LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Conjecture is indeed a for-profit company, and I've often found Connor disingenuous at best.

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question.

How can NDA actually work effectively? What if Alice, ex-employee of OpenAI write a "totally fictional short story about Bob, ex-employee of ClosedDM, who wants to tell about horrible things this company did"?

if a lab has 100 million AI employs and 1000 human employees then you only need one human employee to spend 1% of their allotted AI headcount on your pet project and you’ll have 1000 AI employees

Back to clipping away an entire range, rather than a single dimension. Here's ordering it by the importance computed by clipping away a single dimension:

Less chaotic maybe, but also much slower at reaching a reasonable performance, so I tried a compromise ordering that takes both size and performance into account:

Doesn't seem like it works super great tbh.

Edit: for completeness' sake, here's the initial graph with log-surprise-based plotting.

That makes sense! Maybe you feel like writing a post on the topic? Potentially including a numerical or analytical model.

Inspired by Concentration of Force [LW · GW], which introduced me to the concept, I'm trying to create a TAP [LW · GW] to answer the question "what specific task do I need to accomplish?" before I unlock my phone. If I can't answer the question, maybe that "mental speed bump" makes it easier to put my phone back down.

As a non-physicist I kind of had the idea that the reason I was taught Newtonian mechanics in high school was that it was assumed I wasn't going to have the time, motivation, or brainpower to learn some kind of fancy, real university version of it, so the alternate idea that it's useful for intuition-building of the concepts is novel and interesting to me.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year. Will this post make the top fifty?

(I'm the OP)

I'm not trying to say "it's bad to large sums of money to any group because humans have a tendency to to seek power." 

I'm saying "you should be exceptionally cautious about giving large sums of money to a group of humans with the stated goal of constructing an AGI."

You need to weight any reassurances they give you against two observations:

1. The commonly observed pattern of individual humans or organisations seeking power (and/or wealth) at the expense of the wider community. 
2. The strong likelihood that there will be an opportunity for organisations pushing ahead with AI research to obtain incredible wealth or power.

So, I'm not trying to say "humans seek power therefore giving any group of humans money is bad". 

It's that "humans seek power" and, in the specific case of AI companies, there may be incredibly strong rewards for groups that behave in a self-interested way.

The general idea I'm working off is that you need to be exceptionally skeptical of seemingly altruistic statements and commitments made by humans when there are exceptionally lucrative incentives to break these commitments at a later point in time (and limited ways to enforce the original commitment).

"In particular, it emphasized the importance of distributing AI broadly;¹ our current view is that this may turn out to be a promising strategy for reducing potential risks"

Yes, I'm interpreting the phrase "may turn out" to be treating the idea with more seriousness than it deserves. 

Rereading the paragraph, it seems reasonable to interpret it as politely downplaying it, in which case my statement about Open Phil taking the idea seriously is incorrect.