What is prospective memory training?
Joseph Miller
Karma: 1,782
I think there’s a spectrum between great man theory and structural forces theory and I would classify your view as much closer to the structural forces view, rather than a combination of the two.
The strongest counter-example might be Mao. It seems like one man’s idiosyncratic whims really did set the trajectory for hundreds of millions of people. Although of course as soon as he died most of the power vanished, but surely China and the world would be extremely different today without him.
The Duke of Wellington said that Napoleon’s presence on a battlefield “was worth forty thousand men”.
This would be about 4% of France’s military size in 1812.
I first encountered it in chapter 18 of The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright.
But here’s a easily linkable online source: https://ctc.westpoint.edu/revisiting-al-qaidas-anthrax-program/
“Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials.”
Ayman al-Zawahiri, former leader of Al-Qaeda, on chemical/biological weapons.I don’t think this is a knock-down argument against discussing CBRN risks from AI, but it seems worth considering.
This is great, thanks. I think these could be very helpful for interpretability.
Thanks I enjoyed this.
The main thing that seems wrong to me, similar to some of your other recent posts, is that AI progress seems to mysteriously decelerate around 2030. I predict that things will look much more sci-fi after that point than in your story (if we’re still alive).
xAI claims to have a cluster of 200k GPUs, presumably H100s, online for long enough to train Grok 3.
I think this is faster datacenter scaling than any predictions I’ve heard.
Source: https://x.com/xai/status/1891699715298730482
DM’d
In that case I would consider applying for EA funds if you are willing to do the work professionally or set up a charity to do it. I think you could make a strong case that it meets the highest bar for important, neglected and tractable work.
How long does it take you to save one life on average? GiveWell’s top charities save a life for about $5000. If you can get close to that there should be many EA philanthropists willing to fund you or a charity you create.
And I think they should be willing to go up to like $10-20k at least because murders are probably especially bad deaths in terms of their effects on the world.
I just found the paper BERT’s output layer recognizes all hidden layers? Some Intriguing Phenomena and a simple way to boost BERT, which precedes this post by a few months and invents essentially the same technique as the logit lens.
So consider also citing that paper when citing this post.
As an aside, I would guess that this is the most cited LessWrong post in the academic literature, but it would be cool if anyone had stats on that.
Yeah I guess, but actually the more I think about it, the more impractical it seems.
I think the solution would be something like adopting a security mindset with respect to preventing community members going off the rails.
The costs would be great because then everyone would be under suspicion by default, but maybe it would be worth it.
The next international PauseAI protest is taking place in one week in London, New York, Stockholm (Sunday 9th Feb), Paris (Mon 10 Feb) and many other cities around the world.
We are calling for AI Safety to be the focus of the upcoming Paris AI Action Summit. If you’re on the fence, take a look at Why I’m doing PauseAI.
For those in Europe, Tomorrow Biostasis makes the process a lot easier and they have people who will talk you through step by step.
A good example of surprising detail I just read.
It turns out that the UI for a simple handheld calculator is a large design space with no easy solutions.
https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/ui-is-hell-four-function-calculators
Following OpenAI Twitter freakouts is a colossal, utterly pointless waste of your time and you shouldn’t do it ever.
I feel like for the same reasons, this shortform is kind of an engaging waste of my time. One reason I read LessWrong is to avoid twitter garbage.
we thought that forecasting AI trends was important to be able to have us taken seriously
This might be the most dramatic example ever of forecasting affecting the outcome.
Similarly I’m concerned that a lot of alignment people are putting work into evals and benchmarks which may be having some accelerating affect on the AI capabilities which they are trying to understand.
“That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.”
You can see what he’s referring to in the pictures Webb published of the scene.