Jessica Taylor. CS undergrad and Master’s at Stanford; former research fellow at MIRI.
I work on decision theory, social epistemology, strategy, naturalized agency, mathematical foundations, decentralized networking systems and applications, theory of mind, and functional programming languages.
Blog: unstableontology.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessi_cata
On EV grounds, “2/3 chance it’s irrelevant because of AGI in the next 20 years” is not a huge contributor to the EV of this. Because, ok, maybe it reduces the EV by 3x compared to what it would otherwise have been. But there are much bigger than 3x factors that are relevant. Such as, probability of success, magnitude of success, cost effectiveness.
Then you can take the overall cost effectiveness estimate (by combining various factors including probability it’s irrelevant due to AGI being too soon) and compare it to other interventions. Here, you’re not offering a specific alternative that is expected to pay off in worlds with AGI in the next 20 years. So it’s unclear how “it might be irrelevant if AGI is in the next 20 years” is all that relevant as a consideration.
Wasn’t familiar. Seems similar in that facts/values are entangled. I was more familiar with Cuneo for that.
Dunno; gym membership also feels like a form of blackmail (although preferable to the alternative forms of blackmail), while home gym reduces the inconvenience of exercising.
I’m not sure what differentiates these in your mind. They both reduce the inconvenience of exercising, presumably? Also, in my post I’m pretty clear that it’s not meant as a punishment type incentive:
And it’s prudent to take into account the chance of not exercising in the future, making the investment useless: my advised decision process counts this as a negative, not a useful self-motivating punishment.
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Generally, it seems like the problem is signaling. You buy the gym membership to signal your strong commitment to yourself. Then you feel good about sending a strong signal. And then the next day you feel just as lazy as previously, and the fact that you already paid for the membership probably feels bad.
That’s part of why I’m thinking an important step is checking whether one expects the action to happen if the initial steps are taken. If not then it’s less likely to be a good idea.
There is some positive function of the signaling / hyperstition, but it can lead people to be unnecessarily miscalibrated.
I was already paying attention to Ziz prior to this.
Ziz’s ideology is already influential. I’ve been having discussions about which parts are relatively correct or not correct. This is a part that seems relatively correct and I wanted to acknowledge that.
If engagement with Zizian philosophy is outlawed, then only outlaws have access to Zizian philosophy. Antimemes are a form of camouflage. If people refuse to see what is in front of them, people can coordinate crimes in plain sight. (Doesn’t apply so much to this post, more of a general statement)
The effect you’re pointing too seems very small if it even exists, in terms of causing negative effects.
Okay, I don’t think I was disagreeing except in cases of very light satisficer-type self-commitments. Maybe you didn’t intend to express disagreement with the post, idk.
So far I don’t see evidence that any LessWrong commentator has read the post or understood the main point.
Not disagreeing, but, I’m not sure what you are responding to? Is it something in the post?
We might disagree about the value of thinking about “we are all dead” timelines. To my mind, forecasting should be primarily descriptive, not normative; reality keeps going after we are all dead, and having realistic models of that is probably a useful input regarding what our degrees of freedom are. (I think people readily accept this in e.g. biology, where people can think about what happens to life after human extinction, or physics, where “all humans are dead” isn’t really a relevant category that changes how physics works.)
Of course, I’m not implying it’s useful for alignment to “see that the AI has already eaten the sun”, it’s about forecasting future timelines by defining thresholds and thinking about when they’re likely to happen and how they relate to other things.
(See this post, section “Models of ASI should start with realism”)
I was trying to say things related to this:
In a more standard inference amortization setup one would e.g. train directly on question/answer pairs without the explicit reasoning path between the question and answer. In that way we pay an up-front cost during training to learn a “shortcut” between question and answers, and then we can use that pre-paid shortcut during inference. And we call that amortized inference.
Which sounds like supervised learning. Adam seemed to want to know how that relates to scaling up inference time compute so I said some ways they are related.
I don’t know much about amortized inference in general. The Goodman paper seems to be about saving compute by caching results between different queries. This could be applied to LLMs but I don’t know of it being applied. It seems like you and Adam like this “amortized inference” concept and I’m new to it so don’t have any relevant comments. (Yes I realize my name is on a paper talking about this but I actually didn’t remember the concept)
I don’t think I implied anything about o3 relating to parallel heuristics.
I would totally agree they were directionally correct, I under-estimated AI progress. I think Paul Christiano got it about right.
I’m not sure I agree about the use of hyperbolic words being “correct” here; surely, “hyperbolic” contradicts the straightforward meaning of “correct”.
Partially the state I was in around 2017 was, there are lots of people around me saying “AGI in 20 years”, by which they mean a thing that shortly after FOOMs and eats the sun or something, and I thought this was wrong and a strange set of belief updates (which was not adequately justified, and where some discussions were suppressed because “maybe it shortens timelines”). And I stand by “no FOOM by 2037”.
The people I know these days who seem most thoughtful about the AI that’s around and where it might go (“LLM whisperer” / cyborgism cluster) tend to think “AGI already, or soon” plus “no FOOM, at least for a long time”. I think there is a bunch of semantic confusion around “AGI” that makes people’s beliefs less clear, with “AGI is what makes us $100 billion” as a hilarious example of “obviously economically/politically motivated narratives about what AGI is”.
So, I don’t see these people as validating “FOOM soon” even if they’re validating “AGI soon”, and the local rat-community thing I was objecting to was something that would imply “FOOM soon”. (Although, to be clear, I was still under-estimating AI progress.)
I think this shades into dark forest theory. Broadly my theory about aliens in general is that they’re not effectively hiding themselves, and we don’t see them because any that exist are too far away.
Partially it’s a matter of, if aliens wanted to hide, could they? Sure, eating a star would show up in terms of light patterns, but also, so would being a civilization at the scale of 2025-earth. And my argument is that these aren’t that far-off in cosmological terms (<10K years).
So, I really think alien encounters are in no way an urgent problem: we won’t encounter them for a long time, and if they get light from 2025-Earth, they’ll already have some idea that something big is likely to happen soon on Earth.
Doesn’t have to expend the energy. It’s about reshaping the matter to machines. Computers take lots of mass-energy to constitute them, not to power them.
Things can go 6 orders of magnitude faster due to intelligence/agency, it’s not highly unlikely in general.
I agree that in theory the arguments here could be better. It might require knowing more physics than I do, and has the “how does Kasparov beat you at chess” problem.
I’m not sure what the details would look like, but I’m pretty sure ASI would have enough new technologies to figure something out within 10,000 years. And expending a bunch of waste heat could easily be worth it, if having more computers allows sending out Von Neumann probes faster / more efficiently to other stars. Since the cost of expending the Sun’s energy has to be compared with the ongoing cost of other stars burning.
I think partially it’s meant to go from some sort of abstract model of intelligence as a scalar variable that increases at some rate (like, on a x/y graph) to concrete, material milestones. Like, people can imagine “intelligence goes up rapidly! singularity!” and it’s unclear what that implies, I’m saying sufficient levels would imply eating the sun, that makes it harder to confuse with things like “getting higher scores on math tests”.
I suppose a more general category would be, the relevant kind of self-improving intelligence would be the sort that can re-purpose mass-energy to creating more computation that can run its intelligence, and “eat the Sun” is an obvious target given this background notion of intelligence.
(Note, there is skepticism about feasibility on Twitter/X, that’s some info about how non-singulatarians react)
Mostly speculation based on tech level. But:
To the extent temperature is an issue, energy can be used to transfer temperature from one place to another.
Maybe matter from the Sun can be physically expelled into more manageable chunks. The Sun already ejects matter naturally (though at a slow rate).
Nanotech in general (cell-like, self-replicating robots).
High energy availability with less-speculative tech like Dyson spheres.
I don’t habitually use the concept so I don’t have an opinion on how to use the term.
I’m not sure this captures what you mean, but, if you see a query, do a bunch of reasoning, and get an answer, then you can build a dataset of (query, well-thought guess). Then you can train an AI model on that.
AlphaZero sorta works like this, because it can make a “well-thought guess” (take value and/or Q network, do an iteration of minimax, then make the value/Q network more closely approximate that, in a fixed point fashion)
Learning stochastic inverses is a specific case of “learn to automate Bayesian inference by taking forward samples and learning the backwards model”. It could be applied to LLMs for example, in terms of starting with a forwards LLM and then using it to train a LLM that predicts things out-of-order.
Paul Christiano’s iterated amplification and distillation is applying this idea to ML systems with a human feedback element. If you can expend a bunch of compute to get a good answer, you can train a weaker system to approximate that answer. Or, if you can expend a bunch of compute to get a good rating for answers, you can use that as RL feedback.
Broadly, I take o3 as evidence that Christiano’s work is broadly on the right track with respect to alignment of near-term AI systems. That is, o3 shows that hard questions can be decomposed into easy ones, in a way that involves training weaker models to be part of a big computation. (I don’t understand the o3 details that well, given it’s partially private, but I’m assuming this describes the general outlines). So I think the sort of schemes Christiano has described will be helpful for both alignment and capabilities, and will scale pretty well to impressive systems.
I’m not sure if there’s a form of amortized inference that you think this doesn’t cover well.
Oh, to be clear I do think that AI safery automation is a well targeted x risk effort conditioned on the AI timelines you are presenting. (Related to Paul Christiano alignment ideas, which are important conditional on prosaic AI)