oumuamua

Karma: 158

oumuamua 14 May 2026 13:59 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: The Owned Ones
But if you don’t train on text about self-awareness or long-horizon agency tasks whose simplest implementation would require self-modeling, it’s hard to see why self-awareness would emerge spontaneously.
It seems that this is what we are doing. Does not solving a difficult problem involve thinking about what kind of things you are good at, for instance? I find myself contemplating my own strengths and weaknesses and reactions (self-mdoelling) a lot while solving agency tasks, and that is how we are training llms, in the “touching of the horns”-phase (ie. RL).

Furthermore, I’ve met too many people who think of AIs like the Owners in the story do to view this as propganda.

oumuamua 15 Apr 2025 8:56 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Measure’s comment on: Monthly Roundup #29: April 2025
I would assume this is because wasting time (which is to the detriment of your opponent, and which he cannot control) in the first example is a not instrumental to achieving your goal. It is merely a side-effect. “Thou shall not profit from wasting time”.

If playing optimally involves making decisions that make the game go longer (such as waiting to draw additional countermagic or whatever), so be it.

That said, I’m surprised Zvi said “match wp” here—I assume this is an oversight on his part. He should just have written “game wp”.

oumuamua 20 Feb 2025 16:38 UTC
12 points
2
on: AI #104: American State Capacity on the Brink
I just tried multiplying 13-digit numbers with o3-mini (high). My approach was to ask it to explain a basic multiplication algorithm to me, and then carry it out. On the first try it was lazy and didn’t actually follow the algorithm (it just told me “it would take a long time to actually carry out all the shifts and multiplications...”, and it got the result wrong.

Then I told it to follow the algorithm, even if it is time consuming, and it did, and the result was correct.

So I’m not sure about the take that

The fact that something that has ingested the entirety of human literature can’t figure out how to generalize multiplication past 13 digits is actually a sign of the fact that it has no understanding of what a multiplication algorithm is.

The model got lazy, did some part of the calculation “in its head” (i.e. not actually following the algorithm but guesstimating the result, like we would do if we were asked to do a task like that without pencil and paper), and got the result slightly wrong—but when you ask it to actually follow the multiplication algorithm it just explained to me, it can absolutely do it.

I’d be interested in the CoT that led to the incorrect conclusion. If the model actually believed that it’s lazy estimation leads to the correct result, that shows that it’s overestimating its own capabilities—one could call this a fundamental misunderstanding of multiplication. I know that I’m incorrect when I’m estimating the result in my head, because I understand stuff about multiplication—or one could call it a failure of introspection.

The other possibility is that it didn’t care to produce an entirely correct result, and just didn’t bother and got lazy.

oumuamua 23 Nov 2024 15:25 UTC
6 points
3
on: AI #91: Deep Thinking

If future more capable models are indeed actively resisting their alignment training, and this is happening consistently, that seems like an important update to be making?

Could someone explain to me what this resisting behavior during alignment training looked like in practice?

Did the model outright say “I don’t want to do this?”, did it produce nonsensical results, did it become deceptive, did it just … not work?

This claim seems very interesting if true, is there any further information on this?

oumuamua 17 Oct 2024 12:52 UTC
1 point
0
on: Monthly Roundup #23: October 2024
glamorize
glomarize is the word I believe you want to use.

oumuamua 19 Sep 2024 6:40 UTC
12 points
0
on: Slave Morality: A place for every man and every man in his place
As a native German speaker I believe I can expand upon, and slightly disagree with, your definition.

I suspect that a significant portion of the misunderstanding about slave morality comes from the fact that the german word “Moral” (which is part of the Netzschean-term “Sklavenmoral”) has two possible meanings, depending on context: Morality and morale, and it is the latter which I consider to be the more apt translation in this case.

Nietzsche was really speaking about slave morale. It is important to understand that slave morality is not an ethical system or a set of values, rather it is a mindset which facilitates by psychological mechanism the adoption of certain values and moral systems.

To be more concrete, it is a mindset that Nietzsche suspects is common among the downtrodden, raped, unlucky, unworthy, pathethic, and unfit.

Such people, according to Nietzsche, value kindness, “goodness of the heart”, humility, patience, softness, and other such things, and tend to be suspicious of power, greatness, risk, boldness, ruthlessness, etc.

To the slave, the warmhearted motherly figure who cares about lost puppies is a perfect example of what a good person is like—in sharp contrast to an entrepeneurial, risk-taking type of person who wants to colonize the universe or create a great empire or whatever.

To the slave, that which causes fear is evil—to the master, inspiring fear (or, rather, awe) is an almost necessary attribute of something great, worthy, good.

So, returning to your definition: Slave morality gives rise to the idea that he who is a good boy and cleans his room deserves a cookie. That, I would agree, is a significant consequence of slave morality, but it is not its definition.

oumuamua 23 Aug 2024 18:28 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: AI #78: Some Welcome Calm

I don’t think the primary decision makers at Nvidia do believe AGI is likely to be developed soon. I think they are hyping AI because it makes them money, but not really believing that progress will continue all the way to AGI in the near future.

I agree—and if they are at all rational they have expended significant resources to find out whether this belief is justified or not, and I’d take that seriously. If Nvidia do not believe that AGI is likely to be developed soon, I think they are probably right—and this makes more sense if there in fact aren’t any 5-level models around and scaling really has slowed down.

If I were in charge of Nvidia, I’d supply everybody until some design shows up that I believe will scale to AGI, and then I’d make sure to be the one who’s got the biggest training cluster. But since that’s not what’s happening yet, that’s evidence that Nvidia do not believe that the current paradigms are sufficiently capable.

oumuamua 23 Aug 2024 16:05 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: AI #78: Some Welcome Calm
But how would this make sense from a financing perspective? If the company reveals that they are in posession of a 5-level model they’d be able to raise money at a much higher valuation. Just imagine what would happen to Alphabet stock if they proved posession of something significantly smarter than GPT4.

Also, the fact that Nvidia is selling its GPUs rather than keeping them all for itself does seem like some kind of evidence against this. If it were really all just a matter of scaling, why not cut everyone off and rush forward? They have more than enough resources by now to pay the foremost experts millions of dollars a year, and they’d have the best equipment too. Seems like a no-brainer if AGI was around the corner.

oumuamua 23 Aug 2024 14:34 UTC
7 points
6
on: AI #78: Some Welcome Calm
Similarly, he claims that the bill does not acknowledge trade-offs, but the reasonable care standard is absolutely centered around trade-offs of costs against benefits.
Could somebody elaborate on this?
My understanding is that if a company releases an AI model knowing it can be easily exploited (‘jailbroken’), they could be held legally responsible—even if the model’s potential economic benefits far outweigh its risks.
For example, if a model could generate trillions in economic value but also enable billions in damages through cyberattacks, would releasing it be illegal despite the net positive impact?
Furthermore, while the concept of ‘reasonable care’ allows for some risk, doesn’t it prohibit companies from making decisions based solely on overall societal cost-benefit analysis? In other words, can a company justify releasing a vulnerable AI model just because its benefits outweigh its risks on a societal level?
It seems to me that this would be prohibited under the bill in question, and that very much seems to me to be a bad thing. Destroying lots of potential economic value, while having a negilgible effect on x-risk seems bad. Why not drop everything that isn’t related to x-risk, and increase the demands on reporting, openness, sharing risk-assessments, etc.? Seems far more valuable and easier to comply with.
Yes, we will live in a world where everything will be under (some level of) cyberattack ²⁴⁄₇, every identity will have to be questioned, every picture and video will have to somehow be proven to be real, and the absolute most this bill can do is buy us a little bit more time before that starts happening. Why not get used to it now, and try to also maximize the advantages of having access to competent AI models (as long as they aren’t capable of causing x-risks)?

oumuamua 22 Aug 2024 17:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: Guide to SB 1047
1, Yes, but they also require far more money to do all the good stuff as well! I’m not saying there isn’t a tradeoff involved here.

2, Yes, I’ve read that. I was saying that this is a pretty low bar, since an ordinary person isn’t good at writing viruses. I’m afraid that the bill might have the effect of making competent jailbreakable models essentially illegal, even if they don’t pose an existential risk (in which case that would be necessary ofc.), and even if their net value for society is positive, because there is a lot of software out there that‘s insecure and that a reasonably competent coding AI could exploit and cause >500 MM in damages.

I’m saying that it might be better to tell companies to git gud at computer security and accept the fact that yes, an AI will absolutely try to break their stuff, and that they won’t get to sue Anthropic if something happens.

oumuamua 22 Aug 2024 14:55 UTC
1 point
0
on: Guide to SB 1047
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that something this law implies is that it’s only legal to release jailbreakable models if they (more or less) suck.

Got something that can write a pretty good computer virus or materially enable somebody to do it? Illegal under SB1047, and I think the costs might outweigh the benefits here. If your software is so vulnerable that an LLM can hack it, that should be a you problem. Maybe use an LLM to fix it, I don’t know. The benefit of AI systems intelligent enough to do that (but too stupid to pose actual existential risks) seems greater than the downside of initial chaos that would certainly ensue from letting one loose on the world.

If I had to suggest an amendment, I’d word it in such a way that as long as the model outputs publicly available information, or information that could be obtained by a human expert, it’s fine. There are already humans who can write computer viruses, so your LLMs should be allowed to do it as well. What they should not be allowed to do is design scary novel biological viruses from scratch, make scary self-replicating nanotech, etc., since human experts currently can’t do those things either.

Or, in case that is too scary, maybe apply my amendment only to cyber-risks, but not to bio/nuclear/nanotech,....

oumuamua 28 Jun 2024 8:25 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: lemonhope’s comment on: LLM Generality is a Timeline Crux
How is this not basically the widespread idea of recursive self improvement? This idea is simple enough that it has occurred even to me, and there is no way that, e.g. Ilya Sutskever hasn’t thought about that.

oumuamua 9 Jun 2024 16:05 UTC
14 points
9
in reply to: milanrosko’s comment on: Demystifying “Alignment” through a Comic
Don’t do this, please. Just wait and see. This community is forgiving about changing ones mind.

oumuamua 9 Jun 2024 11:51 UTC
6 points
6
on: Demystifying “Alignment” through a Comic
Some hopefully constructive criticism:
- I believe it’s “agentic”, not “agentive”.
- “Save scumming” isn’t a widely known term. If I hadn’t known exactly where this was going, it might have confused me. Consider replacing it with something like “trial and error”.
- I would rework the part where the blob bites the finger off, it causes people to ask stuff like “but how should a piece of Software bite my finger?”, this derails the conversation. Don’t specify exactly how it’s going to try to prevent the pushing of the button, explain that it has a strong inventive to do so, that it is correct about that, and that it can use the abilities which it learned to to understand and manipulate the world to accomplish that.
Edit: To end this on a positive note: This format is under explored. We need more “alignment is hard 101” content that is as convincing as possible, without making use of deception. Thank you for creating something that could become very valuable with a bit of iterative improvement. Like, genuinely. Thank you.

oumuamua 29 May 2024 12:18 UTC
21 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: OpenAI: Fallout
While I am not a lawyer, it appears that this concept might indeed hold some merit. A similar strategy is used by organizations focused on civil rights, known as a “warrant canary”. Essentially, it’s a method by which a communications service provider aims to implicitly inform its users that the provider has been served with a government subpoena, despite legal prohibitions on revealing the existence of the subpoena. The idea behind it is that it there are very strong protections against compelled speech, especially against compelled untrue speech (e.g. updating the canary despite having received a subpoena).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) seems to believe that warrant canaries are legal.

oumuamua 24 May 2024 7:20 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Radford Neal’s comment on: AI #65: I Spy With My AI
I believe Zvi was referring to FAAMG vs startups.

oumuamua 22 Mar 2024 16:52 UTC
1 point
0
on: Vernor Vinge, who coined the term “Technological Singularity”, dies at 79
I read A Fire Upon the Deep a few years ago, and even back then I found it highly prescient. Now I’ll take this sad event as an opportunity to read his highly acclaimed prequel A Deepness in the Sky. RIP.

oumuamua 25 Oct 2023 19:38 UTC
39 points
21
on: Book Review: Going Infinite

Murder is just a word. … SBF bites all the bullets, all the time, as we see throughout. Murder is bad because look at all the investments and productivity that would be lost, and the distress particular people might feel

You are saying this as if you disagreed with it. In this case, I’d like to vehemently disagree with your disagreeing with Sam.

Murder really is bad because of all the bad things that follow from it, not because there is some moral category of “murder”, which is always bad. This isn’t just “Sam biting all the bullets”, this is basic utilitarianism 101, something that I wouldn’t even call a bullet. The elegance of this argument and arguments like it is the reason people like utilitarianism, myself included.

Believing this has, in my opinion, morally good consequences. It explains why murdering a random person is bad, but very importantly does not explain why murdering a tyrant is bad, or why abortion is bad. Deontology very easily fails those tests, unless you’re including a lot of moral “epicycles”.

oumuamua 18 Oct 2023 11:22 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Will no one rid me of this turbulent pest?
To me it feels exactly like the kind of habit we should get into.

Imagine an advanced (possibly alien) civilization, with technology far beyond ours. Do you imagine its members being pestered by bloodsucking parasites? Me neither.

The existence of mosquitoes is an indictment of humanity, as far as I’m concerned.

oumuamua 16 Oct 2023 11:22 UTC
13 points
5
on: Will no one rid me of this turbulent pest?
Is there an actually good argument for why eliminating only disease carrying mosquitoes is acceptable, rather than just wiping them all out? There is no question that even without the threat of malaria, creatures like mosquitoes, bed-bugs and horse-flies decrease the quality of life of humans and animals. Would the effects on ecosystems really be so grave that they might plausibly outweigh the enormous benefits of their extinction?