Chi Nguyen

Working independently on making AI systems reason safely about decision theory and acausal interactions, collaborating with Caspar Oesterheld and Emery Cooper.

I try to check the LessWrong infrequently. If you wanna get in touch, you can use my admonymous link and leave your email address there, so I can reply to you! (If you don't include some contact details in your message, I can't reply)

You can also just send me thoughts and questions anonymously!

How others can help me

Be interested in working on/implementing ideas from research on acausal cooperations! Or connect me with people who might be.

How I can help others

Ask me about acausal stuff!

Or any of my background: Before doing independent research, I worked for the Center on Long-Term Risk on s-risk reduction projects (hiring, community building, and grantmaking.) Previously, I was a guest manager at the EA Infrastructure Fund (2021), did some research for 1 Day Sooner on Human Challenge Trials for Covid vaccines (2020), did the summer research fellowship at FHI writing about IDA (2019), worked a few hours a week for CEA on local groups mentoring for a few months (2018), and helped a little bit with organizing EA Oxford (2018/19). I studied PPE at Oxford (2018-2021) and psychology in Freiburg (2015-2018.)

I also have things to say about mental health and advice for taking a break from work.

Wikitag Contributions

Comments

Sorted by

Looking for help with an acausal safety project. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, it would be really great if you let me know/share

  1. Help with acausal research and get mentoring to learn about decision theory
  • Motivation: Caspar Oesterheld (inventor/discoverer of ECL/MSR), Emery Cooper and I are doing a project where we try to get LLMs to help us with our acausal research.
    • Our research is ultimately aimed at making future AIs acausally safe.
  • Project: In a first step, we are trying to train an LLM classifier that evaluates critiques of arguments. To do so, we need a large number of both good and bad arguments about decision theory (and other areas of Philosophy.)
  • How you’ll learn: If you would like to learn about decision theory, anthropics, open source game theory, …, we supply you with a curriculum. There’s a lot of leeway for what exactly you want to learn about. You go through the readings.
    • If you already know things and just want to test your ideas, you can optionally skip this step.
  • Your contribution: While doing your readings, you, write up critiques of arguments you read.
  • Bottom-line: We get to use your arguments/critiques for our projects and you get our feedback on them. (We have to read and label them for the project anyway.)
  • Logistics: Unfortunately, you’d be a volunteer. I might be able to pay you a small amount out-of-pocket, but it’s not going to be very much. Caspar and Em are both university employed and I am similar in means to an independent researcher. We are also all non-Americans based in the US which makes it harder for us to acquire money for projects and such for boring and annoying reasons.
  • Why are we good mentors: Caspar has dozens of publications on related topics. Em has a handful. And I have been around.

2. Be a saint and help with acausal research by doing tedious manual labor and getting little in return
We also need help with various grindy tasks that aren’t super helpful for learning, e.g. turning pdfs with equations etc. into sensible txts to feed to LLMs. If you’re motivated to help with that, we would be extremely grateful.

My current guess is that occasional volunteers are totally fine! There's some onboarding cost but mostly, the cost on our side scales with the number of argument-critique pairs we get. Since the whole point is to have critiques of a large variety of quality, I don't expect the nth argument-critque pair we get to be much more useable than the 1st one. I might be wrong about this one and change my mind as we try this out with people though!

(Btw I didn't get a notification for your comment, so maybe better to dm if you're interested.)

I don't trust Ilya Sutskever to be the final arbiter of whether a Superintelligent AI design is safe and aligned. We shouldn't trust any individual,

I'm not sure how I feel about the whole idea of this endeavour in the abstract - but as someone who doesn't know Ilya Sutskever and only followed the public stuff, I'm pretty worried that he in particular runs it if decision-making is on the "by an individual" level and even if not. Running this safely will likely require lots of moral integrity and courage. The board drama made it look to me like Ilya disqualified himself from having enough of that.

Lightly held because I don't know the details but just from the public stuff I've seen I don't know why I should at all believe that Ilya has sufficient moral integrity and courage for this project even if he might "mean well" at the moment.

Greg Brockman and Sam Altman (cosigned):
[...]
First, we have raised awareness of the risks and opportunities of AGI so that the world can better prepare for it. We’ve repeatedly demonstrated the incredible possibilities from scaling up deep learning

chokes on coffee

From my point of view, of course profit maximizing companies will…maximize profit. It never was even imaginable that these kinds of entities could shoulder such a huge risk responsibly.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Conjecture legally a company? Maybe their profit model isn't actually foundation models? Not actually trying to imply things, just thought the wording was weird in that context and was wondering whether Conjecture has a different legal structure than I thought.

minus Cullen O’Keefe who worked on policy and legal (so was not a clear cut case of working on safety),

 

I think Cullen was on the same team as Daniel (might be misremembering), so if you count Daniel, I'd also count Cullen. (Unless you wanna count Daniel because he previously was more directly part of technical AI safety research at OAI.)

The "entity giving the payout" in practice for ECL would be just the world states you end up in and requires you to care about the environment of the person you're playing the PD with.

So, defecting might be just optimising my local environment for my own values and cooperating would be optimising my local environment for some aggregate of my own values and the values of the person I'm playing with. So, it only works if there are positive-sum aggregates and if each player cares about what the other does to their local environment.

I watched and read a ton of Lab Muffin Beauty Science when I got into skincare. Apart from Sunscreen, I think a lot of it is trial and error with what has good short-term effects. I'm not sure about long-term effects at all tbh. Lab Muffin Beauty Science is helpful for figuring out your skin type, leads for which products to try first, and how to use them. (There's a fair number of products you wanna ramp up slowly and even by the end only use on some days.)

Load More