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Published on April 28, 2025 11:46 PM GMTIntroductionFocusmate changed my life. I started using it mid-2023 and have been a power user since 2023. Here are the high-level stats:I've spent 2,456 hours on Focusmate.I've met 1,447 people.I have 10+ friends with whom I've spent between 30 and 300 hours.I've met five of my Focusmate friends in person. I've had a Focusmate's family over for...

Published on April 28, 2025 8:56 PM GMTIn most democracies,the very way people file complaints tells you how well their government works.You can vote.You can sue.You can organize, lobby, or protest.But in China?You write a physical letter to Beijing,then pray someone reads it.This is called Xinfang — the so-called "petition system."It sounds like democracy.It’s not.1. There is No Real "Letter Culture" in ChinaIn the...

Published on April 27, 2025 5:08 PM GMTI am starting a meetup for anyone in Victoria. I am unsure if there is anyone here who's into LessWrong but if you are RSVP!Discuss

Published on April 27, 2025 4:17 PM GMTOur universe is probably a computer simulation created by a paperclip maximizer to map the spectrum of rival resource‑grabbers it may encounter while expanding through the cosmos. The purpose of this simulation is to see what kind of ASI (artificial superintelligence) we humans end up creating. The paperclip maximizer likely runs a vast ensemble of biology‑to‑ASI simulations,...

Published on April 27, 2025 4:11 PM GMTI wasn't on LessWrong 10 years ago, during the pre-ChatGPT era, so I'd like to hear from people who were here back in the day. I want to know how AI-related discussions have changed and how people's opinions have changed.Are you leaning more towards "alignment is easy" or towards "alignment is hard", compared to many years ago?...

Published on April 27, 2025 3:31 PM GMTSo this post is an argument that multi-decade timelines are reasonable, and the key cruxes that Ege Erdil has with most AI safety people who believe in short timelines are due to the following set of beliefs:Ege Erdil don't believe that trends exist that require AI to automate everything in only 2-3 years.Ege Erdil doesn't believe that...

Published on April 27, 2025 8:18 AM GMT ChatGPT recently introduced improved cross-chat memory, and I've found myself using it a lot more sense then. Everything from helping write components with unfamiliar JavaScript libraries, to counseling me through a breakup. So much so that when I face a new problem, my mind turns not to breaking it down myself, but how to structure it as...

Published on April 27, 2025 2:38 PM GMTThis is post 2 of a sequence on my framework for doing and thinking about research. Start here.Before I get into what exactly to do at each stage of the research process, it’s worth reflecting on the key mindsets that are crucial throughout the process, and how they should manifest at each stage.I think the most important...

Published on April 27, 2025 2:08 PM GMTA common idea held by people debating AI art is that the growing amount of AI-generated images present in training data will cause AI diffusion models, like midjourney or stable diffusion, to produce bad results as existing flaws get amplified.However, I believe the opposite will occur, as there is a bias in AI outputs being published on...

Published on April 27, 2025 12:15 PM GMTSomeone asked me for an example of Recursive Self Improvement (RSI). I tried writing a sketch of a possible future where things go bad because of AI RSI. Here is my contribution to the Sci-Fi genre: ASI cautionary tales... Let's suppose some AI company creates a system with the goal of autonomously improving it's ability to sway...

Published on April 27, 2025 4:51 AM GMT"Hive mind" may not be the ideal term. What I'm really envisioning is something modelled on the existing relationship between human users and frontier LLMs, but with the "users" actually just being LLMs too, or simple programs that mediate between LLMs. But first, consider OpenAI's o-series models, and their human user base. For any particular model, OpenAI presumably...

Published on April 27, 2025 4:31 AM GMTDario Amodei posted a new essay titled "The Urgency of Interpretability" a couple days ago.Some excerpts I think are worth highlighting:The nature of AI training makes it possible that AI systems will develop, on their own, an ability to deceive humans and an inclination to seek power in a way that ordinary deterministic software never will; this...

Published on April 25, 2025 4:02 PM GMTIntroductionEffective Altruism (EA) is a social movement that aims to use reason and evidence to help others as much as possible. It encourages people to ask not just “how to do good”, but how to do the most good. This has led members to support things like global health interventions, existential risk reduction, and animal welfare.I used...

Published on April 25, 2025 3:32 PM GMTSince the 1970s, productivity has outpaced wage growth in many sectors. One sector where wages have kept up with productivity growth is tech, especially among programmers. But, I suspect this is changing thanks to the use of AI coding assistants.To quickly review the relevant economic history, before 1973 wage growth roughly tracked productivity in Western economies, but...

Published on April 25, 2025 2:40 PM GMT At work we've recently been using zstd as a better-compressing alternative to gzip, and overall I've been pretty happy with it. A minor documentation gripe, though, is that the behavior around multithreaded compression is a bit unclear. I understand it's chunking the work and sending chunks to different threads to parallelize the compression process, and this...

Published on April 25, 2025 10:03 AM GMTLetters to attorney generals, etc, to block OpenAI from moving assets into a corporation.Sep: Public CitizenDec: MetaJan, Apr: Californian civil society nonprofitsApr: Coalition for AI Nonprofit IntegrityApr: Safety ex-employees' brief for Musk lawsuitApr: Safety+ researchers on 'not for private gain' Discuss

Published on April 25, 2025 5:12 AM GMTI was recently encouraged to read Jeffrey Heninger's report "Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?"  It was interesting, but I thought it had some critical flaws.  I would've recommended rejecting it if I were reviewing it for an academic conference.  I've written a mock review below.  As typical when reviewing for a conference, I didn't aim to mince...

Published on April 24, 2025 9:22 PM GMTTLDR: I really like the graph where they show the best model for every price point. And how Google's models have the best performance at any price point. So I made it live and fetches news data and model regularly because things are moving fast and images don't refresh themselves. (Thanks Claude) https://winston-bosan.github.io/llm-pareto-frontier/(Will be hosted soon in a...

Published on April 24, 2025 9:15 PM GMTIn this post, we study whether we can modify an LLM’s beliefs and investigate whether doing so could decrease risk from advanced AI systems.We describe a pipeline for modifying LLM beliefs via synthetic document finetuning and introduce a suite of evaluations that suggest our pipeline succeeds in inserting all but the most implausible beliefs. We also demonstrate...

Published on April 24, 2025 9:15 PM GMTYesterday, I couldn't wrap my head around some programming concepts in Python, so I turned to ChatGPT (gpt-4o) for help. This evolved into a very long conversation (the longest I've ever had with it by far), at the end of which I pasted around 600 lines of code from Github and asked it to explain them to...

Published on April 24, 2025 8:17 PM GMTWhat in retrospect seem like serious moral crimes were often widely accepted while they were happening. This means that moral progress can require intellectual progress.[1] Intellectual progress often requires questioning received ideas, but questioning moral norms is sometimes taboo. For example, in ancient Greece it would have been taboo to say that women should have the same political...

Published on April 24, 2025 7:09 PM GMTIn late 2019 I wrote a TTRPG.The theme was alien sentience (or perhaps sapience is the technical term), both "organic" (extra terrestrial) and "artificial" (AI/robots). This is the prologue that kicks off play. I found it really fascinating to look back on late 2019 and how I was thinking about some of these topics. Earthdate March 2022. Two months ago...

Published on April 23, 2025 4:05 PM GMTtl;dr: Even if we can't solve alignment, we can solve the problem of catching and fixing misalignment.If a child is bowling for the first time, and they just aim at the pins and throw, they’re almost certain to miss. Their ball will fall into one of the gutters. But if there were beginners’ bumpers in place blocking...

Published on April 23, 2025 12:01 PM GMTDear policymakers,We demand that the AI alignment budget be Belief-Consistent with the military budget.Belief-Consistency is a simple yet powerful idea:If you spend 8000 times less on AI alignment (compared to the military),You must also believe that AI risk is 8000 times less (than military risk).[1]Yet the only way to reach Belief-Consistency, is toGreatly increase AI alignment spending,orBecome...