LessWrong 2.0 Reader

by saying their name aloud: [...] …but it’s a lot more difficult to use active recall to remember people’s names.

I'm confused, isn't saying their name in a sentence an example of active recall?

Why do you focus on this particular guy?

Because I saw a few posts discussing his trades, vs none for anyone else's, which in turn is presumably because he moved the market by ten percentage points or so. I'm not arguing that this "should" make him so salient, but given that he was salient I stand by my sense of failure.

Thanks, that clears it up. Indeed I agree that "take real trajectories, then edit the attacks in" is promising, and didn't track this when writing my first comment (oops) - thanks for flagging it.

I don't know if it's aimed at neural nets specifically (and of course it is in fact visible to the naked eye) but AFAIK the noise is there to disrupt computer-vision systems, yes. (And in the first one it seems to have been effective in keeping 4o from recognizing the light bulb or the buildings, though interestingly Claude was able to see the buildings and not the bulb or the teapot). Agreed re: hoping they die soon XD

The important thing is that both do active learning & decisionmaking & search, i.e. RL. *

LLMs don't do that. So the gain from doing that is huge. 

Synthetic data is a bit of a weird word that get's thrown around a lot. There are fundamental limits on how much information resampling from the same data source will yield about completely different domains. So that seems a bit silly. Ofc sometimes with synthetic data people just mean doing rollouts, i.e. RL. 

*the word RL sometimes gets mistaken for only very specific reinforcement learning algorithm. I mean here a very general class of algorithms that solve MDPs. 

Why do you focus on this particular guy? Tens of thousands of traders were cumulatively betting billions of dollars in this market. All of these traders faced the same incentives.

Note that it is not enough to assume that willingness to bet more money makes a trader worth paying more attention to. You need the stronger assumption that willingness to bet n times more than each of n traders makes the single trader worth paying more attention to than all the other traders combined. I haven’t thought much about this, but the assumption seems false to me. 

Nice post!

Regarding o1 like models: I am still unsure how to draw the boundary between tasks that see a significant improvement with o1 style reasoning and tasks that do not. This paper sheds some light on the kinds of tasks that benefit from regular COT. However, even for mathematical tasks, which should benefit the most from CoT, o1-preview does not seem that much better than other models on extraordinarily difficult (and therefore OOD?) problems. I would love to see comparisons of o1 performance against other models in games like chess and Go. 

Also, somewhat unrelated to this post, what do you and others think about x-risk in a world where explicit reasoners like o1 scale to AGI. To me this seems like one of the safest forms of AGI, since much of the computation is happening explicitly, and can be checked/audited by other AI systems and humans. 

If we can construct fake honeypots that are indistinguishable - to the policy - from real opportunities, and do this at scale, then that could suffice: we could drive the policy's P(deployment | great opportunity) very low. (This relies on how many high-stakes we can create and how many the model will see in deployment.)

Yes totally. (This is impractical if you think that the model has a very large number of opportunities to attack, e.g. if every time it's programming is an opportunity to attack.)

If we can construct fake attacks that are indistinguishable - to the untrusted monitor - from real attacks, then that possibly suffices: we could drive the monitor's prior P(deployment | attack) very low

Indeed; as you know, this is probably easier than driving the policy's P(deployment|great opportunity) sufficiently low, because untrusted monitors have to defect reliably [AF · GW].

If you are saying that we don't need either of these - i.e. that we can get by with honeypots/attacks that are noticeably fake - then that's news to me, and I don't see how you can do that.

What I was trying to say is that if you don't have the ability to generate tasks that look real, you might still be able to honeypot your monitor by taking real trajectories and editing them to contain fake attacks (that you hope the monitor will be unable to distinguish from real attacks). I discuss this here [AF · GW].

CAPTCHAs have "adversarial perturbations"? Is that in the sense of "things not visible to humans, but specifically adversarial to deep learning networks"? I thought they just had a bunch of random noise and weird ad hoc patterns thrown over them.

Anyway, CAPTCHAs can't die soon enough. Although the fact that they persist in the face of multiple commercial services offering to solve 1000 for a dollar doesn't give me much hope...

This isn't directly related to TMS, but I've been trying to get an answer to this [LW · GW] question for years, and maybe you have one.

When doing TMS, or any depression treatment, or any supplementation experiment, etc. it would make sense to track the effects objectively (in addition to, not as a replacement for subjective monitoring). I haven't found any particularly good option for this, especially if I want to self-administer it most days. Quantified mind comes close, but it's really hard to use their interface to construct a custom battery and an indefinite experiment.

Do you know of anything?