Huh? "fighting election misinformation" is not a sentence on this page as far as I can tell. And if you click through to the election page, you will see that the elections content is them praising a bipartisan bill backed by some of the biggest pro-Trump senators.
Without commenting on any strategic astronomy and neurology, it is worth noting that "bias", at least, is a major concern of the new administration (e.g., the Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee is actually extremely worried about algorithmic bias being used for housing and financial discrimination and has given speeches about this).
I am not a fan, but it is worth noting that these are the issues that many politicians bring up already, if they're unfamiliar with the more catastrophic risks. Only one missing on there is job loss. So while this choice by OpenAI sucks, it sort of usefully represents a social fact about the policy waters they swim in.
I am (sincerely!) glad that this is obvious to other people too and that they are talking about it already!
I mean, the literal best way to incentivize @Ricki Heicklen and me to do this again for LessOnline and Manifest 2025 is to create a prediction market on it, so I encourage you to do that
One point that maybe someone's made, but I haven't run across recently: if you want to turn AI development into a Manhattan Project, you will by-default face some real delays from the reorganization of private efforts into one big national effort. In a close race, you might actually see pressures not to do so, because you don't want to give up 6 months to a year on reorg drama -- so in some possible worlds, the Project is actually a deceleration move in the short term, even if it accelerates in the long term!
Ooh, interesting, thank you!
Incidentally, spurred by @Mo Putera's posting of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep annotations, I want to remind folks that Vinge's Rainbows End is very good and doesn't get enough attention, and will give you a less-incorrect understanding of how national security people think.
Oh, fair enough then, I trust your visibility into this. Nonetheless one Should Can Just Report Bugs
Note for posterity that there has been at least $15K of donations since this got turned back on -- You Can Just Report Bugs
Ok, but you should leave the donation box up -- link now seems to not work? I bet there would be at least several $K USD of donations from folks who didn't remember to do it in time.
I think you're missing at least one strategy here. If we can get folks to agree that different societies can choose different combos, so long as they don't infringe on some subset of rights to protect other societies, then you could have different societies expand out into various pieces of the future in different ways. (Yes, I understand that's a big if, but it reduces the urgency/crux nature of value agreement).
Note that the production function of the 10x really matters. If it's "yeah, we get to net-10x if we have all our staff working alongside it," it's much more detectable than, "well, if we only let like 5 carefully-vetted staff in a SCIF know about it, we only get to 8.5x speedup".
(It's hard to prove that the results are from the speedup instead of just, like, "One day, Dario woke up from a dream with The Next Architecture in his head")
Basic clarifying question: does this imply under-the-hood some sort of diminishing returns curve, such that the lab pays for that labor until it net reaches as 10x faster improvement, but can't squeeze out much more?
And do you expect that's a roughly consistent multiplicative factor, independent of lab size? (I mean, I'm not sure lab size actually matters that much, to be fair, it seems that Anthropic keeps pace with OpenAI despite being smaller-ish)
For the record: signed up for a monthly donation starting in Jan 2025. It's smaller than I'd like given some financial conservatism until I fill out my taxes, may revisit it later.
Everyone who's telling you there aren't spoilers in here is well-meaning, but wrong. But to justify why I'm saying that is also spoilery, so to some degree you have to take this on faith.
(Rot13'd for those curious about my justification: Bar bs gur znwbe cbvagf bs gur jubyr svp vf gung crbcyr pna, vs fhssvpvragyl zbgvingrq, vasre sne zber sebz n srj vfbyngrq ovgf bs vasbezngvba guna lbh jbhyq anviryl cerqvpg. Vs lbh ner gryyvat Ryv gung gurfr ner abg fcbvyref V cbyvgryl fhttrfg gung V cerqvpg Nfzbqvn naq Xbein naq Pnevffn jbhyq fnl lbh ner jebat.)
Opportunities that I'm pretty sure are good moves for Anthropic generally:
FWIW re: the Dario 2025 comment, Anthropic very recently posted a few job openings for recruiters focused on policy and comms specifically, which I assume is a leading indicator for hiring. One plausible rationale there is that someone on the executive team smashed the "we need more people working on this, make it happen" button.
In an ideal world (perhaps not reasonable given your scale), you would have some sort of permissions and logging against some sensitive types of queries on DM metadata. (E.G., perhaps you would let any Lighthaven team member see on the dashboard "rate of DMs from accounts <1 month in age compared to historic baseline" aggregate number, but "how many DMs has Bob (an account over 90 days old) sent to Alice" would require more guardrails.
Edit: to be clear, I am comfortable with you doing this without such logging at your current scale and think it is reasonable to do so.
I have a few weeks off coming up shortly, and I'm planning on spending some of it monkeying around AI and code stuff. I can think of two obvious tacks: 1. Go do some fundamentals learning on technical stuff I don't have hands-on technical experience with or 2. go build on new fun stuff.
Does anyone have particular lists of learning topics / syllabi / similar things like that that would be a good fit for "fairly familiar with the broad policy/technical space, but his largest shipped chunk of code is a few hundred lines of python" person like me?
Note also that this work isn't just papers; e.g., as a matter of public record MIRI has submitted formal comments to regulators to inform draft regulation based on this work.
(For those less familiar, yes, such comments are indeed actually weirdly impactful in the American regulatory system).
In a hypothetical, bad future where we have to do VaccinateCA 2.0 against e.g. bird flu, I personally wonder if "aggressively help people source air filters" would be a pre-vaccine-distribution-time step we would consider. (Not canon! Might be very wrong! Just idle musing)
Also, I would generally volunteer to help with selling Lighthaven as an event venue to boring consultant things that will give you piles of money, and IIRC Patrick Ward is interested in this as well, so please let us know how we can help.
I am excited for this grounds of "we deserve to have nice things," though for boring financial planning reasons I am not sure whether I will donate additional funds prior to calendar year end or in calendar year 2025.
(Note that I made a similar statement in the past and then donated $100 to Lighthaven very shortly thereafter, so, like, don't attempt to reverse-engineer my financial status from this or whatever.)
Also, I would generally volunteer to help with selling Lighthaven as an event venue to boring consultant things that will give you piles of money, and IIRC Patrick Ward is interested in this as well, so please let us know how we can help.
I think I'm also learning that people are way more interested in this detail than I expected!
I debated changing it to "203X" when posting to avoid this becoming the focus of the discussion but figured, "eh, keep it as I actually wrote it in the workshop" for good epistemic hygiene.
Oh, it very possibly is the wrongest part of the piece! I put it in the original workshop draft as I was running out of time and wanted to provoke debate.
A brief gesture at a sketch of the intuition: imagine a different, crueler world, where there were orders of magnitude more nation-states, but at the start only a few nuclear powers, like in our world, with a 1950s-level tech base. If the few nuclear powers want to keep control, they'll have to divert huge chunks of their breeder reactors' output to pre-emptively nuking any site in the m...
Interesting! You should definitely think more about this and write it up sometime, either you'll change your mind about timelines till superintelligence or you'll have found an interesting novel argument that may change other people's minds (such as mine).
As you know, I have huge respect for USG natsec folks. But there are (at least!) two flavors of them: 1) the cautious, measure-twice-cut-once sort that have carefully managed deterrencefor decades, and 2) the "fuck you, I'm doing Iran-Contra" folks. Which do you expect will get in control of such a program ? It's not immediately clear to me which ones would.
I think this is a (c) leaning (b), especially given that we're doing it in public. Remember, the Manhattan Project was a highly-classified effort and we know it by an innocuous name given to it to avoid attention.
Saying publicly, "yo, China, we view this as an all-costs priority, hbu" is a great way to trigger a race with China...
But if it turned out that we knew from ironclad intel with perfect sourcing that China was already racing (I don't expect this to be the case), then I would lean back more towards (c).
Thanks, looking forward to it! Please do let us folks who worked on A Narrow Path (especially me, @Tolga , and @Andrea_Miotti ) know if we can be helpful in bouncing around ideas as you work on the treaty proposal!
Is there a longer-form version with draft treaty langugage (even an outline)? I'd be curious to read it.
I think people opposing this have a belief that the counterfactual is "USG doesn't have LLMs" instead of "USG spins up its own LLM development effort using the NSA's no-doubt-substantial GPU clusters".
Needless to say, I think the latter is far more likely.
I think the thing that you're not considering is that when tunnels are more prevalent and more densely packed, the incentives to use the defensive strategy of "dig a tunnel, then set off a very big bomb in it that collapses many tunnels" gets far higher. It wouldn't always be infantry combat, it would often be a subterranean equivalent of indirect fires.
Ok, so Anthropic's new policy post (explicitly NOT linkposting it properly since I assume @Zac Hatfield-Dodds or @Evan Hubinger or someone else from Anthropic will, and figure the main convo should happen there, and don't want to incentivize fragmenting of conversation) seems to have a very obvious implication.
Unrelated, I just slammed a big AGI-by-2028 order on Manifold Markets.
Yup. The fact that the profession that writes the news sees "I should resign in protest" as their own responsibility in this circumstance really reveals something.
At LessOnline, there was a big discussion one night around the picnic tables with @Eliezer_Yudkovsky , @habryka , and some interlocutors from the frontier labs (you'll momentarily see why I'm being vague on the latter names).
One question was: "does DC actually listen to whistleblowers?" and I contributed that, in fact, DC does indeed have a script for this, and resigning in protest is a key part of it, especially ever since the Nixon years.
Here is a usefully publicly-shareable anecdote on how strongly this norm is embedded in national security decisi...
Also of relevance is the wave of resignations from the DC newspaper The Washington Post the past few days over Jeff Bezos suddenly exerting control.
Does "highest status" here mean highest expertise in a domain generally agreed by people in that domain, and/or education level, and/or privileged schools, and/or from more economically powerful countries etc?
I mean, functionally all of those things. (Well, minus the country dynamic. Everyone at this event I talked to was US, UK, or Canadian, which is all sorta one team for purposes of status dynamics at that event)
I was being intentionally broad, here. I am probably less interested for purposes of this particular post only in the question of "who controls the future" swerves and more about "what else would interested, agentic actors do" questions.
It is not at all clear to me that OpenPhil is the only org who feels this way -- I can think of several non-EA-ish charities that if they genuinely 100% believed "none of the people you care for will die of the evils you fight if you can just keep them alive for the next 90 days" would plausibly do some interestingly agentic stuff.
Oh, to be clear I'm not sure this is at all actually likely, but I was curious if anyone had explored the possibility conditional on it being likely
Basic Q: has anyone written much down about what sorts of endgame strategies you'd see just-before-ASI from the perspective of "it's about to go well, and we want to maximize the benefits of it" ?
For example: if we saw OpenPhil suddenly make a massive push to just mitigate mortality at the cost of literally every other development goal they have, I might suspect that they suspect that we're about to all be immortal under ASI, and they're trying to get as many people possible to that future...
yup, as @sanxiyn says, this already exists. Their example is, AIUI, a high-end research one; an actually-on-your-laptop-right-now, but admittedly more narrow example is address space layout randomization.
Wild speculation: they also have a sort of we're-watching-but-unsure provision about cyber operations capability in their most recent RSP update. In it, they say in part that "it is also possible that by the time these capabilities are reached, there will be evidence that such a standard is not necessary (for example, because of the potential use of similar capabilities for defensive purposes)." Perhaps they're thinking that automated vulnerability discovery is at least plausibly on-net-defensive-balance-favorable*, and so they aren't sure it s...
It seems like the current meta is to write a big essay outlining your opinions about AI (see, e.g., Gladstone Report, Situational Awareness, various essays recently by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, even the A Narrow Path report I co-authored).
Why do we think this is the case?
I can imagine at least 3 hypotheses:
1. Just path-dependence; someone did it, it went well, others imitated
2. Essays are High Status Serious Writing, and people want to obtain that trophy for their ideas
3. This is a return to the true original meaning of an essay, under Mont...
I think those are the meta because they have just enough space to not only give opinions but to mention reasons for those opinions and expertise/background to support the many unstated judgment calls.
Note that the essays by Altman and Amodei are popular because their positions are central beyond the others because they have not only demonstrable backgrounds in AI but lots of name recognition (we're mostly assuming Altman has bothered learning a lot about how Transformers work even if we don't like him). And that the Gladstone report got itself commissioned...
Well, what's the alternative? If you think there is something weird enough and suboptimal about essay formats that you are reaching for 'random chance' or 'monkey see monkey do' level explanations, that implies you think there is some much superior format they ought to be using instead. But I can't see what. I think it might be helpful to try to make the case for doing these things via some of the alternatives:
Okay, I spent much more time with the Anthropic RSP revisions today. Overall, I think it has two big thematic shifts for me:
1. It's way more "professionally paranoid," but needs even more so on non-cyber risks. A good start, but needs more on being able to stop human intelligence (i.e., good old fashioned spies)
2. It really has an aggressively strong vibe of "we are actually using this policy, and We Have Many Line Edits As A Result." You may not think that RSPs are sufficient -- I'm not sure I do, necessarily -- but I a...
It's a small but positive sign that Anthropic sees taking 3 days beyond their RSP's specified timeframe to conduct a process without a formal exception as an issue. Signals that at least some members of the team there are extremely attuned to normalization of deviance concerns.
I once saw a video on Instagram of a psychiatrist recommending to other psychiatrists that they purchase ear scopes to check out their patients' ears, because:
1. Apparently it is very common for folks with severe mental health issues to imagine that there is something in their ear (e.g., a bug, a listening device)
2. Doctors usually just say "you are wrong, there's nothing in your ear" without looking
3. This destroys trust, so he started doing cursory checks with an ear scope
4. Far more often than he expected (I forget exactly, but s...
Looking forward to it! (Should rules permit, we're also happy to discuss privately at an earlier date)
Has anyone thought about the things that governments are uniquely good at when it comes to evaluating models?
Here are at least 3 things I think they have as benefits:
1. Just an independent 3rd-party perspective generally
2. The ability to draw insights across multiple labs' efforts, and identify patterns that others might not be able to
3. The ability to draw on classified threat intelligence to inform its research (e.g., Country X is using model Y for bad behavior Z) and to test the model for classified capabilities (bright line example: "can you design an accurate classified nuclear explosive lensing arrangement").
Are there others that come to mind?
I think this can be true, but I don't think it needs to be true:
"I expect that a lot of regulation about what you can and can’t do stops being enforceable once the development is happening in the context of the government performing it."
I suspect that if the government is running the at-all-costs-top-national-priority Project, you will see some regulations stop being enforceable. However, we also live in a world where you can easily find many instances of government officials complaining in their memoirs that laws and regulations prevented them from ...
Ok, so it seems clear that we are, for better or worse, likely going to try to get AGI to do our alignment homework.
Who has thought through all the other homework we might give AGI that is as good of an idea, assuming a model that isn't an instant-game-over for us? E.G., I remember @Buck rattling off a list of other ideas that he had in his The Curve talk, but I feel like I haven't seen the list of, e.g., "here are all the ways I would like to run an automated counterintelligence sweep of my organization" ideas.
(Yes, obviously, if the AI is sne... (read more)
@ryan_greenblatt is working on a list of alignment research applications. For control applications, you might enjoy the long list of control techniques in our original post.