Many people expect the AI paradigm to approximately AGI complete, and expect it to smoothly scale to AI that can do innovative science. i.e. the kind of science you'd need to do to develop a plague from scratch that actually kills all humans, with very limited opportunity to experiment. Or, the kind of science you'd need to solve alignment, so you could build a more powerful successor AI that shares your values. A periodic thread of disagreement has been @TsviBT, @Steven Byrnes and some others arguing that, yes, the AIs are getting better at verifiable tasks, but they still seem to be missing some basic sauce that lets them actually form new concepts on the fly and apply them. The AIs are getting better at "brute force creativity", where you try every single idea ever devised by Man in parallel and maybe one of them works. But there's still a kind of creativity that a) would have way higher efficiency and b) is maybe necessary for doing some kinds of breakthrough work. On one hand, my subjective experience has been seeing AIs be able to demonstrate increasingly interesting judgement and taste in increasingly many domains (even open-ended ones). But, I do indeed still run into AIs that get confused and "just don't get it", in a way that is pretty suggestive that there is still something significant missing. OpenAI has lately been shipping some major results in mathematics, for problems that people had previously agreed were important and hard. But, I'd heard for previous results that the proofs turned out sort of "not actually interesting", compared to how sometimes makes you go "Holy shit that's beautiful/elegant/surprising" and conveys someone is a level above you." Recently they shipped a lot of new proofs on important problems. I'm not a math guy. But, seems fairly important for some people with enough context to wade through them and figure out "What sort of cognition was involved here?". Do any of the proofs have the vibe of AlphaGo's Move 37? Does it inv
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The text discusses cultural differences between China and the West, focusing on social media and communication styles. It highlights how Chinese social media is perceived as overwhelming and inauthentic by Western standards, and how these differences may pose challenges for AI safety awareness efforts in China.
6 days agoLessWrongThe text discusses the debate between 'Alignment Engineering' and 'Misalignment Science' in AI alignment research, highlighting concerns that current alignment methods might inadvertently accelerate capabilities development, increasing risks of rapid technological growth. It questions the opportunity costs of focusing on alignment engineering and proposes a shift towards 'Misalignment Science' as a more robust approach.
2 days agoLessWrongThe text discusses the process of applying to AI safety fellowships and jobs, emphasizing the importance of clearly communicating skills. It highlights the challenges of application processes being noisy and the need to avoid overfitting to the process while showcasing genuine abilities.
5 days agoLessWrongThe article discusses the challenge of defining safety research in AI, noting that capabilities research can also contribute to safety by expanding the Pareto frontier of safety and usefulness. It highlights that while improving safety without reducing usefulness is a key goal, some research may inadvertently encourage developers to prioritize capabilities over safety. The text explores scenarios where capabilities research could enhance safety under specific political conditions, but emphasizes the complexity of distinguishing between safety and capabilities research.
5 days agoLessWrongThis document provides an overview of monitoring practices for internally deployed agents at frontier AI companies, focusing on OpenAI (OAI), Anthropic, and Google DeepMind (GDM). It highlights that most monitoring is done asynchronously, with some real-time automated classifiers used for agent actions. However, there is limited public information about GDM's specific practices, as much of the data comes from their control roadmap, which outlines suggestions rather than confirmed implementations.
13 hours agoLessWrongThe article discusses the challenges of implementing AI safety in policy and governance, emphasizing the need for legal professionals to understand technical aspects of AI to effectively enforce regulations. It highlights a bootcamp organized by ML4Good and EquiStamp, which aimed to equip legal and governance practitioners with knowledge of frontier AI technologies and their implications for safety and compliance.
4 days ago