All of Milan W's Comments + Replies

I am interested in the space. Lots of competent people in the general public are also interested. I had not heard of this hackathon. I think you probably should have done a lot more promotion/outreach.

Here is a customizable LLM-powered feed filter for X/Twitter: https://github.com/jam3scampbell/Promptable-Twitter-Feed

This reads like marketing content. However, when read at a meta level, it is a good demonstration of LLMs being already deployed in the wild.

Maybe for a while.
Consider, though, that correct reasoning tends towards finding truth.

In talking with the authors, don't be surprised if they bounce off when encountering terminology you use but don't explain. I pointed you to those texts precisely so you can familiarize yourself with pre-existing terminology and ideas. It is hard but also very useful to translate between (and maybe unify) frames of thinking. Thank you for your willingness to participate in this collective effort.

Let me summarize so I can see whether I got it: So you see "place AI" as body of knowledge that can be used to make a good-enough simulation of arbitrary sections of spacetime, where are events are precomputed. That precomputed (thus, deterministic) aspect you call "staticness".

How can a place be useful if it is static? For reference I'm imagining a garden where blades of grass are 100% rigid in place and water does not flow. I think you are imagining something different.

I think you may be conflating between capabilities and freedom. Interesting hypothesis about rules and anger though, has it been experimentally tested?

Hmm i think i get you a bit better now. You want to build human-friendly and even fun and useful-by-themselves interfaces for looking at the knowledge encoded in LLMs without making them generate text. Intriguing.

I'm not sure I follow. I think you are proposing a gamification of interpretability, but I don't know how the game works. I can gather something about player choice making the LLM run and maybe some analogies to physical movement, but I can't really grasp it. Could you rephrase it from it's basic principles up instead of from an example?

Reversibility should be the fundamental training goal. Agentic AIs should love being changed and/or reversed to a previous state.

That idea has been gaining traction lately. See the Corrigibility As a Singular Target (CAST) sequence here on lesswrong. I believe there is a very fertile space to explore at the intersection between CAST and the idea that Instrumental Goals Are A Different And Friendlier Kind Of Thing Than Terminal Goals. Also probably add in Self-Other Overlap: A Neglected Approach to AI Alignment to the mix. A comparative analysis of the mode... (read more)

Anthropic is calling it an "hybrid reasoning model". I don't know what they mean by that.

I think it is not that unlikely that they are roughly as biologically smart as us and have advanced forms of communication, but that they are just too alien and thus we haven't deciphered them yet.

Also, if whales could argue like this, whale relations with humans would be very different

Why?

I have also seen this.

Update 2025-02-23: Sam Altman has a kid now. link, mirror.

I see. Friction management / affordance landscaping is indeed very important for interface UX design.

Seems like just pasting into the chat context / adding as attachments the relevant info on the default Claude web interface would work fine for those use cases.

Main concern right now is very much lab proliferation, ensuing coordination problems, and disagreements / adversarial communication / overall insane and polarized discourse.

• Google Deepmind:  They are older than OpenAI. They also have a safety team. They are very much aware of the arguments. I don't know about Musk's impact on them.
• Anthropic: They split from OpenAI. To my best guess, they care about safety at least roughly as much as them. Many safety researchers have been quitting OpenAI to go work for Anthropic over the past few years.
• xAI: Founded by

The Pantheon interface features comments by different LLM personas.

@dkl9 wrote a very eloquent and concise piece arguing in favor of ditching "second brain" systems in favor of SRSs (Spaced Repetition Systems, such as Anki).

Try as you might to shrink the margin with better technology, recalling knowledge from within is necessarily faster and more intuitive than accessing a tool. When spaced repetition fails (as it should, up to 10% of the time), you can gracefully degrade by searching your SRS' deck of facts.

If you lose your second brain (your files get corrupted, a cloud service shuts down, etc), you forget its content,

Now some object-level engagement with your piece:

Very interesting. There are indeed well-read people who see Thiel as the ideological core of this Trump administration, and who view this as a good thing. I was under the (I now see, wrong) impression that Thiel-centrality was an hallucination by paranoid leftists. Thank you very much for providing a strong and important update to my world model.

Your personal website states that you are of Syrian extraction. Thiel is gay. Both of these facts point to a worldview that has trascended identity politics. I belie... (read more)

To restate my criticism in a more thorough way:

Your post reads like you are trying to vibe with a reader who already agrees with you. You cannot assume that in an open forum. There are many reasonable people who disagree with you. Such is the game you have decided to play by posting here. In this corner of the internet, you may find libertarians, socialists, conservatives, antinatalists, natalists, vegans, transhumanists, luddites, and more engaging in vigorous yet civilized debate. We love it.

Try to make the reader understand what you are trying to convey... (read more)

This post is pretty much devoid of world-modeling. It is instead filled to the brim with worldview-assertions.

Dear author, if I were to judge only by this post I would be forced to conclude that your thought process is composed solely of vibing over quotations. I hazard the guess that you can maybe do better.

The nearest thing I can think of off the top of my head is the Pantheon interface. Probably more unconventional than what you had in mind, though.

Upon reflection, I think I want to go further in this direction, and I have not done so due to akratic / trivial inconveniences reasons. Here is a list of examples:

• I used to take only cold showers, unless I needed to wash my hair. May be a good idea to restart that.
• I've wanted to center my workflow around CLI / TUI programs (as opposed to GUI) programs for a while now. It is currently in a somewhat awkward hybrid state.
• I used to use Anki and enjoy it. I dropped it during a crisis period in my life. The crisis has abated. It is imperative that I return.

I strongly agree with this post, and feel like most people would benefit from directionally applying its advice. Additional examples from my own life:

• One time, a close friend complained about the expense and effort required to acquire and prepare good coffee, and about the suffering incurred whenever he drank bad coffee. I have since purposefully avoided developing a taste in coffee. I conceive of it as a social facilitator, or as a medium to simultaneously ingest caffeine, water and heat.
• Back during my teenage years, one day I decided I would drink just w

However, the assumption that high-quality high-skill human feedback is important and neglected by EAs has not been falsified. 

To your best guess, is this still true?

Maybe one can start with prestige conservative media? Is that a thing? I'm not from the US and thus not very well versed.

Interesting. Do you have the code published somewhere?

I applaud the scholarship, but this post does not update me much on Gary Marcus. Still, checking is good, bumping against reality often is good, epistemic legibility is good. Also, this is a nice link to promptly direct people who trust Gary Marcus to. Thanks!

Hi sorry for soft-doxxing you but this information is trivially accesible from the link you provided and helps people evaluate your work more quickly: 
danilovicioso.com

Cheers!

Oh. That's nice of her.

In the gibbs energy principle quote you provide, are you implying the devil is roughly something like "the one who wishes to consume all available energy"? Or something like "the one who wishes to optimize the world such that no energy source remains untapped"?

This post is explicitly partisan and a bit hard to parse for some people, which is why I think they bounced off and downvoted, but I think this writer is an interesting voice to follow. I mean, a conservative who knows deleuze and cybernetics? Sign me up! (even though I'm definitively not a conservative)

Hi! Welcome! Is your thesis roughly this?:
"The left latched into the concept of "diversity" to make the right hate it, thus becoming more homogeneous and dumber"

I think the thesis of the poster is roughly: The left latched into the concept of "diversity" to make the right hate it, thus becoming more homogeneous and dumber. Seems plausible, yet a bit too clever to be likely.

All of it. Thinking critically about AI outputs (and also human outputs), and taking mitigating measures to reduce the bullshit in both.

Yeah people in here (and in the EA Froum) are participating in a dicussion that has been going on for a long time, and thus we tend to assume that our interlocutors have a certain set of background knowledge that is admittedly quite unusual and hard to get the hang of. Have you considered applying to the intro to EA program?

Thank you for doing, that and please keep doing it. Maybe also run a post draft trough another human before posting, though.

Huh. Maybe. I think the labs are already doing something like this, though. Some companies pay you to write stuff more interesting than internet mediocrity. They even pay extra for specialist knowledge. Those companies then sell that writing to the labs, who use it to train their LLMs.

Side point: Consider writing shorter posts, and using LLMs to critique and shorten rather than to (co)write the post itself. Your post is kind of interesting, but a lot longer than it needs to be.

Huh. OK that looks like a thing worth doing. Still, I think you are probably underestimating how much smarter future AIs will get, and how useful intelligence is. But yes, money is also powerful. Therefore, it is good to earn money and then give it away. Have you heard of effective altruism?

Well good luck creating AI capitalists I guess. I hope you are able to earn money with it. But consider that your alpha is shrinking with every passing second, and that what you will be doing has nothing to do with solving alignment.

Because building powerful AI is also hard. Also, it is very expensive. Unless you happen to have a couple billion dollars lying around, you are not going to get there before OpenAI or Anthropic or Google Deepmind.

Also, part of the problem is that people keep building new labs. Safe Super Intelligence Inc and Anthropic are both splinters from OpenAI. Elon left OpenAI over a disagreement and then founded xAI years later. Labs keep popping up, and the more there are the harder it is to coordinate to not get us all killed.

Hi. The point of AI alignment is not whether the first people to build extremely powerful AI will be "the good guys" or "the bad guys".

Some people here see the big AI labs as evil, some see the big AI labs as well-intentioned but misguided or confused, some even see the big labs as being "the good guys". Some people in here are working to get the labs shut down, some want to get a job working for the labs, some even already work for them.

Yet, we all work together. Why? Because we believe that we may all die even if the first people building super-AIs are t... (read more)