Has anyone done the math on if Elon can keep these plates spinning until he dies of old age or if it will implode sooner than that? I wouldn't think he can keep this up another decade, but I wouldn't have predicted Tesla limping along as long as it has even as Elon squeezes more money out of it, so idk. It would be really satisfying to watch Elon's empire implode, but probably he holds onto millions even if he loses billions because consequences aren't for the ultra rich in America.

You know, it makes the exact word choices Eliezer chose on this post: https://awful.systems/post/6297291 much more suspicious. "To the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life had sex with anyone under the age of 18." So maybe he didn't know they were underage at the time?

Another day, another instance of rationalists struggling to comprehend how they've been played by the LLM companies: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aKRshJzhojqfbRyo/unless-its-governance-changes-anthropic-is-untrustworthy

A very long, detailed post, elaborating very extensively the many ways Anthropic has played the AI doomers, promising AI safety but behaving like all the other frontier LLM companies, including blocking any and all regulation. The top responses are all tone policing and such denying it in a half-assed way that doesn't really engage with the fact the Anthropic has lied and broken "AI safety commitments" to rationalist/lesswrongers/EA shamelessly and repeatedly:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aKRshJzhojqfbRyo/unless-its-governance-changes-anthropic-is-untrustworthy?commentId=tBTMWrTejHPHyhTpQ

I feel confused about how to engage with this post. I agree that there's a bunch of evidence here that Anthropic has done various shady things, which I do think should be collected in one place. On the other hand, I keep seeing aggressive critiques from Mikhail that I think are low-quality (more context below), and I expect that a bunch of this post is "spun" in uncharitable ways.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aKRshJzhojqfbRyo/unless-its-governance-changes-anthropic-is-untrustworthy?commentId=CogFiu9crBC32Zjdp

I think it's sort of a type error to refer to Anthropic as something that one could trust or not. Anthropic is a company which has a bunch of executives, employees, board members, LTBT members, external contractors, investors, etc, all of whom have influence over different things the company does.

I would find this all hilarious, except a lot of the regulation and some of the "AI safety commitments" would also address real ethical concerns.

“I’m sort of a complex chaotic systems guy, so I have a low estimate that I actually know what the nonlinear dynamic in the memosphere really was,” he said. (Translation: It’s complicated.)

Why do these people have the urge to talk like this? Does it make themselves feel smarter? Do they think it makes them look smart to other people? Are they so caught up in their field they can't code switch to normal person talk?

Saw this posted to the Reddit Sneerclub, this essay has some excellent zingers and a good overall understanding of rationalists. A few highlights...

Rationalism is the notion that the universe is a collection of true facts, but since the human brain is an instrument for detecting lions in the undergrowth, almost everyone is helplessly confused about the world, and if you want to believe as many true things and disbelieve as many false things as possible—and of course you do—you must use various special techniques to discipline your brain into functioning more like a computer. (In practice, these techniques mostly consist of calling your prejudices ‘Bayesian priors,’ but that’s not important right now.)

We're all very familiar with this phenoma, but this author has a pithy way of summarizing it.

The story is not a case study in how rationality will help you understand the world, it’s a case study in how rationality will give you power over other people. It might have been overtly signposted as fiction, with all the necessary content warnings in place. That doesn’t mean it’s not believed. Despite being genuinely horrible, this story does have one important use: it makes sense out of the rationalist fixation on the danger of a superhuman AI. According to HPMOR, raw intelligence gives you direct power over other people; a recursively self-improving artificial general intelligence is just our name for the theoretical point where infinite intelligence transforms into infinite power.

Yep, the author nails the warped view Rationalists have about intelligence.

We’re supposedly dealing with a group of idiosyncratic weirdos, all of them trying to independently reconstruct the entirety of human knowledge from scratch. Their politics run all the way from the furthest fringes of the far right to the furthest fringes of the liberal centre.

That is a concise summary of their warped Overton Window, yeah.

We barely understsnd how LLMs actually work

I would be careful how you say this. Eliezer likes to go on about giant inscrutable matrices to fearmoner, and the promptfarmers use the (supposed) mysteriousness as another avenue for crithype.

It's true reverse engineering any specific output or task takes a lot of effort and requires access to the model's internals weights and hasn't been done for most tasks, but the techniques exist for doing so. And in general there is a good high level conceptual understanding of what makes LLMs work.

which means LLMs don’t understand their own functioning (not that they “understand” anything strictly speaking).

This part is absolutely true. If you catch them in mistake, most of their data about responding is from how humans respond, or, at best fine-tuning on other LLM output and they don't have any way of checking their own internals, so the words they say in response to mistakes is just more bs unrelated to anything.

• "tickled pink" is a saying for finding something humorous

• "BI" is business insider, the newspaper that has the linked article

• "chuds" is a term of online alt-right losers

• OFC: of fucking course

• "more dosh" mean more money

• "AI safety and alignment" is the standard thing we sneer at here: making sure the coming future acasual robot god is a benevolent god. Occasionally reporter misunderstand it to mean or more PR-savvy promptfarmers misrepresent it to mean stuff like stopping LLMs from saying racist shit or giving you recipes that would accidentally poison you but this isn't it's central meaning. (To give the AI safety and alignment cultists way too much charity, making LLMs not say racist shit or give harmful instructions has been something of a spin-off application of their plans and ideas to "align" AGI.)

A new LLM plays pokemon has started, with o3 this time. It plays moderately faster, and the twitch display UI is a little bit cleaner, so it is less tedious to watch. But in terms of actual ability, so far o3 has made many of the exact same errors as Claude and Gemini including: completely making things up/seeing things that aren't on the screen (items in Virdian Forest), confused attempts at navigation (it went back and forth on whether the exit to Virdian Forest was in the NE or NW corner), repeating mistakes to itself (both the items and the navigation issues I mentioned), confusing details from other generations of Pokemon (Nidoran learns double kick at level 12 in Fire Red and Leaf Green, but not the original Blue/Yellow), and it has signs of being prone to going on completely batshit tangents (it briefly started getting derailed about sneaking through the tree in Virdian Forest... i.e. moving through completely impassable tiles).

I don't know how anyone can watch any of the attempts at LLMs playing Pokemon and think (viable) LLM agents are just around the corner... well actually I do know: hopium, cope, cognitive bias, and deliberate deception. The whole LLM playing Pokemon thing is turning into less of a test of LLMs and more entertainment and advertising of the models, and the scaffold are extensive enough and different enough from each other that they really aren't showing the models' raw capabilities (which are even worse than I complained about) or comparing them meaningfully.

This is especially ironic with all of Elon's claims about making Grok truth seeking. Well, "truth seeking" was probably always code for making an LLM that would parrot Elon's views.

Elon may have failed at making Grok peddle racist conspiracy theories like he wanted, but this shouldn't be taken as proof that LLMs can't be manipulated that way. He probably went with the laziest option possible of directly prompting it as opposed to fine tuning it on racist content or anything more advanced.

It was a thing in the sense that the promptfondlers were trying to portray prompting as a matter of fine technique and skill (as opposed to dumb luck mixed with trial and error with a few general guidelines that half work). It was not a thing then and is still not now in the sense that prompting has none of the skill or precision or verifiability or reliability of actual programming.

This isn't debate club or men of science hour, this is a forum for making fun of idiocy around technology. If you don't like that you can leave (or post a few more times for us to laugh at before you're banned).

As to the particular paper that got linked, we've seen people hyping LLMs misrepresent their research as much more exciting than it actually is (all the research advertising deceptive LLMs for example) many many times already, so most of us weren't going to waste time to track down the actual paper (and not just the marketing release) to pick apart the methods. You could say (raises sunglasses) our priors on it being bullshit were too strong.

Lol, Altman's AI generated purple prose slop was so bad even Eliezer called it out (as opposed to make a doomer-hype point):

Perhaps you have found some merit in that obvious slop, but I didn't; there was entropy, cliche, and meaninglessness poured all over everything like shit over ice cream, and if there were cherries underneath I couldn't taste it for the slop.