LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Latest Episodes:

[HUMAN VOICE] "Believing In" by Anna Salamon Feb 14, 2024

Show notes

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffTzL3dWJcxn/believing-in-1
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[Curated Post] ✓
[125+ Karma Post] ✓

[HUMAN VOICE] "Attitudes about Applied Rationality" by Camille Berger Feb 14, 2024

Show notes

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jdqtpT6StjKDKacw/attitudes-about-applied-rationality
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[Curated Post] ✓

Scale Was All We Needed, At First Feb 14, 2024

Show notes

This is a hasty speculative fiction vignette of one way I expect we might get AGI by January 2025 (within about one year of writing this). Like similar works by others, I expect most of the guesses herein to turn out incorrect. However, this was still useful for expanding my imagination about what could happen to enable very short timelines, and I hope it's also useful to you.
The assistant opened the door, and I walked into Director Yarden's austere office. For the Director of a major new federal institute, her working space was surprisingly devoid of possessions. But I suppose the DHS's Superintelligence Defense Institute was only created last week.
“You’re Doctor Browning?” Yarden asked from her desk.
“Yes, Director,” I replied.
“Take a seat,” she said, gesturing. I complied as the lights flickered ominously. “Happy New Year, thanks for coming,” she said. “I called you in today [...]
---
First published:
December 17th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xLDwCemt5qvchzgHd/scale-was-all-we-needed-at-first
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Sam Altman’s Chip Ambitions Undercut OpenAI’s Safety Strategy Feb 11, 2024

Show notes

This is a linkpost for https://garrisonlovely.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-chip-ambitions-undercut If you enjoy this, please consider subscribing to my Substack.
Sam Altman has said he thinks that developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to human extinction, but OpenAI is trying to build it ASAP. Why?
The common story for how AI could overpower humanity involves an “intelligence explosion,” where an AI system becomes smart enough to further improve its capabilities, bootstrapping its way to superintelligence. Even without any kind of recursive self-improvement, some AI safety advocates argue that a large enough number of copies of a genuinely human-level AI system could pose serious problems for humanity. (I discuss this idea in more detail in my recent Jacobin cover story.)
Some people think the transition from human-level AI to superintelligence could happen in a matter of months, weeks, days, or even hours. The faster the takeoff, the more dangerous, the thinking goes.
Sam [...]
---
First published:
February 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pEAHbJRiwnXCjb4A7/sam-altman-s-chip-ambitions-undercut-openai-s-safety
Linkpost URL:
https://garrisonlovely.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-chip-ambitions-undercut
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

[HUMAN VOICE] "A Shutdown Problem Proposal" by johnswentworth, David Lorell Feb 08, 2024

Show notes

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PhTBDHu9PKJFmvb4p/a-shutdown-problem-proposal
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[Curated Post] ✓
[125+ Karma Post] ✓

Brute Force Manufactured Consensus is Hiding the Crime of the Century Feb 04, 2024

Show notes

People often parse information through an epistemic consensus filter. They do not ask "is this true", they ask "will others be OK with me thinking this is true". This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.
- Anon, 4Chan, slightly edited
Ordinary people who haven't spent years of their lives thinking about rationality and epistemology don't form beliefs by impartially tallying up evidence like a Bayesian reasoner. Whilst there is a lot of variation, my impression is that the majority of humans we share this Earth with use a completely different algorithm for vetting potential beliefs: they just believe some average of what everyone and everything around them believes, especially what they see on screens, newspapers and "respectable", "mainstream" websites.
---
First published:
February 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bMxhrrkJdEormCcLt/brute-force-manufactured-consensus-is-hiding-the-crime-of
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

[HUMAN VOICE] "Without fundamental advances, misalignment and catastrophe are the default outcomes of training powerful AI" by Jeremy Gillen, peterbarnett Feb 03, 2024

Show notes

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GfZfDHZHCuYwrHGCd/without-fundamental-advances-misalignment-and-catastrophe
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[Curated Post] ✓
[125+ Karma Post] ✓

Leading The Parade Feb 02, 2024

Show notes

Background
Terminology: Counterfactual Impact vs “Leading The Parade”
Y’know how a parade or marching band has a person who walks in front waving a fancy-looking stick up and down? Like this guy:
The classic 80's comedy Animal House features a great scene in which a prankster steals the stick, and then leads the marching band off the main road and down a dead-end alley.
That is not the guy who's supposed to have that stick.In the context of the movie, it's hilarious. It's also, presumably, not at all how parades actually work these days. If you happen to be “leading” a parade, and you go wandering off down a side alley, then (I claim) those following behind will be briefly confused, then ignore you and continue along the parade route. The parade leader may appear to be “leading”, but they do not have any counterfactual impact on the route [...]
---
First published:
January 31st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LKC3XfWxPzZXK7Esd/leading-the-parade
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

[HUMAN VOICE] "The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled" by ryan_greenblatt, Buck Feb 01, 2024

Show notes

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kcKrE9mzEHrdqtDpE/the-case-for-ensuring-that-powerful-ais-are-controlled
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[Curated Post] ✓
[125+ Karma Post] ✓

Processor clock speeds are not how fast AIs think Feb 01, 2024

Show notes

I often encounter some confusion about whether the fact that synapses in the brain typically fire at frequencies of 1-100 Hz while the clock frequency of a state-of-the-art GPU is on the order of 1 GHz means that AIs think "many orders of magnitude faster" than humans. In this short post, I'll argue that this way of thinking about "cognitive speed" is quite misleading.
The clock speed of a GPU is indeed meaningful: there is a clock inside the GPU that provides some signal that's periodic at a frequency of ~ 1 GHz. However, the corresponding period of ~ 1 nanosecond does not correspond to the timescale of any useful computations done by the GPU. For instance; in the A100 any read/write access into the L1 cache happens every ~ 30 clock cycles and this number goes up to 200-350 clock cycles for the L2 cache. The result [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
January 29th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/adadYCPFAhNqDA5Ye/processor-clock-speeds-are-not-how-fast-ais-think
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected