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Published on February 14, 2025 11:18 PM GMTUpdate: seems like earlier today the OpenAI Board rejected Musk's proposal and said OpenAI is "not for sale." Epistemic status: thought about it briefly; seems like a longshot that's probably not worth it but curious what people think of the possibility. You might have heard Sam Altman is trying to transition OpenAI to a for-profit company and has offered...

Published on February 14, 2025 3:43 PM GMTWe are excited to release a short course on AGI safety for students, researchers and professionals interested in this topic. The course offers a concise and accessible introduction to AI alignment, consisting of short recorded talks and exercises (75 minutes total) with an accompanying slide deck and exercise workbook. It covers alignment problems we can expect as AI capabilities...

Published on February 14, 2025 3:30 PM GMTThis post covers three recent shenanigans involving OpenAI. In each of them, OpenAI or Sam Altman attempt to hide the central thing going on. First, in Three Observations, Sam Altman’s essay pitches our glorious AI future while attempting to pretend the downsides and dangers don’t exist in some places, and in others admitting we’re not going to...

Published on February 14, 2025 2:29 PM GMTI recently messed about with Celtic knot patterns, for which there are some fun generators online, eg. https://dmackinnon1.github.io/celtic/ or https://w-shadow.com/celtic-knots/. Just as addictive to doodle as the 'cool s' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S) but with more cool.However, everyone knows that its cooler to tile a plane with hexagons than squares. So I cooked up some tiles to make the Hex-grid...

Published on February 14, 2025 6:45 AM GMTMuch is said about society's general lack of AI situational awareness. One prevailing topic of conversation in my social orbit is our ongoing bafflement about how so many other people we know, otherwise smart and inquisitive, seem unaware of or unconcerned about AI progress, x-risk, etc. This hardly seems like a unique experience.We all can see that...

Published on February 14, 2025 6:14 AM GMTBelow is the core of my response to the Federal Register's "Request for Information on the Development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan."I'd encourage anyone to do do the same. Instructions can be found here. More of an excuse to write current thoughts on AI safety than an actual attempt to communicate them to the government. To...

Published on February 14, 2025 4:40 AM GMTI'm aware of the understanding that "a circuit is a subgraph of a neural network that implements a specific computation." In practice (to my understanding) the way you identify "circuits" is by identifying components of the neural network that have high correlation with certain tasks, and doing some ablations to see if it's "causally responsible" for performance...

Published on February 13, 2025 10:35 PM GMTWe know that the fundamental components of reality are relatively homogeneous wherever we look—they’re protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, neutrinos, quarks, and so on. What if we allowed those who don’t want to live in a world dominated by agentic AIs to build spaceships outfitted with BMI armchairs and digitize a copy of Earth—like a modern Noah’s Ark...

Published on February 14, 2025 1:22 AM GMTThis was the project I worked on during BlueDot Impact's AI Safety Fundamentals Alignment course, which expands on findings from Meinke et al's "Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming".SummaryA dataset of 1,011 variations of the sandbagging prompt ("consequences") from Meinke et al were generated using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and used to run 7 sandbagging evaluations (2...

Published on February 13, 2025 11:40 PM GMTIn 1836, Andrew Jackson had served two terms. In the presidential election, incumbent vice president Martin Van Buren defeated several Whig candidates.Historical BackgroundBy 1836, there were 25 states. States were often added in pairs (one slave and one free) to maintain political balance: Mississippi and Indiana, Alabama and Illinois, Missouri and Maine. Arkansas had just been added...

Published on February 13, 2025 9:54 PM GMTHi there! I'm Thomas Eliot. You may remember me from the Bay Area Rationalist Community, or the one in New York, or the one in Melbourne. I'm writing a semi-autobiographical roleplaying called THE SINGULARITY WILL HAPPEN IN LESS THAN A YEAR inspired by The Quiet Year by Avery Alder about life in a barely fictionalized intentional community during...

Published on February 12, 2025 2:00 PM GMTIt doesn’t look good. What used to be the AI Safety Summits were perhaps the most promising thing happening towards international coordination for AI Safety. This one was centrally coordination against AI Safety. In November 2023, the UK Bletchley Summit on AI Safety set out to let nations coordinate in the hopes that AI might not kill...

Published on February 12, 2025 10:20 AM GMTThis is the second part of a series on the identity of social networks:Part one: Looking for humanness in the world wide socialPart two: Inside the dark forests of the internetIf you’ve been hanging for long enough in the tech-intellectual internet corner, you’re probably acquainted with The Theory of The Dark Forest of the Internet—which was published...