At the Omnicide Machine Manufacturing Corporation, we work tirelessly to ensure an omnicide-free future. That's why we’re excited to announce our Responsible Increase Policy (RIP)—our internal protocol for managing any risks that arise as we create increasingly omnicidal machines.

Inspired by the risk-management framework used in gain-of-function virology research, our RIP defines a framework of Omnicidal Ability Levels (OAL), reflecting the precautions we plan to take as we release increasingly dangerous features over time:

The basic idea of the RIP is simple: each time we ship an update which makes our product more lethal, we will pause our efforts for some amount of time, and then revise our policies to be in some sense more “cautious.” For example, our RIP contains the following firm commitments:

• We aspire to take actions which are broadly good, rather than broadly bad;
• We hope to refrain from releasing any weakly omnicidal systems [...]

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Outline:

(02:09) The Sweet Lesson: Reasoning is Futile

(03:20) Gain of Omnicide

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(Epistemic status: publication date is significant.)

Some observers have argued that the totality of "AI safety" and "alignment" efforts to date have plausibly had a negative rather than positive impact on the ultimate prospects for safe and aligned artificial general intelligence. This perverse outcome is possible because research "intended" to help with AI alignment can have a larger impact on AI capabilities, moving existentially-risky systems closer to us in time without making corresponding cumulative progress on the alignment problem.

When things are going poorly, one is often inclined to ask "when it all went wrong." In this context, some identify the founding of OpenAI in 2015 as a turning point, being casually downstream of safety concerns despite the fact no one who had been thinking seriously about existential risk thought the original vision of OpenAI was a good idea.

But if we're thinking about counterfactual impacts [...]

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Epistemic status - self-evident.

In this post, we interpret a small sample of Sparse Autoencoder features which reveal meaningful computational structure in the model that is clearly highly researcher-independent and of significant relevance to AI alignment.

Motivation

Recent excitement about Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) has been mired by the following question: Do SAE features reflect properties of the model, or just capture correlational structure in the underlying data distribution?

While a full answer to this question is important and will take deliberate investigation, we note that researchers who've spent large amounts of time interacting with feature dashboards think it's more likely that SAE features capture highly non-trivial information about the underlying models.

Evidently, SAEs are the one true answer to ontology identification and as evidence of this, we show how initially uninterpretable features are often quite interpretable with further investigation / tweaking of dashboards. In each case, we [...]

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Outline:

(00:22) Motivation

(01:38) Case Studies in SAE Features

(01:42) Scripture Feature

(02:07) Perseverance Feature

(02:41) Teamwork Feature

(02:59) Deciphering Feature Activations with Quantization can be highly informative

(03:58) Lesson - visualize activation on full prompts to better understand features!

(04:49) Predictive Feature

(05:29) Neel Nanda Feature

(06:14) Effective Altruism Features

(06:39) “Criticism of Effective Altruism” Feature

(07:03) “Criticism of Criticism of Effective Altruism” Feature

(07:26) “Criticism of Criticism of Criticism of Effective Altruism” Feature

(07:56) Conclusion

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Are you passionate about ensuring the safety and reliability of the world's most lethal and cutting-edge weaponry? Does the idea of creating technology and then working out its impacts excite you? Do you thrive in dynamic environments where innovation meets rigorous safety standards? If so, you might want to consider joining the team at Lockheed Martin (LM), global leaders in advanced weapon systems development!

Position overview and background:

As a Safety Engineer specializing in advanced weaponry systems, you will play a critical role in ensuring we pass the checks and balances we’ve helped Federal Governments develop. You will collaborate very closely with multidisciplinary teams of engineers, scientists, and analysts to assess, mitigate, and manage risks associated with our most innovative products (however we expect any capabilities insights you discover along the way will be kept from your colleagues).

You might be a good fit if you:

• Thrive on [...]

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“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Hillary Clinton, who is still alive

I'm proud and excited to announce the founding of my new startup, Open Asteroid Impact, where we redirect asteroids towards Earth for the benefit of humanity. Our mission is to have as high an impact as possible.

Below, I've copied over the one-pager I've sent potential investors and early employees:

Name: Open Asteroid Impact

Launch Date: April 1 2024

Website: openasteroidimpact.org

Mission: To have as high an impact as possible

Pitch: We are an asteroid mining company. When most people think about asteroid mining, they think of getting all the mining equipment to space and carefully mining and refining ore in space, before bringing the ore back down in a controlled landing. But humanity has zero experience in Zero-G mining in the vacuum of space. This is [...]

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https://openasteroidimpact.org/

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Rationality is Systematized Winning, so rationalists should win. We’ve tried saving the world from AI, but that's really hard and we’ve had … mixed results. So let's start with something that rationalists should find pretty easy: Becoming Cool!

I don’t mean, just, like, riding a motorcycle and breaking hearts level of cool. I mean like the first kid in school to get a Tamagotchi, their dad runs the ice cream truck and gives you free ice cream and, sure, they ride a motorcycle. I mean that kind of feel-it-in-your-bones, I-might-explode-from-envy cool.

The eleventh virtue is scholarship, so I hit the ~books~ search engine on this one. Apparently, the aspects of coolness are:

1. Confidence
2. Playing an instrument
3. Low average kinetic energy

I’m afraid that (1) might mess with my calibration, and Lightcone is committed to moving quickly which rules out (3), so I guess that leaves (2). I [...]

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Outline:

(03:18) Track Listing and Lyrics

(03:24) Folk Album

(10:43) Dance Album

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This is a post to officially announce the sae-vis library, which was designed to create feature dashboards like those from Anthropic's research.

There are 2 types of visualisations supported by this library: feature-centric and prompt-centric.

The feature-centric vis is the standard from Anthropic's post, it looks like the image below. There's an option to navigate through different features via a dropdown in the top left.

The prompt-centric vis is centred on a single user-supplied prompt, rather than a single feature. It will show you the list of features which score highest on that prompt, according to a variety of different metrics. It looks like the image below. There's an option to navigate through different possible metrics and choices of token in your prompt via a dropdown in the top left.

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TL;DR

Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos—aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that's what you're here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I’ll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, George Hotz, and others.

What are Tacit Knowledge Videos?

Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows:

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual [...]

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Outline:

(00:04) TL;DR

(00:46) What are Tacit Knowledge Videos?

(04:37) List of Tacit Knowledge Videos

(04:41) Software Engineering

(04:45) Notable

(05:29) Competitive Programming

(05:52) Game Design

(06:27) Other

(07:41) Research and Studying

(09:19) Business and Business Communication

(11:53) Media

(12:28) Finance

(13:10) Sports

(13:30) Miscellaneous

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TL;DR:

• Options traders think it's extremely unlikely that the stock market will appreciate more than 30 or 40 percent over the next two to three years, as it has over the last year. So they will sell you the option to buy current indexes for 30 or 40% above their currently traded value for very cheap.
• But slow takeoff, or expectations of one, would almost certainly cause the stock market to rise dramatically. Like many people, I think institutional market makers are basically not pricing this in.
• To take advantage of this, instead of buying individual tech stocks, I allocate a sizable chunk of my portfolio to buying LEAPS (Long-term Equity AnticiPation Securities) at high strike prices and faraway expiration dates on these indexes. If a slow takeoff does happen, and public companies capture some of the increased productivity, I'll at least be duly compensated for it when [...]

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Outline:

(01:16) FAQ

(01:20) Does this strategy only make sense if you think visible slow takeoff will begin before 2027?

(02:23) Why not buy futures instead of options, if your thesis is about the next ten years rather than the next three?

(03:09) What is money going to be worth to you post-AGI anyways?

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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The Vesuvius Challenge is a million+ dollar contest to read 2,000 year old text from charcoal-papyri using particle accelerators and machine learning. The scrolls come from the ancient villa town of Herculaneum, nearby Pompeii, which was similarly buried and preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The prize fund comes from tech entrepreneurs and investors Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and several other donors.

In the 9 months after the prize was announced, thousands of researchers and students worked on the problem, decades-long technical challenges were solved, and the amount of recovered text increased from one or two splotchy characters to 15 columns of clear text with more than 2000 characters.

The success of the Vesuvius Challenge validates the motivating insight of metascience: It's not about how much we spend, it's about how we spend it.

Most debate over science funding concerns a [...]

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https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/metascience-of-the-vesuvius-challenge

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