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Published on April 22, 2025 1:10 PM GMTOr you had better not. The question is which one. This post covers the announcement of Mechanize, the skeptical response from those worried AI might kill everyone, and the associated (to me highly frustrating at times) Dwarkesh Patel podcast with founders Tamay Besiroglu and Ege Erdil. Mechanize plans to help advance the automation of AI labor, which...

Published on April 22, 2025 12:34 PM GMTTL;DR: Several experiments show that I can extract useful information just by treating myself as a random sample, and thus a view that I can't use myself as a random sample is false. But it's still not clear whether this can be used to prove the Doomsday argument.There are two views: one view is that I can...

Published on April 22, 2025 7:16 AM GMTO3 and Claude 3.7 are terribly dishonest creatures. Gemini 2.5 can be a bit dishonest too, even though Google writes tests like mad. I would bet that lie-proof benchmarks will be difficult and expensive to make and that the lie-proofing techniques won't easily generalize outside of coding tasks. Perhaps a more punishing optimizer would help solve this...

Published on April 22, 2025 5:00 AM GMTThis is a cross-post from https://250bpm.substack.com/p/accountability-sinksBack in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents arrived on a KLM flight from Beijing, without the necessary import papers. Because...

Published on April 22, 2025 3:22 AM GMTThis is a linkpost to an article by Ege Erdil and I that we wrote to explain an important perspective that we share regarding AI automation. I'll quote the introduction:A popular view about the future impact of AI on the economy is that it will be primarily mediated through AI automation of R&D. In some form or...

Published on April 21, 2025 3:30 PM GMTThis seemed like a good next topic to spin off from monthlies and make into its own occasional series. There’s certainly a lot to discuss regarding crime. What I don’t include here, the same way I excluded it from the monthly, are the various crimes and other related activities that may or may not be taking place...

Published on April 21, 2025 3:21 PM GMTIn our earlier post, we described how one could parametrize local image patches in natural images by a surface called a Klein bottle.  In Love et al, we used this information to modify the convolutional neural network construction so as to incorporate information about the pixels in a small neighborhood of a given pixel in a systematic...

Published on April 21, 2025 2:10 PM GMTBy Xander BalwitWith death all but obsolete, Jamie’s life felt moot and emaciated. The Obituary Desk at The Times, where he worked, had turned into a ghost town he presided over with the bearing of a man who had given everything up for the bitter disappointment of a mine devoid of mineral riches. He would go on...

Published on April 21, 2025 3:18 AM GMTEpistemic status: exploratory but confident. This essay presents a general framework for identifying and analyzing ideologies based on recurring structural patterns. It draws on observation, theory, and examples from across the political spectrum. The goal is to improve mental defenses against manipulative belief systems, not to discredit all ideological thinking. I welcome critique and refinement.We live in...

Published on April 21, 2025 3:52 AM GMTDisclaimer: this post was not written by me, but by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous. I did some editing, however.So a recent post my friend wrote has made the point quite clearly (I hope) that LLM performance on the simple task of playing and winning a game of Pokémon Red is highly dependent on the...

Published on April 21, 2025 3:09 AM GMTAI 2027 lies at a Pareto frontier – it contains the best researched argument for short timelines, or the shortest timeline backed by thorough research[1]. My own timelines are substantially longer, and there are credible researchers whose timelines are longer still. For this reason, I thought it would be interesting to explore the key load-bearing arguments AI...

Published on April 21, 2025 2:21 AM GMT***Severance Spoilers!***Nick Bostrom talks about coherent, extrapolated ethics as the goal of AI alignment, specifically to avoid calcification from our current moral code, which likely contains many things future generations would find unethical, just as we would previous generations. Since reading that, I've been wondering what things we accept today might alter the trajectory of the future.Another...

Published on April 20, 2025 7:00 PM GMTSay hi at ICSE in Ottawa, I’ll be at the reception Thursday, this colocated event on Friday, and the LLM4Code workshop on Saturday.As usual there are no benefits to the paid subscription. Sorry for consolidating two months into one post again after I said I wouldn’t. Subscribe nowFermstimate of the cost of patching all security relevant open...

Published on April 20, 2025 6:50 PM GMTThe current University System is bad. Very bad. Half of young adults spend 3 to 4 years learning nothing of particular value so that they can get a piece of paper that gives them a leg up when applying for a job. They can't stop, because then somebody else will be first in line for an interview,...

Published on April 19, 2025 6:37 PM GMTThis post summarizes some of the research I have been doing for Bootstrap Bio AKA kman and Genesmith TL;DR We currently don’t have a list of all imprinted genes that are important in human development, but further long-read sequencing in adults and in the human placenta is going to get us close to that goal. Measuring DNA...

Published on April 19, 2025 12:47 AM GMTWe don’t always know what we’re looking for until we stop looking for what we are told to want.When I worked as a relationship coach, most people came to me with a list. A neat, itemised checklist of traits their future partner must have. Tall. Intelligent. Ambitious. Spiritual. Funny but not flippant. Driven but not workaholic. Family-oriented...

Published on April 19, 2025 3:37 PM GMTIn the face of any hard problem—reversing climate change, curing cancer, or starting a great novel—modern LLMs can generate thousands of possible solutions relatively cheaply.Most solutions from most prompts are bad: they’re not new relative to the state of the art, not feasible, or not significant enough.But for every thousand ideas an LLM has about how to...

Published on April 19, 2025 2:47 PM GMTThough, given my doomerism, I think the natsec framing of the AGI race is likely wrongheaded, let me accept the Dario/Leopold/Altman frame that AGI will be aligned with the national interest of a great power. These people seem to take as an axiom that a USG AGI will be better in some way than a CCP AGI....

Published on April 19, 2025 2:09 PM GMTI aim to cover a lot of ground, but only briefly. Click through the links for more detailed explanations.Several of the techniques here see general use outside of interpretability. My definitions/references lean towards how they specifically apply to Mechanistic Interpretability Sparse Dictionary Learning describes any ML technique that aims to find a set of “atoms” that can be...

Published on April 19, 2025 11:40 AM GMT Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook. This is an internal strategy note I wrote in November 2024 that I'm making public with some light editing. In my work at the NAO I've been thinking about what I expect to see as LLMs continue to become more capable and get closer to where they can significantly accelerate their...

Published on April 19, 2025 9:12 AM GMTThe ambulance screeched to a halt with the flair of a rock opera outside an apartment block whose hallway smelled like dry leaves, soggy cardboard, and… was that melted cheese? Best not to investigate. Within seconds, my partner—a guy who had tragedy for breakfast with his coffee—confirmed the inevitable: the mother, lifeless, sprawled in the kitchen next...

Published on April 19, 2025 4:29 AM GMTThis is a living document. Crosspost below may not be updated. Click link for the latest version. 2025-04-19 tldr SecureDrop provides less source privacy than journalist privacy, even though it is the source not the journalist who is more likely to be punished for their actions. SecureDrop opsec guide may be overkill for the median whistleblower but...

Published on April 18, 2025 9:20 PM GMTOpenAI has finally introduced us to the full o3 along with o4-mini. Greg Brockman (OpenAI): Just released o3 and o4-mini! These models feel incredibly smart. We’ve heard from top scientists that they produce useful novel ideas. Excited to see their positive impact on people’s daily lives and humanity’s hardest problems! Sam Altman: we expect to release o3-pro...