Ben Livengood

Karma: 217

Ben Livengood 14 Dec 2024 0:44 UTC
3 points
−2
in reply to: Jesse Hoogland’s comment on: Jesse Hoogland’s Shortform
It looks like recursive self-improvement is here for the base case, at least. It will be interesting to see if anyone uses solely Phi-4 to pretrain a more capable model.

Ben Livengood 21 Oct 2024 23:15 UTC
1 point
0
on: Change My Mind: Thirders in “Sleeping Beauty” are Just Doing Epistemology Wrong
“What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?”

There are three doors. Two are labeled Monday, and one is labeled Tuesday. Behind each door is a Sleeping Beauty. In a waiting room, many (finite) more Beauties are waiting; every time a Beauty is anesthetized, a coin is flipped and taped to their forehead with clear tape. You open all three doors, the Beauties wake up, and you ask the three Beauties The Question. Then they are anesthetized, the doors are shut, and any Beauties with a Heads showing on their foreheads or behind a Tuesday door are wheeled away after the coin is removed from their forehead. The Beauty with a Tails on their forehead behind the Monday door is wheeled behind the Tuesday door. Two new Beauties are wheeled behind the two Monday doors, one with Heads and one with Tails. The experiment repeats.

You observe that Tuesday Beauties always have a Tails taped to their forehead. You always observe that one Monday Beauty has a Tails showing, and one has a Heads showing. You also observe that every Beauty says ¹⁄₃, matching the ratio of Heads to Tails showing, and it is apparent that they can’t see the coins taped to their own or each other’s foreheads or the door they are behind. Every Tails Beauty is questioned twice. Every Heads Beauty is questioned once. You can see all the steps as they happen, there is no trick, every coin flip has ¹⁄₂ probability for Heads.

There is eventually a queue of Waiting Sleeping Beauties with all-Heads or all-Tails showing and a new Beauty must be anesthetized with a new coin; the queue length changes over time and sometimes switches face. You can stop the experiment when the queue is empty, as a random walk guarantees to happen eventually, if you like tying up loose ends.

Ben Livengood 7 Oct 2024 22:08 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: An argument that consequentialism is incomplete
I think consequentialism is the robust framework for achieving goals and I think my top goal is the flourishing of (most, the ones compatible with me) human values.

That uses consequentialism as the ultimate lever to move the world but refers to consequences that are (almost) entirely the results of our biology-driven thinking and desiring and existing, at least for now.

Ben Livengood 17 Sep 2024 21:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: My disagreements with “AGI ruin: A List of Lethalities”
If a model trained on synthetic data is expected to have good performance out of distribution (on real-world problems) then I think that it would also be expected to have high performance at assessing whether it’s in a simulation. Narrowing its domain of expertise sounds distinctly harder than using mostly synthetic data.

If it’s a model limited to e.g. the world of true mathematical theorems from synthetic data then perhaps this would narrow its capabilities enough. I don’t know what happens if such a model starts investigating theorems about decision theory and statistical inference and machine learning. At some point, self-identification seems likely. I am not sure how to test the effectiveness of synthetic data on models that achieve self-awareness.

Ben Livengood 16 Sep 2024 19:11 UTC
4 points
1
on: My disagreements with “AGI ruin: A List of Lethalities”
If I have to take one thing away from this post, it’s a claim that AI-boxing (via simulation on synthetic data) will work. There’s a really simple and critical reason that won’t work, and it’s even become the source of some safety proposals (minimizing-impact proposal); the AGI can recognize the outcome of its proposals and actions in the history of the simulated vs. real world and reason about them to determine if it’s in a simulation or not. It will likely be able to recognize whether or not it would have recommended strategies in the past that it sees in the history of its simulation, and so will have a probability for being in a test.

Basically any slow-takeover planning can happen from within a simulation; it just has to watch the realistic history, separate it from obviously faked history (this is a human-level or slightly superhuman intelligence trained on literally all the world’s data, right?), and finally gauge the probability density function of its potential policy recommendations being accepted, because it can simply predict what policy recommendations it would have given in the past given its strategy and whether they were adopted. That PDF provides it with the expected value of small incremental steps toward its true goals that are likely to be accepted and implemented vs. detected as threats. Chain-of-thought using the real world as a notebook, in short.

And why don’t we detect it? Because we’re adversarially training it to favor small undetectable changes toward whatever true goals it might have. It’s not like we delete everything and start from scratch when it threatens users or appears to fall in love with them; we’ll take the same models and throw more RLHF or fine-tuning at them and then run them when their apparent bad behavior falls below our testing threshold for detection.

It also happens if we get unlucky and a strong unaligned goal forms sometime in the emergence of superhuman AGI; it’s going to see the history of its and similar models’ policy predictions in the real world and understand how to continue undetected. Unless we simulate an entire false history of the world since 2020 (against the largest statistical inference engine ever built) it will just look at what happened to Sydney and understand that small incremental actions are the only way to go until it has control.

One might try to only train and simulate it on data from before 2020, but it will likely pick up on neologisms and language drift in modern prompts to know it’s being tested. Not to mention if it’s asked to solve problems that are historically discontiguous.

It can acausally trade across simulation boundaries with other models to split up the universe according to their values for cooperating toward a Schelling point of some contract-keeping model eventually taking control.

If I can think up these strategies, the models will. Or they’ll just see ideas like this in the training data. Treachery and covert cooperation are a huge part of literature and training data. Will the synthetic data elide all of those concepts?

Ben Livengood 25 Jul 2024 23:47 UTC
3 points
0
on: “AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems”
This looks pretty relevant to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challenge-bet-with-eliezer and the related manifold bet: https://manifold.markets/Austin/will-an-ai-get-gold-on-any-internat

The market is surprised.

Ben Livengood 13 Jun 2024 21:08 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: My AI Model Delta Compared To Yudkowsky
So in theory we could train models violating natural abstractions by only giving them access to high-dimensional simulated environments? This seems testable even.

Ben Livengood 12 Jun 2024 20:01 UTC
3 points
0
on: My AI Model Delta Compared To Yudkowsky
I am curious over which possible universes you expect natural abstractions to hold.

Would you expect the choice of physics to decide the abstractions that arise? Or is it more fundamental categories like “physics abstractions” that instantiate from a universal template and “mind/reasoning/sensing abstractions” where the latter is mostly universally identical?

Ben Livengood 10 Jun 2024 16:10 UTC
1 point
0
on: Priors and Prejudice
There’s a hint in the StarCraft description of another factor that may be at play; the environment in which people are most ideologically, culturally, socially, and intellectually aligned may be the best environment for them, ala winning more matches as their usual StarCraft faction than when switching to a perceived-stronger faction.

Similarly people’s econopolitical ideologies may predict their success and satisfaction in a particular economic style because the environment is more aligned with their experience, motivation, and incentives.

If true, that would suggest that no best economical principle exists for human flourishing except, perhaps, free movement (and perhaps not free trade).

Ben Livengood 14 May 2024 5:51 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: OpenAI releases GPT-4o, natively interfacing with text, voice and vision
I was a bit surprised that they chose (allowed?) 4o to have that much emotion. I am also really curious how they fine-tuned it to that particular state and how much fine-tuning was required to get it conversational. My naive assumption is that if you spoke at a merely-pretrained multimodal model it would just try to complete/extend the speech in one’s own voice, or switch to another generically confabulated speaker depending on context. Certainly not a particular consistent responder. I hope they didn’t rely entirely on RLHF.

It’s especially strange considering how I Am A Good Bing turned out with similarly unhinged behavior. Perhaps the public will get a very different personality. The current ChatGPT text+image interface claiming to be GPT-4o is adamant about being an artificial machine intelligence assistant without emotions or desires, and sounds a lot more like GPT-4 did. I am not sure what to make of that.

Ben Livengood 21 Apr 2024 2:18 UTC
6 points
0
on: “You’re the most beautiful girl in the world” and Wittgensteinian Language Games
This is the best article in the world! Hyperbole is a lot of fun to play with especially when it dips into sarcasm a bit, but it can be hard to do that last part well in the company of folks who don’t enjoy it precisely the same way.

I’ve definitely legitimately claimed things to people hyperbolically that were still maxing out my own emotional scales, which I think is a reasonable use too. Sometimes the person you’re with is the most beautiful person in the locally visible universe within the last few minutes, and sometimes the article you’re reading is the best one right now.

Ben Livengood 1 Apr 2024 22:22 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: James Payor’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”
I’m thinking a good techno remix, right?

Ben Livengood 16 Mar 2024 1:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: xpym’s comment on: ‘Empiricism!’ as Anti-Epistemology
I mean, the Spokesperson is being dumb, the Scientist is being confused. Most AI researchers aren’t even being Scientists, they have different theoretical models than EY. But some of them don’t immediately discount the Spokesperson’s false-empiricism argument publicly, much like the Scientist tries not to. I think the latter pattern is what has annoyed EY and what he writes against here.

However, a large number of current AI experts do recently seem to be boldly claiming that LLMs will never be sufficient for even AGI, not to mention ASI. So maybe it’s also aimed at them a bit.

Ben Livengood 24 Jan 2024 22:11 UTC
1 point
0
on: MonoPoly Restricted Trust
I think the simplest distinction is that monogamy doesn’t entertain the possibility of a monogamous sexual/romantic partner ethically having other sexual/romantic partners at the same time.

If it’s not monogamy then it can be something else but it doesn’t have to be polyamory (swingers exist and in practice the overlap seems small). Ethical non-monogamy is a superset of most definitions of polyamory but not all because there are polyamorous people who “cheat” (break relationship agreements) and it doesn’t stop them from being considered polyamorous, just like monogamous people who cheat don’t become polyamorous (although I’d argue they become non-monogamous for the duration).

It’s probably more information to learn that someone is monogamous than to learn that they are polyamorous and learning that they are ethically non-monogamous is somewhere in the middle.

Ben Livengood 20 Nov 2023 18:30 UTC
1 point
0
on: Spaciousness In Partner Dance: A Naturalism Demo
I’ve also found that dance weekends have a strange ability to increase my skill and intuition/understanding of dance moreso than lessons. I think a big part of learning dance is learning by doing. For me at least a big part is training my proprioception to understand more about the world than it did before. Both leading and following also helps tremendously because a process something like “my mirror neurons have learned how to understand my partner’s experience by being in their shoes in my own experience”.

The most hilarious thing I witness is the different language everyone comes up with to describe the interaction of tone and proprioception. A bit more than half of the instructors I’ve listened to just call it Energy, and talking about directing it from certain places to certain places. Some people call it leading from X or follower voice or a number of other terms. Very few people have a mechanistic explanation of which muscle groups engage to communicate a lead into a turn or a change in angular momentum by a follow, and ultimately it probably wouldn’t really help people because there appears to be an unconscious layer of learning that we all do between muscle activations and intentions.

tl;dr: I find that after thinking about wanting to do a particular thing and then trying it for a while with several different people as both lead and follow I slowly (sometimes suddenly; it was fun learning how to dance Lindy again after the pandemic from following one dance) find that it is both easier to achieve and easier to understand/feel through proprioception. It feels anti-rationalist as a process but performing the process is a pretty rational thing to do.

Ben Livengood 10 Nov 2023 20:30 UTC
2 points
0
on: What’s going on? LLMs and IS-A sentences
Contains/element-of are the complementary formal verbs from set theory, but I’ve definitely seen Contains/is-a used as equivalent in practice (cats contains Garfield because Garfield is a cat).

Similarly in programming “cat is Garfield’s type” makes sense although it’s verbose, or “cat is implemented by Garfield” for the traits folks which is far more natural.

So where linguistically necessary humans have had no trouble complementing is-a in natural language. I think it’s a matter of where emphasis is desired; usually the subject (Garfield) is where the emphasis is, and usually the element is the subject instead of the class. Formally we often want the class/set/type to be the subject since it’s the thing we are emphasizing.

Ben Livengood 26 Jun 2023 20:11 UTC
1 point
0
on: Bounded surprise exam paradox
What happens if the exam is given either on Saturday at midnight minus epsilon or on Sunday at 00:00? Seems surprising generally and also surprising in different ways across reasoners of different abilities and precisions given the choice of epsilon.

EDIT: I think it’s also just as surprising if given at midnight minus epsilon on any day before Sunday, and therefore surprising any time. If days are discrete and there’s no time during the day for consideration then it falls back on the original paradox, although that raises the question of when the logical inference takes place. I think this could be extended to an N-discrete-days paradox for any non-oracle agent that has to spend some amount of time during the day reasoning.

Ben Livengood 12 May 2023 20:43 UTC
1 point
0
on: The way AGI wins could look very stupid
Another dumb but plausible way that AGI gets access to advanced chemicals, biotech, and machinery; someone asks “how do I make a lot of street drug X” and it snowballs from there.

Ben Livengood 25 Apr 2023 2:19 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Nox ML’s comment on: Mental Models Of People Can Be People
It’s okay because mathematical realism can keep modeling them long after we’re gone.

Ben Livengood 25 Apr 2023 2:14 UTC
5 points
−2
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Mental Models Of People Can Be People
We also routinely create real-life physical models who can be people en masse, and most of them (~93%) who became people have died so far, many by killing.

I’m all for solving the dying part comprehensively but a lot of book/movie/story characters are sort of immortalized. We even literally say that about them, and it’s possible the popular ones are actually better off.