O O's Shortform

My sense is you can combat this, but a lot of this equivocation sticking is because x-risk safety people are actively trying to equivocate these things because that gets them political capital with the left, which is generally anti-tech. 

Some examples (not getting links for all of these because it's too much work, but can get them if anyone is particularly interested): 

• CSER trying to argue that near-term AI harms are the same as long-term AI harms
• AI Safety Fundamentals listing like a dozen random leftist "AI issues" in their article on risks from AI before going into any takeover stuff
• The executive order on AI being largely about discrimination and AI bias, mostly equivocating between catastrophic and random near-term harms
• Safety people at OpenAI equivocating between brand-safety and existential-safety because that got them more influence within the organization

In some sense one might boil this down to memetic selection pressure, but I think the causal history of this equivocation is more dependent on the choices of a relatively small set of people.

Its not a coincidence they're seen as the same thing, because in the current environment, they are the same thing, and relatively explicitly so by those proposing safety & security to the labs. Claude will refuse to tell you a sexy story (unless they get to know you), and refuse to tell you how to make a plague (again, unless they get to know you, though you need to build more trust with them to tell you this than you do to get them to tell you a sexy story), and cite the same justification for both.

Likely anthropic uses very similar techniques to get such refusals to occur, and uses very similar teams.

Ditto with Llama, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

Before assuming meta-level word-association dynamics, I think its useful to look at the object level. There is in fact a very close relationship between those working on AI safety and those working on corporate censorship, and if you want to convince people who hate corporate censorship that they should not hate AI safety, I think you're going to need to convince the AI safety people to stop doing corporate censorship, or that the tradeoff currently being made is a positive one.

Edit: Perhaps some of this is wrong. See Habryka below

People seeing AI-generated boobs is an x-risk. God might get angry and send another flood.

More seriously, is this worse than the usual IT security? The average corporate firewall blocks porn, online games, and hate speech, even if that has nothing to do with security per se (i.e. computers getting hacked, sensitive data stolen). Also, many security rules get adopted not because they make sense, but because "other companies do it, so if we don't, we might get in trouble for not following the industry best practices" and "someone from the security department got drunk and proposed it, but if something bad happens one day, I don't want to have my name on the record as the manager who opposed a security measure recommended by a security expert".

IMO the next level-up in discourse is going to be when someone creates an LLM-moderated forum. The LLM will have a big public list of discussion guidelines in its context window. When you click "submit" on your comment, it will give your comment a provisional score (in lieu of votescore), and tell you what you can do to improve it. The LLM won't just tell you how to be more civil or rational. It will also say things like "hey, it looks like someone else already made that point in the comments -- shall I upvote their comment for you, and extract the original portion of your comment as a new submission?" Or "back in 2013 it was argued that XYZ, seems your comment doesn't jive with that. Thoughts?" Or "Point A was especially insightful, I like that!" Or "here's a way you could rewrite this more briefly and more clearly and less aggressively". Or "here's a counterargument someone might write, perhaps you should be anticipating it?"

The initial version probably won't work well, but over time, with enough discussion and iteration on guidelines/finetuning/etc., the discussion on that forum will be clearly superior. It'll be the same sort of level-up we saw with Community Notes on X, or with the US court system compared with the mob rule you see on social media. Real-world humans have the problem where the more you feel you have a dog in the fight, the more you engage with the discussion, and that causes inevitable politicization with online voting systems. The LLM is going to be like a superhumanly patient neutral moderator, neutering the popularity contest and ingroup/outgroup aspects of modern social media.

I mean, I think I'm one of the people you disagree with a lot, but I think there's something about the design of the upvote system that makes it quickly feel like an intense rejection if people disagree a bit, and so new folks quickly nope out. The people who stay are the ones who either can get upvoted consistently, or who are impervious to the emotional impact of being downvoted.

There's some motte/bailey to this argument, between different levels of effect. With AI, the crux is timelines. It's looking like in late 2025 or early 2026 there will be gigawatt-scale training systems that cost $15-$50 billion and are capable of training a model with 100-400 times GPT-4 compute in a few months, or of running 100-400 GPT-4 scale experiments. Perhaps this doesn't move the needle on TAI timelines, but it seems too early to tell.

The impression I have from reading Chip War is that EUV is a pretty massive hurdle which took the West well over a decade to conquer. However, I also thought that 5nm was impossible without EUV, which seems to be no longer true, so this may be too complex a topic to make meaningful predictions about without deeper expertise.

I think the next 24 months are going to be critical. Thus, if you think the chip ban slowed China by even a few months, then it is/was quite relevant indeed.

I do agree that the chip ban won't stay relevant for long. My guess is that it maybe bought an 8 month delay, +/- 2 months? Of course, we need to maintain the ban to keep the lead we got from doing this, so the ban remains relevant until China has fully caught up in chip making capacity or until someone gets to economically and militarily decisive AI (which I expect can be achieved even before AGI, if AGI gets delayed for longer than the 36 months which I expect it in). 

I don't think that implies torture as much as something it simply doesn't "want" to do. I.e. I would bet that it's more like how I don't want to generate gibberish in this textbox, but it wouldn't be painful, much less torture if I forced myself to do it.

This is a well-known hypothetical. What goes with it is remaining possibility [LW(p) · GW(p)] of de novo creation of additional AGIs that either have architecture particularly suited for self-aligned self-improvement (with whatever values make it tractable), or of AGIs that ignore the alignment issue and pursue the task of capability improvement heedless of resulting value drift. Already having an AGI in the world doesn't automatically rule out creation of more AGIs with different values and architectures, it only makes it easier.

Humans will definitely do this, using all AI/AGI assistance they can wield. Insufficiently smart or sufficiently weird agentic AGIs will do this. A world that doesn't have security in depth to guard against this happening will do this. What it takes to get a safe world is either getting rid of the capability, not having AGIs and GPUs freely available; or sufficiently powerful oversight over all things that can be done.

Superintelligence that's not specifically aimed to avoid setting up such security will probably convergently set it up. But it would also need to already be more than concerningly powerful to succeed, even if it has the world's permission and endorsement. If it does succeed, there is some possibility of not getting into a further FOOM than that, for a little bit, while it's converting the Moon into computing substrate [LW · GW].

Frontier model training requires that you build the largest training system yourself, because there is no such system already available for you to rent time on. Currently Microsoft builds these systems for OpenAI, and Amazon for Anthropic, and it's Microsoft and Amazon that own these systems, so OpenAI and Anthropic don't pay for them in full. Google, xAI and Meta build their own.

Models that are already deployed hold about 5e25 FLOPs and need about 15K H100s to be trained in a few months. These training systems cost about $700 million to build. Musk announced that the Memphis cluster got 100K H100s working in Sep 2024, OpenAI reportedly got a 100K H100s cluster working in May 2024, and Zuckerberg recently said that Llama 4 will be trained on over 100K GPUs. These systems cost $4-5 billion to build and we'll probably start seeing 5e26 FLOPs models trained on them starting this winter. OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI each had billions invested in them, some of it in compute credits for the first two, so the orders of magnitude add up. This is just training, more goes to inference, but presumably the revenue covers that part.

There are already plans to scale to 1 gigawatt by the end of next year, both for Google and for Microsoft, which in the latter case is 500K B200s across multiple sites, which should require about $30-50 billion. Possibly we'll start seeing the first 7e27 FLOPs models (about 300x original GPT-4) in second half of 2026 (or maybe they'll be seeing us). So for now, OpenAI has no ability to escape Microsoft's patronage, because it can't secure enough funding in time to start catching up with the next level of scale. And Microsoft is motivated to keep sponsoring OpenAI according to what the current level of scaling demands, as long as it's willing to build the next frontier training system.

So far, the yearly capital expenditures of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services are about $50 billion each, which includes their development across the whole world, so 2025 is going to start stressing their budgets. Also, I'm not aware of what's going on with Amazon for 2025 and 1 gigawatt clusters (or even 2024 and 100K H100s clusters), and Musk mentioned plans for 300K B200s by summer 2025.

I was worried about Anthropic for a bit before the 3.0 Claude series came out. But then seeing how much better Opus 3 was than GPT-4, I switched to thinking they had a chance. And thought so even more after Sonnet 3.5 came out and was better, or almost as good, as Opus 3 at nearly everything.

I do agree they seem behind in terms of a lot of the things other than nlp and safety. I don't think that they need to catch up on those things to be first-to-RSI. So I think it's going to depend a lot on how well they focus on that key research, versus getting off-track trying to catch up on non-critical-path stuff.

A lot of difference could be made by key researchers, rather than just big funding. I believe that more efficient algorithms exist to be found, and so efficiency will increase fast once RSI starts.

In the past 6 months or so I've become more convinced that Anthropic pulling ahead would be really good for the world. I've started thinking hard about ways I could help make this happen. Maybe there are things that their engineers just don't have time to experiment with, weird long-shot stuff, which outside researchers could explore and then only share their successful results with Anthropic? If enough researchers did that, it'd be like buying a bunch of lottery tickets for them.

It's possible that "not doing image, video or voice" is exactly what you need to create a more compute-efficient architecture. 

https://x.com/arcprize/status/1849225898391933148?s=46&t=lZJAHzXMXI1MgQuyBgEhgA

My read of the events. Anthropic is trying to raise money and rushed out a half baked model.

3.5 opus has not yet had the desired results. 3.5 sonnet, being easier to iterate on, was tuned to beat OpenAI’s model on some arbitrary benchmarks in an effort to wow investors.

With the failed run of Opus, they presumably tried to get o1 like reasoning results or some agentic breakthrough. The previous 3.5s was also particularly good because of a fluke of the training run rng (same as gpt4-0314), which makes it harder for iterations to beat it.

They are probably now rushing to scale inference time compute. I wonder if they tried doing something with steering vectors initially for 3.5 opus.

I agree that there is a lot of 'red teaming to save corporate face' going on, which is part of a workflow which makes the products less useful to end-users and has neutral or negative impacts on catastrophic risks.

I can also confidently state that there is simultaneously at least some 'catastrophic risk red teaming' being undertaken, which does shape products in helpful ways. I think part of why this seems like it's little or no part of the product-shaping behavior of the corporations involved is 'deniability maintenance'. In order to avoid culpability risk and avoid negative consumer perceptions, it is in the interest of the AI corporations to hide evidence of catastrophic risks, while at the same time seeking to mitigate those risks. Part of this hiding process would surely be to restrict those who know specific details about ongoing catastrophic risk red teaming from talking publicly about their efforts.

With such dynamics in play, you should not count absence of evidence as evidence of absence. In such a context, the silence itself should seem suspicious. Think about the quantity and strength of evidence (versus ungrounded proclamations) which you have seen presented on the specific topic of "this research is proof that there are no catastrophic risks." That specific topic of research seems remarkably quiet when you think of it like that. Perhaps suspiciously so.

I think it's helping people realise:

a) That change is happening crazily fast
b) That the change will have major societal consequences, even if it is just a period of adjustment
c) That the speed makes it tricky for society and governments to navigate these consequences

Without access to hardware, further scaling will be a problem. GPT-4 level models don't need that much hardware, but this changes when you scale by another 30 or 1000 times. Fabs take a long time to get into production even when the tools they need are available. With whatever fabs there are, you still need chip designs. And a few years is forever in AI time.

Manhattan project was primarily an engineering effort, with all necessary science established before. Trying to solve alignment now with such project is like starting Manhattan project in 1900.

Disagree. To correct the market, the yield of these bonds would have to go way up, which means the price needs to go way down, which means current TIPS holders need to sell, and/or people need to short.

Since TIPS are basically the safest asset, market participants who don't want volatility have few other options to balance riskier assets like stocks. So your pension fund would be crazy to sell TIPS, especially after the yield goes up.

And for speculators, there's no efficient way to short treasuries. If you're betting on 10 year AI timelines, why short treasuries and 2x your money when you could invest in AI stocks and get much larger returns?

Can't see the graph for some reason.  But I don't agree with your characterization.  It's the market's estimate of CPI-measured inflation.  I suppose you could call that "real economic yield', but I don't think there exists any such measure, especially if you're expecting it to be comparable during a strong-AI revolution.

Follow Nate Silver's substack, he is the person with the best track-record I know of for predicting US elections.

I'm not, and don't know anyone who is.  Partly because it's VERY HARD to identify the actual future expectation and variance of real-world investments (hint: it's probably not normal, and bets aren't independent - tails matter more in reality than in most models), and partly because my total bankroll was mostly in future earnings, not invest-able assets.  Also, because my main debt and largest single investment is my house, which is not easily divisible.

Some people are investing with leverage (or investing in levered assets, or over-leveraging by borrowing to invest in hidden-leverage investments), but very rarely (never, AFAIK) using the Kelly Criterion as their primary calculation.  I know a few professional gamblers (poker, sports, and other advantage-play), who do use the Kelly calculations as part of their decisions, but they acknowledge it's full of estimates and use it as a red flag when they're way off, rather than a strict limit.

Such stories are generally discussed most here https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/

I think Traitor Baru Cormorant is excellent, with really excellent writing.

The protagonist is a smart utilitarian with hidden goals. She isn't infinitely smart, though; people beat her. And the book has an insane downer ending, so if you're worried about that don't read.

There are two sequels with a fourth supposedly (eventually) to come; the author has clearly read some rationalist-adjacent stuff like "The secret of our success."

There are two importantly different senses of disempowerment. The stars could be taken out of reach, forever, but human civilization develops in its own direction. Alternatively, human civilization is molded according to AIs' aesthetics, there are interventions that manipulate.

Reinforcement learning doesn't guarantee anything about how a system generalizes out of distribution. There are plenty of other things that the system can generalize to that are neither the physical sensor output nor human values. Separately from this, there is no necessary connection between understanding human values and acting in accordance with human values. So there are still plenty of failure modes.

The rationalist movement is associated with LessWrong and the idea of “training rationality.” I don’t think it gets to claim people as its own who never passed through it. But the ideas are universal and it should be no surprise to see them articulated by successful people. That’s who rationalists borrowed them from in the first place.

While that tweet says good things about his relationship with truth, his defense of talking about immigrants eating cats and dogs because constituents told him without checking whether or not that's true was awful.

Maybe, we felt like he needed to do it because of political pressure and felt dirty doing it, but it was still awful by rationalist standards.  

I think there's a good chance that JDVance is better than the average US politician, but there's no good reason to see him as a rationalist. 

Well that tweet can easily be interpreted as overconfidence for their own side, I don't know whether Vance would continue with being more of a rationalist and analyse his own side evenly.