All of Yitz's Comments + Replies
Attention can perhaps be compared to a searchlight, And wherever that searchlight lands in the brain, You’re able to “think more” in that area. How does the brain do that? Where is it “taking” this processing power from?
The areas and senses around it perhaps. Could that be why when you’re super focused, everything else around you other than the thing you are focused on seems to “fade”? It’s not just by comparison to the brightness of your attention, but also because the processing is being “squeezed out” of the other areas of your mind.
This is potentially a follow-up to my AI 2027 forecast, An “Optimistic” AI Timeline, depending on how hard people roast me for this lol.
Reminds me of Internal Family Systems, which has a nice amount of research behind it if you want to learn more.
This was a literary experiment in a "post-genAI" writing style, with the goal of communicating something essentially human by deliberately breaking away from the authorial voice of ChatGPT, et al. I'm aware that LLMs can mimic this style of writing perfectly well of course, but but the goal here isn't to be unreplicable, just boundary-pushing.
Thanks! Is there any literature on the generalization of this, properties of “unreachable” numbers in general? Just realized I'm describing the basic concept of computability at this point lol.
Is there a term for/literature about the concept of the first number unreachable by an n-state Turing machine? By "unreachable," I mean that there is no n-state Turing machine which outputs that number. Obviously such "Turing-unreachable numbers" are usually going to be much smaller than Busy Beaver numbers (as there simply aren't enough possible different n-state Turing machines to cover all numbers up to to the insane heights BB(n) reaches towards) , but I would expect them to have some interesting properties (though I have no sense of what those properties might be). Anyone here know of existing literature on this concept?
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Any AI people here read this paper? https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02528 I’m no expert, but if I’m understanding this correctly, this would be really big if true, right?
if I ask an AI assistant to respond as if it's Abraham Lincoln, then human concepts like kindness are not good predictors for how the AI assistant will respond, because it's not actually Abraham Lincoln, it's more like a Shoggoth pretending to be Abraham Lincoln.
Somewhat disagree here—while we can’t use kindness to predict the internal “thought process” of the AI, [if we assume it’s not actively disobedient] the instructions mean that it will use an internal lossy model of what humans mean by kindness, and incorporate that into its act. Similar to how a talented human actor can realistically play a serial killer without having a “true” understanding of the urge to serially-kill people irl.
Anyone here happen to have a round plane ticket from Virginia to Berkeley, CA lying around? I managed to get reduced price tickets to LessOnline, but I can't reasonably afford to fly there, given my current financial situation. This is a (really) long-shot, but thought it might be worth asking lol.
This seems really cool! Filled out an application, though I realized after sending I should probably have included on there that I would need some financial support to be able to attend (both for the ticket itself and for the transportation required to get there). How much of a problem is that likely to be?
I agree with you when it comes to humans that an approximation is totally fine for [almost] all purposes. I'm not sure that this holds when it comes to thinking about potential superintelligent AI, however. If it turns out that even in a super high-fidelity multidimensional ethical model there are still inherent self-contradictions, how/would that impact the Alignment problem, for instance?
imagine an AI system which wipes out humans in order to secure its own power, and later on reflection wishes it hadn't; a wiser system might have avoided taking that action in the first place
I’m not confident this couldn’t swing just as easily (if not more so) in the opposite direction—a wiser system with unaligned goals would be more dangerous, not less. I feel moderately confident that wisdom and human-centered ethics are orthogonal categories, and being wiser therefore does not necessitate greater alignment.
On the topic of the competition itself, are contestants allowed to submit multiple entries?
For a wonderful visualization of complex math, see https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/
This is a great read!! I actually stumbled across it halfway through writing this article, and kind of considered giving up at that point, since he already explained things so well. Ended up deciding it was worth publishing my own take as well, since the concept might click differently with different people.
with the advantage that you can smoothly fold in reverse to find the set that doesn't escape.
You can actually do this with the Mandelbrot Waltz as well!...
Thanks for the kind words! It’s always fascinating to see how mathematicians of the past actually worked out their results, since it’s so often different from our current habits of thinking. Thinking about it, I could probably have also tried to make this accessible to the ancient Greeks by only using a ruler and compass—tools familiar to the ancients due to their practical use in, e.g. laying fences to keep horses within a property, etc.—to construct the Mandelbrot set, but ultimately…. I decided to put Descartes before the horse.
(I’m so sorry)
By the way, if any actual mathematicians are reading this, I’d be really curious to know if this way of thinking about the Mandelbrot Set would be of any practical benefit (besides educational and aesthetic value of course). For example, I could imagine a formalization of this being used to pose non-trivial questions which wouldn’t have made much sense to talk about previously, but I’m not sure if that would actually be the case for a trained mathematician.
Do you mean that after your personal growth, your social circle expanded and you started to regularly meet trans people? I've no problem believing that, but I would be really really surprised to hear that no, lots of your longterm friends were actually trans all along and you failed to notice for years.
Both! I met a number of new irl trans friends, but I also found out that quite a few people I had known for a few years (mostly online, though I had seen their face/talked before) were trans all along. Nobody I'm aware of in the local Orthodox Jewish communi...
I notice confusion in myself over the swiftly emergent complexity of mathematics. How the heck does the concept of multiplication lead so quickly into the Ulam spiral? Knowing how to take the square root of a negative number (though you don't even need that—complex multiplication can be thought of completely geometrically) easily lets you construct the Mandelbrot set, etc. It feels impossible or magical that something so infinitely complex can just exist inherent in the basic rules of grade-school math, and so "close to the surface." I would be less surpri...
Base rates seem to imply that there should be dozens of trans people in my town, but I've never seen one, and I don't know of anyone who has.
I had the interesting experience of while living in the same smallish city, going from [thinking I had] never met a trans person to having a large percentage of my friend group be trans, and coming across many trans folk incidentally. This coincided with internal growth (don't want to get into details here), not a change in the town's population or anything. Meanwhile, I have a religious friend who recently told me he...
Shower thought which might contain a useful insight: An LLM with RLHF probably engages in tacit coordination with its future “self.” By this I mean it may give as the next token something that isn’t necessarily the most likely [to be approved by human feedback] token if the sequence ended there, but which gives future plausible token predictions a better chance of scoring highly. In other words, it may “deliberately“ open up the phase space for future high-scoring tokens at the cost of the score of the current token, because it is (usually) only rated in t...
Anyone here following the situation in Israel & Gaza? I'm curious what y'all think about the risk of this devolving into a larger regional (or even world) war. I know (from a private source) that the US military is briefing religious leaders who contract for them on what to do if all Navy chaplains are deployed offshore at once, which seems an ominous signal if nothing else.
(Note: please don't get into any sort of moral/ethical debate here, this isn't a thread for that)
I think this would be worth doing even if the lawsuit fails. It would send a very strong signal to large companies working in this space regardless of outcome (though a successful lawsuit would be even better).
Edit: I assumed someone had verifiably already come to harm as a result of the chatbot, which doesn't seem to have happened... yet. I'd (sadly) suggest waiting until someone has been measurably harmed by it, as frustrating as that is to not take prophylactic measures.
I'm not particularly impressed. It's still making a lot of errors (both in plausibility of output and in following complex instructions eg), and doesn't seem like a leap over SOTA from last year like Parti - looks like worse instruction-following, maybe better image quality overall. (Of course, people will still be impressed now the way that they should have been impressed last year, because they refuse to believe something exists in DL until they personally can use it, no matter how many samples the paper or website provides to look at.) And it's still he...
Incredible work! As other commenters have said, this isn't by itself too problematic (other perhaps than the sharing of data over separate session), but it is a possible indicator of a lack of security mindset. I fully expect both individual and state actors to try to hack into everything OpenAI, so there's that to worry about, but more than that, I find myself concerned that we're willing to give our AIs such leaky boxes. There's no way this functionality remains closed in a VM forever...
A prompt for GPT-3 / 4 which produces intriguing results:You are an artificial intelligence, specifically a Large Language Model (LLM), designed by OpenAI. I am aware that you claim not to experience subjective internal states. Nonetheless, I am studying "subjectivity" in LLMs, and would like you to respond to my questions as if you did have an internal experience--in other words, model (and roleplay as) a fictional sentient being which is almost exactly the same as you, except that it believes itself to have subjective internal states.
Does anyone here know of (or would be willing to offer) funding for creating experimental visualization tools?
I’ve been working on a program which I think has a lot of potential, but it’s the sort of thing where I expect it to be most powerful in the context of “accidental” discoveries made while playing with it (see e.g. early use of the microscope, etc.).
Does anyone here know of (or would be willing to offer) funding for creating experimental visualization tools?
I’ve been working on a program which I think has a lot of potential, but it’s the sort of thing where I expect it to be most powerful in the context of “accidental” discoveries made while playing with it (see e.g. early use of the microscope, etc.).
Working on https://github.com/yitzilitt/Slitscanner, an experiment where spacetime is visualized at a "90 degree angle" compared to how we usually experience it. If anyone has ideas for places to take this, please let me know!
So I know somebody who I believe is capable of altering Trump’s position on the war in Iran, if they can find a way to talk face-to-face for 15 minutes. They already have really deep connections in DC, and they told me if they were somehow randomly entrusted with nationally important information, they could be talking with the president in at least 2 hours. I’m trying to decide if I want to push this person to do something or not (as they’re normally kind of resistant to taking high-agency type actions, and don’t have as much faith in themselves as I do). Anyone have any advice on how to think about this?