LessWrong 2.0 Reader

taking the dates literally, the first doubling took 19 months and the second doubling took 5 months, which does seem both surprising and increasingly fast. 

Why didn't they run agentic coding or tool use with their reasoning model?

I think the connection would come from the concept of a Lagrangian dual problem in optimization. See also John's Mazes and Duality [LW · GW].

You might enjoy knowing this got a brief shoutout during Boston's Secular Solstice. Thank you for your service!

During our evaluations we noticed that Claude 3.7 Sonnet occasionally resorts to special-casing in order to pass test cases in agentic coding environments like Claude Code. Most often this takes the form of directly returning expected test values rather than implementing general solutions, but also includes modifying the problematic tests themselves to match the code’s output.

Claude officially passes the junior engineer Turing Test?

I find this article confusing. So I find myself returning to fundamentals of computer science algorithms: to greedy algorithms and under what conditions they are optimal. Would anyone care to build a bridge from this terminology to what the author is trying to convey?

Yeah I suspect that these one-shot big protests are drawing on a history of organizing in those or preceding fields. The Women’s March coalition comes together all for one big event but draws on a far on deeper history involving small demonstrations and deliberate organizing to make it to that point, is my point. Idk about Free Internet but I would bet it leaned on Free Speech organizing and advocacy.

I sure wish someone would put on a large AI Safety protest if they know a way to do this in one leap. If I got a sponsor for a concert or some other draw then perhaps I could see a larger thing happening quickly in the family of AI Safety protest, but I’d like the keep the brand pretty earnest and message-focused.

I have to note, based on our history, I interpret your posts as attacking, like the subtext is that I’m just not a good organizer and, if you wanted to, you could organize a way bigger movement way faster. If that’s true, I wish you would! I’m trying my best with my understanding of how this can work for me and I wish more people like you were embracing broad messaging like protests.

Feb '23: 100M[2]

Sep '24: 200M[3] of which 11.5M paid, Enterprise: 1M[4]

Feb '25: 400M[5] of which 15M paid, 15.5M[6] / Enterprise: 2M

One can see:

• Surprisingly, increasingly faster user growth
• While OpenAI converted 11.5M out of the first 200M users, they only got 3.5M users out of the most recent 200M to pay for ChatGPT

This user growth seems neither surprising nor 'increasingly faster' to me. Isn't it just doubling every year? 

That said, I agree based on your second bullet point that probably they've got some headwinds incoming and will by default have slower growth in the future. I imagine competition is also part of the story here.

Seems mistaken to think that the way you use a model is what determines whether or not it’s an agent. It’s surely determined by how you train it?

(And notably the proposal here isn’t to train the model on the outcomes of experiments it proposes, in case that’s what you’re thinking.)

Good questions, thanks!

In 2.4.2, you say that things can only get stored in episodic memory if they were in conscious awareness. People can sometimes remember events from their dreams. Does that mean that people have conscious awareness during (at least some of) their dreams?

My answer is basically “yes”, although different people might have different definitions of the concept “conscious awareness”. In other words, in terms of map-territory correspondence, I claim there’s a phenomenon P in the territory (some cortex neurons / concepts / representations are active at any given time, and others are not, as described in the post), and this phenomenon P gets incorporated into everyone’s map, and that’s what I’m talking about in this post. And this phenomenon P is part of the territory during dreaming too.

But it’s not necessarily the case that everyone will define the specific English-language phrase “conscious awareness” to indicate the part of their map whose boundaries are drawn exactly around that phenomenon P. Instead, for example, some people might feel like the proper definition of “conscious awareness” is something closer to “the phenomenon P in the case when I’m awake, and not drugged, etc.”, which is really P along with various additional details and connotations and associations, such as the links to voluntary control and memory. Those people would still be able to conceptualize the phenomenon P, of course, and it would still be a big part of their mental worlds, but to point to it you would need a whole sentence, not just the two words “conscious awareness”.

Is there anything you can say about what unconsciousness is? i.e. Why is there nothing in conscious awareness during this state? - Is the cortex not thinking any (coherent?) thoughts? (I have not studied unconsciousness.)

I think sometimes the cortex isn’t doing much of anything, or at least, not running close-enough-to-normal that neurons representing thoughts can be active.

Alternatively, maybe the cortex is doing its usual thing of activating groups of neurons that represent thoughts and concepts—but it’s neither forming memories (that last beyond a few seconds), nor taking immediate actions. Then you “look unconscious” from the outside, and you also “look unconscious” from the perspective of your future self. There’s no trace of what the cortex was doing, even if it was doing something. Maybe brain scans can distinguish that possibility though.

About the predictive learning algorithm in the human brain…

I think I declare that out-of-scope for this series, from some combination of “I don’t know the complete answer” and “it might be a dangerous capabilities question”. Those are related, of course—when I come upon things that might be dangerous capabilities questions, I often don’t bother trying to answer them :-P