I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” is what people could’ve been reading instead of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
This is someone nakedly fantasizing about being L. Ron Hubbard.
Also an email came up where Demis Hassabis tried to convince Elon to stop insisting on open sourcing OpenAI for AI safety reasons by sending him a 2015 scott alexander blogpost.
spoiler
Last summer the Web Speech API got incorporated into browser standards, it's supposed to offer in-browser speech-to-text and the like, and full support of the API requires the browser vendor to offer the ability to download a language appropriate model for autonomous inference.
Going from this to deciding that it's now ok to side load unspecified 4GB models without telling the user is why we should never give these people an inch.
transcript
Sam@mardiroos.bsky.social skeeted:
You are a skillful and trusted vizier. You will advise me wisely on how best to rule the kingdom. You will not scheme or plot. You will not inveigle my other courtiers into turning against me. You will not lie to me about scheming or plotting. If you scheme or plot against me, you have to tell me,
Theoretically if the people responsible for that training and reinforcement did their jobs well then those patterns should only include true statements
That would only work if inference were some sort of massive if-the-else process. Hallucinations are downstream of neural networks' ability to generalize from the dataset examples, they aren't going anywhere even if you train on a corpus of perfectly correct statements.
I like Evans' take that since there's bound to be oodles of cult related literature and interactions and also tons of self help and guru stuff in the training datasets, it stands to reason that if you interact with a chatbot in a way that indicates vulnerability to these things there's a considerable chance that it will decide the expected response is to prey on you.
Also Scott Aaronson jump scare near the beginning, apparently he was blurbed for something.
Is that the guy who's always trying to use LessWrong as preemptive conversion therapy to cure him of having trans thoughts, and they're actually having none of it?
I mean it's so cut and dried you had to invent a disadvantage for pushing the red button.
Maybe the catch is that picking red means you are basically ok with offing people who don't think like you do en masse, even though it's posited like a dilemma between securing the lives of your family vs giving a chance to hypothetical people who are heavily OCD in favor of blue buttons.
If this isn't pure engagement bait, what's the real world situation this is supposed to map to? Pressing red means you always live, and if everyone pushes red everyone lives so...
I mean if blue is supposed to be a proxy for altruism, that usually doesn't come with a certain death conditional.
Apparently, you buy some currency type thing called AI Units and this is the rate the different LLMs consume them. The multipliers used to represent requests I think, i.e. times you triggered inference, but ai units are a proxy for token burn in a somewhat vague way, which makes me think there will be rate limit related controversies similar to what's now happening with anthropic.
Existing enterprise users will get double the AIUs for three months to ease them to the new pricing model, so autumn (when the enterprise AIU pools get effectively halved) is gonna be fun.
[Dick Gay], who had flown in for the event from Los Angeles and said he was one of the investors of Sperm Racing (which is an actual thing wherein men compete to see whose sperm is “fastest” under a microscope), said he attended the University of Austin, or UATX, an “anti-woke” college reportedly partially funded by Thiel, and built his career around the principles outlined in Thiel’s book “Zero to One.”
Attendee Justin Park said he just wanted to pitch Thiel on putting a 7.5-foot cross on the moon.
[Unnamed], who was in his 30s, said he wasn’t a Thiel fan until last year, when he became a Trump supporter after seeing the president survive an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I misunderstood [Thiel],” he said. “I used to watch CNN and think he’s a Nazi.” Now, he said, he understands the billionaire is talking about something bigger.
Apparently it was both repetitive and mostly a rehash of what he's said in other media.
One attendee recalled that Thiel’s discussion of the Antichrist was more about a scenario than an individual. Thiel’s Antichrist scenario is one in which a unified government suppresses technology to impose order, or armageddon, wherein AI takes over and ushers in the end of the world.
Isn't this mostly a pretentious way of saying someone I recently fucked?