I'd like to opt out of all analytics. I believe the GDPR requires you to implement this?

I am sad to see you getting so downvoted. I am glad you are bringing this perspective up in the comments.

I am pretty excited about doing something more in-house, but it's much easier to get data about how promising this direction is by using some third-party services that already have all the infrastructure. 

If it turns out to be a core part of LW, it makes more sense to in-house it. It's also really valuable to have an relatively validated baseline to compare things to. 

There are a bunch of third-party services we couldn't really replace that we send user data to. Hex.tech as our analytics dashboard service. Google Analytics for basic user behavior and patterns. A bunch of AWS services. Implementing the functionality of all of that ourselves, or putting a bunch of effort into anonymizing the data is not impossible, but seems pretty hard, and Recombee seems about par for the degree to which I trust them to not do anything with that data themselves.

Disappointing to see this is the approach y'all are taking to making ai tools for the site, but I guess it does make sense that you'd want to outsource it. I'd strongly appreciate a way to opt out of having my data sent off-site for this or any future reason.

Thanks!

I agree. This is unfortunately often done in various fields of research where familiar terms are reused as technical terms.

For example, in ordinary language "organic" means "of biological origin", while in chemistry "organic" describes a type of carbon compound. Those two definitions mostly coincide on Earth (most such compounds are of biological origin), but when astronomers announce they have found "organic" material on an asteroid this leads to confusion.

Thank for the great comment!

Do we know if distributed training is expected to scale well to GPT-6 size models (100 trillions parameters) trained over like 20 data centers? How does the communication cost scale with the size of the model and the number of data centers? Linearly on both?

After reading for 3 min this:
Google Cloud demonstrates the world’s largest distributed training job for large language models across 50000+ TPU v5e chips (Google November 2023). It seems that scaling is working efficiently at least up to 50k GPUs (GPT-6 would be like 2.5M GPUs). There are also some surprising linear increases in start time with the number of GPUs, 13min for 32k GPUs. What is the SOTA?

I don't think staging a civil war is generally a good way of saving lives. Moreover, ordinary aging has about a 100% chance of "killing literally everyone" prematurely, so it's unclear to me what moral distinction you're trying to make in your comment. It's possible you think that:

1. Death from aging is not as bad as death from AI because aging is natural whereas AI is artificial
2. Death from aging is not as bad as death from AI because human civilization would continue if everyone dies from aging, whereas it would not continue if AI kills everyone

In the case of (1) I'm not sure I share the intuition. Being forced to die from old age seems, if anything, worse than being forced to die from AI, since it is long and drawn-out, and presumably more painful than death from AI. You might also think about this dilemma in terms of act vs. omission, but I am not convinced there's a clear asymmetry here.

In the case of (2), whether AI takeover is worse depends on how bad you think an "AI civilization" would be in the absence of humans. I recently wrote a post [EA · GW] about some reasons to think that it wouldn't be much worse than a human civilization.

In any case, I think this is simply a comparison between "everyone literally dies" vs. "everyone might literally die but in a different way". So I don't think it's clear that pushing for one over the other makes someone a "Dark Lord", in the morally relevant sense, compared to the alternative.

Tangentially related: some advanced meditators report that their sense that perception has a center vanishes at a certain point along the meditative path, and this is associated with a reduction in suffering.

Research Writing Workflow: First figure stuff out

• Do research and first figure stuff out, until you feel like you are not confused anymore.
• Explain it to a person, or a camera, or ideally to a person and a camera.
  • If there are any hiccups expand your understanding.
  • Ideally, as the last step, explain it to somebody whom you have not ever explained it to.
• Only once you made a presentation without hiccups you are ready to write post.
  • If you have a recording this is useful as a starting point.