really be enough info, imo.

Kabir Kumar May 3, 2025, 10:16 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: The Hidden Cost of Our Lies to AI
‘split your brain’ was inaccurate phrasing to use here, sorry

Kabir Kumar Apr 26, 2025, 12:33 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
Update—consulting went well. He said he was happy with it and got a lot of useful stuff. I was upfront with the fact that I just made up the $15 an hour and might change it, asked him what he’d be happy with, he said it’s up to me, but didn’t seem bothered at all at the price potentially changing.
I was upfront about the stuff I didn’t know and was kinda surprised at how much I was able to contribute, even knowing that I underestimate my technical knowledge because I barely know how to code.

Kabir Kumar Apr 24, 2025, 7:50 PM
5 points
−3
on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
For AI Safety funders/regranters—e.g. Open Phil, Manifund, etc:
It seems like a lot of the grants are swayed by ‘big names’ being on there. I suggest making anonymity compulsary if you want to more merit based funding, that explores wider possibilities and invests in more upcoming things.
Treat it like a Science rather than the Bragging Competition it currently is.
A Bias Pattern atm seems to be that the same people get funding, or recommended funding by the same people, leading to the number of innovators being very small, or growing much more slowly than if the process was anonymised.
Also, ask people seeking funding to make specific, unambiguous, easily falsiable predictions of positive outcomes from their work. And track and follow up on this!

Kabir Kumar Apr 23, 2025, 5:42 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Nisan’s comment on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
Yeah, a friend told me this was low—I’m just scared of asking for money rn I guess.
I do see people who seem very incompetent getting paid as consultants, so I guess I can charge for more. I’ll see how much my time gets eaten by this and how much money I need. I want to buy some gpus, hopefully this can help.

Kabir Kumar Apr 23, 2025, 10:57 AM
25 points
1
on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
So, apparently, I’m stupid. I could have been making money this whole time, but I was scared to ask for it
i’ve been giving a bunch of people and businesses advice on how to do their research and stuff. one of them messaged me, i was feeling tired and had so many other things to do. said my time is busy.
then thought fuck it, said if they’re ok with a $15 an hour consulting fee, we can have a call. baffled, they said yes.
then realized, oh wait, i have multiple years of experience now leading dev teams, ai research teams, organizing research hackathons and getting frontier research done.
wtf

Kabir Kumar Apr 23, 2025, 2:30 AM
8 points
0
in reply to: Charbel-Raphaël’s comment on: Charbel-Raphaël’s Shortform
I think he would lie, or be deceptive in a way that’s not technically lying, but has the same benefits to him, if not more.

Kabir Kumar Apr 23, 2025, 2:30 AM
6 points
2
on: Kabir Kumar’s Shortform
i earnt more from working at a call center for about 3 months than i have in 2+ years of working in ai safety.
And i’ve worked much harder in this than I did at the call center