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we thought that forecasting AI trends was important to be able to have us taken seriously
This might be the most dramatic example ever of forecasting affecting the outcome.
Similarly I'm concerned that a lot of alignment people are putting work into evals and benchmarks which may be having some accelerating affect on the AI capabilities which they are trying to understand.
"That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially."
1Just did a debugging session IRL with Gurkenglas and it was very helpful!
correctness and beta-coherence can be rolled up into one specific property
Is that rolling up two things into one, or is that just beta-coherence?
I agree that the ultimate goal is to understand the weights. Seems pretty unclear whether trying to understand the activations is a useful stepping stone towards that. And it's hard to be sure how relevant theoretical toy example are to that question.
- Ilya Sutskever had two armed bodyguards with him at NeurIPS.
Some people are asking for a source on this. I'm pretty sure I've heard it from multiple people who were there in person but I can't find a written source. Can anyone confirm or deny?
Well, it seems quite important whether the DROS registration could possibly have been staged.
That would be difficult. To purchase a gun in California you have to provide photo ID[1], proof of address[2] and a thumbprint[3]. Also it looks like the payment must be trackable[4] and gun stores have to maintain video surveillance footage for up to year.[5]
My guess is that the police haven't actually invested this as a potential homicide, but if they did, there should be very strong evidence that Balaji bought a gun. Potentially a very sophisticated actor could fake this evidence but it seems challenging (I can't find any historical examples of this happening). It would probably be easier to corrupt the investigation. Or the perpetrators might just hope that there would be no investigation.
There is a 10-day waiting period to purchase guns in California[5], so Balaji would probably have started planning his suicide before his hiking trip (I doubt someone like him would own a gun for recreational purposes?).
Is the interview with the NYT going to be published?
I think it's this piece that was published before his death.
Is any of the police behavior actually out of the ordinary?
Epistemic status: highly uncertain: my impressions from searching with LLMs for a few minutes.
It's fairly common for victim's families to contest official suicide rulings. In cases with lots of public attention police generally try to justify their conclusions. So we might expect the police to publicly state if there is footage of Balaji purchasing the gun shortly before his death. It could be that this will still happen with more time or public pressure.
land in space will be less valuable than land on earth until humans settle outside of earth (which I don't believe will happen in the next few decades).
Why would it take so long? Is this assuming no ASI?
As in, this is also what the police say?
Yes, edited to clarify. The police say there was no evidence of foul play. All parties agree he died in his bathroom of a gunshot wound.
Did the police find a gun in the apartment? Was it a gun Suchir had previously purchased himself according to records? Seems like relevant info.
The only source I can find on this is Webb, so take with a grain of salt. But yes, they found a gun in the apartment. According to Webb, the DROS registration information was on top of the gun case[1] in the apartment, so presumably there was a record of him purchasing the gun (Webb conjectures that this was staged). We don't know what type of gun it was[2] and Webb claims it's unusual for police not to release this info in a suicide case.
I feel like for the same reasons, this shortform is kind of an engaging waste of my time. One reason I read LessWrong is to avoid twitter garbage.