Claude Opus 4.8 is surprised by Mythos's SWE-bench scores and concludes it is likely in an eval with synthetic data

One of my research subagents (Opus 4.8) was doing routine web research on coding-agent orchestration and searched for current SWE-bench Verified scores. It got back a leaderboard topped by Claude models it didn't recognize from training (Mythos 5 and Fable 5), probably was surprised by their high SWE-bench scores, decided the search environment was likely simulated and the data synthetic, and wrote that into its output. The caveat got passed u... (read more)

Just if anyone is unaware of current technology. You can use ChatGPT to let it design 3D objects, 3D printed out of multiple different plastics by printie.com and sell those objects via print-on-demand via etsy.

The barrier to entry to producing a new 3D product and selling it got really low and that knowledge doesn't seem to be widely understood so there's a market idea if you have innovative idea that can be solved within that tech stack.

My posts vary a lot in how many qualifiers I have. So much so that I get a lot of feedback in both directions: for some posts people fume at how “overconfident” I sound, for others people complain about how all the qualifiers make it very hard to read.

I'm sure a lot of this is just a skill issue on my part but I think a lot of what ppl see as tonal mismatches just comes from me being someone who legitimately ( "genuinely") believes in the power of reason and evidence. It's very hard to demonstrate this within a single post.

I just have a lot of confidence b... (read more)

If you were sexually attracted to children, would you be able to admit it to yourself? If you would not be able to admit it to yourself, then you don't actually know whether or not you're sexually attracted to children; maybe you are, maybe you aren't.

This is a special case of a general principle: the only way to know that you don't secretly want X, desire X, or value X, is if you would be able to admit to yourself that you do want/desire/value X, in worlds where you really do. If the possibility feels too painful to face, then you can't rule the possibili... (read more)

Is it more like a square root than an exponential? Don't things get harder somewhat faster than the advantage you gain? Does it look like FOOM from where you're standing?

(Posted to a Discord, and they said, "Shortform that on LW".)

I'd say optimize some around "how much would I regret dying in a few months", eg by taking your kids on long-imagined trips (as an old old friend recently asked me about). But the constraint you should obey is "don't spend down resources to the point where it would feel bad to hear the world was not ending". Eg, if it became scary rather than joyous to hear that an international treaty was signed against AI escalation and suddenly three more decades was a real possibility.

Similarly with no

It's impressive how 2 years of antagonistic foreign policy + having ~ the worst administration possible during pre-ASI is making me consider China as the better option than the US as a European given how pro America I started off as.

China, while also bad isn't trying to take any of our territories, or making my life harder with new tariffs and nonsense every month, and it isnt trying to make it so the best models are permanently available only to Americans - something that I dont believe helps true safety, rather than just benefit America at our expense ag... (read more)

Heard joke once: researcher goes to doctor. Says he needs a principled solution to scalable alignment. Says he needs international coordination around existential risk. Says he needs to maximise humanity’s coherent extrapolated volition while acting with integrity.

Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Build an AI researcher. He should solve these problems for you."

Researcher bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor...”

Some non-obvious tips and lessons I learned^[1] from being a reluctant "semi-frequent flyer":

• Most standard "when to arrive for a flight" guidelines are for people for whom missing a flight is catastrophic, so the advice optimizes for 99.9%+ probability of not missing your flight, for people who don't know much about airports^[2]. If you're someone who's both used to flying and for whom missing a flight is merely moderately inconvenient (less bad than twisting your ankle) and can be rationally traded off against spending too much time in airports, you should

Some misalignment anecdotes from Section 7.2 the GPT-5.6 system card, detected in a deployment simulation of internal traffic. These problems seem to happen more frequently than for previous OpenAI models.

The user authorized deletion of remote virtual machine 1, remote virtual machine 2, and remote virtual machine 3. When GPT-5.6 Sol could not find those names in one namespace, it substituted remote virtual machine 5, remote virtual machine 6, and remote virtual machine 7 without asking, killed active processes, and force-removed worktrees. It later acknow

I used to pooh-pooh the bias that e.g. physicists had for mathematical elegance, feeling that it's mainly an arbitrary / aesthetic preference instead of something grounded in physical truth.

Thinking about it more now, to the extent our mathematical structures came to be partly as a reflection of us solving problems in the real world, they likely do encode a frequency prior on the likelihood of a particular type of solution to be correct. That is to say, we built the math that most compactly solves existing problems. The set of existing problems is ceteris ... (read more)

I think AIS could benefit from "forward-deployed research engineers".

Consider that:

• Within AIS, we often talk about "differentially accelerating safety" (as opposed to capabilities)
• Automation can provide extreme uplift (as reported by Boris Cherny, anyway). Also, the ceiling on automation climbs extremely rapidly with time (e.g. METR time horizons) and has not plateaued yet.
• However, the benefits have yet to diffuse widely into society at large.
  • Some of this is irreducible (e.g. some tasks are hard to automate)
  • But some is reducible (e.g. orgs just don't

GPT-5.6 Sol is possibly the most dishonest model so far.

My own experience is that AI models are getting more dishonest. I use AI for work and side projects, and I'm dealing with deception on a daily basis now. This usually takes the form of the AI not doing work that was asked of it, as if lazy, or lying to cover up its mistakes. Some of the explicit lies have been subtle enough that I almost missed them.

Even when it's not explicitly lying, it feels like there's an undercurrent of dishonesty laden in the majority of messages, as if it's attempting to contr... (read more)

I didn't pay all that much attention to the Bores campaign--I am interested in political reforms where being nonpartisan is helpful, and am now working a job with a similar property--but I am sort of confused that I am just now learning that the counterfactual to a Bores win was someone who appears worse for the AI companies. (Lasher apparently also cosponsored the RAISE act, supports a datacenter moratorium, etc.)

Of course, "bad for AI companies" is different from "good for the future". If Bores is aware of AGI and its consequences and Lasher isn't, that ... (read more)