All of Aprillion's Comments + Replies

Interesting - the first part of the response seems to suggest that it looked like I was trying to understand more about LLMs... Sorry for confusion, I wanted to clarify an aspect of your worflow that was puzzling to me. I think I got all info for what I was asking about, thanks!

FWIW, if the question was an expression of actual interest and not a snarky suggestion, my experience with chatbots has been positive for brainstorming, dictionary "search", rubber ducking, description of common sense (or even niche) topics, but disappointing for anything that requi... (read more)

it's from https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/mitigating-the-risk ... I've used "just" (including scare quotes) for the concept of something being very hard, yet simpler to the thing in comparison

and now that concept has more color/flavour/it sparkled a glimmer of joy for me (despite/especially because it was used to illuminate such a dark and depressing scene - gradual disempowerment is like putting a dagger to one's liver where the mere(!) misaligned ASI was a stab between the ribs, lose thy hope mere mortals, you were grabbing for water)

"merely(!)" is my new favourite word

I can see that if Moloch is a force of nature, any wannabe singleton would collapse under internal struggles... but it's not like that would show me any lever AI safety can pull, it would be dumb luck if we live in a universe where the ratio of instrumentally convergent power concentration to it's inevitable schism is less than 1 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Have you tried to make a mistake in your understanding on purpose to test out whether it would correct you or agree with you even when you'd get it wrong?

(and if yes, was it "a few times" or "statistically significant" kinda test, please?)

While Carl Brown said (a few times) he doesn't want to do more youtube videos for every new disappointing AI release, so far he seems to be keeping tabs on them in the newsletter just fine - https://internetofbugs.beehiiv.com/

...I am quite confident that if anything actually started to work, he would comment on it, so even if he won't say much about any future incremental improvements, it might be a good resource to subscribe to for getting better signal - if Carl will get enthusiastic about AI coding assistants, it will be worth paying attention.

My own experience is that if-statements are even 3.5's Achilles heel and 3.7 is somehow worse (when it's "almost" right, that's worse than useless, it's like reviewing pull requests when you don't know if it's an adversarial attack or if they mean well but are utterly incompetent in interesting, hypnotizing ways)... and that METR's baselines more resemble a Skinner box than programming (though many people have that kind of job, I just don't find the conditions of gig economy as "humane" and representative of what how "value" is actually created), and the s... (read more)

I would never trust people not to look at my scratchpad.

I suspect the corresponding analogy for humans might be about hostile telepaths, not just literal scratchpads, right?

thanks for concrete examples, can you help me understand how these translate from individual productivity to externally-observable productivity?

3 days to make a medium sized project

I agree Docker setup can be fiddly, however what happened with the 50+% savings - did you lower price for the customer to stay competitive, do you do 2x as many paid projects now, or did you postpone hiring another developer who is not needed now, or do you just have more free time? No change in support&maintenance costs compared to similar projects before LLMs?

processing is

toxic slime, which releases a cloud of poison gas if anything touches it

this reminds me of Oxygen Not Included (though I just learned the original reference is D&D), where Slime (which also releases toxic stuff) can be harversted to produce useful stuff in Algae Distiller

the metaphor runs differently, one of the useful stuff from Slime is Polluted Water, which is also produced by humans replicants in Lavatory ... and there is Water Sieve that will process Polluted Water into Water (and some plants want to be watered by the Polluted variant)

makes me won... (read more)

Talking out loud is even better. There is something about forcing your thoughts into language...

Those are 2 very different things for some people ;)

I, for one, can think MUCH faster without speaking out loud, even if subvocalize real words (for the purpose of revealing gaps) and don't go all the way to manipulating concepts-that-don't-have-words-yet-but-have-been-pointed-to-already or concepts-that-have-a-word-but-the-word-stands-for-5-concepts-and-we-already-narrowed-it-down-without-explicit-label ...

the set of problems the solutions to which are present in their training data

a.k.a. the set of problems already solved by open source libraries without the need to re-invent similar code?

that's not how productivity ought to be measured - it should measure some output per (say) a workday

1 vs 5 FTE is a difference in input, not output, so you can say "adding 5 people to this project will decrease productivity by 70% next month and we hope it will increase productivity by 2x in the long term" ... not a synonym of "5x productivity" at all

it's the measure by which you can quantify diminishig results, not obfuscate them!

...but the usage of "5-10x productivity" seems to point to a diffent concept than a ratio of useful output per input 🤷 AFAICT it's a synonym with "I feel 5-10x better when I write code which I wouldn't enjoy writing otherwise"

A thing I see around me, my mind.
Many a peak, a vast mountain range,
standing at a foothill,
most of it unseen.

Two paths in front of me,
a lighthouse high above.

Which one will it be,
a shortcut through the forest,
or a scenic route?

Climbing up for better views,
retreating from overlooks,
away from the wolves.

To think with all my lighthouses.

all the scaffold tools, system prompt, and what not add context for the LLM ... but what if I want to know what's the context too?

we can put higher utility on the shutdown

sounds instrumental to expand your moral circle to include other instances of yourself to keep creating copies of yourself that will shut down ... then exand your moral circle to include humans and shut them down too 🤔

exercise for readers: what patterns need to hold in the environment in order for "do what I mean" to make sense at all?

Notes to self (let me know if anyone wants to hear more, but hopefully no unexplored avenues can be found in my list of "obvious" if somewhat overlapping points):

• sparsity - partial observations narrow down unobserved dimensions
• ambiguity / edge of chaos - the environment is "interesting" to both agents (neither fully predictable nor fully random)
• repetition / approximation / learnability - induction works
• computational boundedness / embeddedness / diversity
• power balance / care / empathy / trading opportunity / similarity / scale

Parity in computing is whether the count of 1s in a binary string is even or odd, e.g. '101' has two 1s => even parity (to output 0 for even parity, XOR all bits like 1^0^1 .. to output 1 for this, XOR that result with 1).

The parity problem (if I understand it correctly) sounds like trying to find out the minimum amount of data samples per input length a learning algorithm ought to need to figure out that a mapping between a binary input and a single bit output is equal to computing XOR parity and not something else (e.g. whether an integer is even/odd,... (read more)

The failure mode of the current policy sounds to me like "pay for your own lesson to feel less motivated to do it again" while the failure mode of this proposal would be "one of the casinos might maybe help you cheat the system which will feel even more exciting" - almost as if the people who made the current policy knew what they were doing to set aligned incentives 🤔

Focus On Image Generators

How about audio? Is the speech-to-text domain as "close to the metal" as possible to deserve focus too or did people hit roadblocks that made image generators more attractive? If the latter, where can I read about the lessons learned, please?

What if you tried to figure out a way to understand the "canonical cliffness" and design a new line of equipment that could be tailored to fit any "slope"... Which cliff would you test first? 🤔

IMO

in my opinion, the acronym for the international math olympiad deserves to be spelled out here

Evolution isn't just a biological process; it's a universal optimization algorithm that applies to any type of entity

Since you don't talk about the other 3 forces of biological evolution, or about "time evolution" concept in physics...

And since the examples seem to focus on directional selection (and not on other types of selection), and also only on short-term effect illustrations, while in fact natural selection explains most aspects of biological evolution, it's the strongest long-term force, not the weakest one (anti-cancer mechanisms and why viruses d... (read more)

If anyone here might enjoy a dystopian fiction about a world where the formal proofs will work pretty well, I wrote Unnatural abstractions

Thank you for the engagement, but "to and fro" is a real expression, not a typo (and I'm keeping it).. it's used slightly unorthodoxly here, but it sounded right to my ear, so it survived editing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I tried to be use the technobabble in a way that's usefully wrong, so please also let me know if someone gets inspired by this short story.

I am not making predictions about the future, only commenting on the present - if you notice any factual error from that point of view, feel free to speak up, but as far as the doominess spectrum goes, it's supposed to be both too dystopian and too optimistic at the same time.

And if someone wants to fix a typo or a grammo, I'd welcome a pull request (but no commas shall be harmed in the process). 🙏

Let me practice the volatile kidness here ... as a European, do I understand it correctly that this advice is targeted for US audience? Or am I the only person to whom it sounds a bit fake?

How I personally understand what it could mean to "understand an action:"

Having observed action A1 and having a bunch of (finite state machine-ish) models, each with a list of states that could lead to action A1, more accurate candidate model => more understanding. (and meta-level uncertainty about which model is right => less understanding)

Model 1            Model 2
S11 -> 50% A1      S21 -> 99% A1
    -> 50% A2          ->  1% A2

S21 -> 10% A1      S22 ->  1% A1
    -> 90% A3          -> 99% A2
                   
                   S23 -> 100% A3

Thanks for the clarification, I don't share the intuition this will prove harder than other hard software engineering challenges in non-AI areas that weren't solved in months but were solved in years and not decades, but other than "broad baseline is more significant than narrow evidence for me" I don't have anything more concrete to share.

A note until fixed: Chollet also discusses 'unhobbling' -> Aschenbrenner also discusses 'unhobbling'

I agree with "Why does this matter" and with the "if ... then ..." structure of the argument.

But I don't see from where do you see such high probability (>5%) of scaffolding not working... I mean whatever will work can be retroactively called "scaffolding", even if it will be in the "one more major breakthrough" category - and I expect they were already accounted for in the unhobblings predictions.

a year ago many expected scaffolds like AutoGPT and BabyAGI to result in effective LLM-based agents

Do we know the base rate how many years... (read more)

Aschenbrenner argues that we should expect current systems to reach human-level given further scaling

In https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/#Unhobbling, "scaffolding" is explicitly named as a thing being worked on, so I take it that progress in scaffolding is already included in the estimate. Nothing about that estimate is "just scaling".

And AFAICT neither Chollet nor Knoop made any claims in the sense that "scaffolding outside of LLMs won't be done in the next 2 years" => what am I missing that is the source of hope for longer timelines, please?

It’s a failure of ease of verification: because I don’t know what to pay attention to, I can’t easily notice the ways in which the product is bad.

Is there an opposite of the "failure of ease of verification" that would add up to 100% if you would categorize the whole of reality into 1 of these 2 categories? Say in a simulation, if you attributed every piece of computation into following 2 categories, how much of the world can be "explained by" each category?

• make sure stuff "works at all and is easy to verify whether it works at all"
• stuff that works must be

This leaves humming in search of a use case.

we can still hum to music, hum in (dis)agreement, hum in puzzlement, and hum the "that's interesting" sound ... without a single regard to NO or viruses, just for fun!

I agree with the premises (except "this is somewhat obvious to most" 🤷).

On the other hand, stopping AI safety research sounds like a proposal to go from option 1 to option 2:

1. many people develop capabilities, some of them care about safety
2. many people develop capabilities, none of them care about safety

Know some fancier formulas like left/mid/right, concatenate, hyperlink

Wait, I thought basic fancier formulas are like =index(.., match(.., .., 0)) 

I guess https://dev.to/aprillion/self-join-in-sheets-sql-python-and-javascript-2km4 might be a nice toy example if someone wants to practice the lessons from the companion piece 😹

It's duct tapes all the way down!

Bad: "Screw #8463 needs to be reinforced."

The best: "Book a service appointment, ask them to replace screw #8463, do a general check-up, and report all findings to the central database for all those statistical analyses that inform recalls and design improvements."

Oh, I should probably mention that my weakness is that I cannot remember the stuff well while reading out loud (especially when I focus on pronunciation for the benefit of listeners)... My workaround is to make pauses - it seems the stuff is in working memory and my subconscious can process it if I give it a short moment, and then I can think about it consciously too, but if I would read out loud a whole page, I would have trouble even trying to summarize the content.

Similarly a common trick how to remember names is to repeat the name out loud.. that doesn... (read more)

Yeah, I myself subvocalize absolutely everything and I am still horrified when I sometimes try any "fast" reading techniques - those drain all of the enjoyment our of reading for me, as if instead of characters in a story I would imagine them as p-zombies.

For non-fiction, visual-only reading cuts connections to my previous knowledge (as if the text was a wave function entangled to the rest of the universe and by observing every sentence in isolation, I would collapse it to just "one sentence" without further meaning).

I never move my lips or tongue though, ... (read more)

ah, but booby traps in coding puzzles can be deliberate... one might even say that it can feel "rewarding" when we train ourselves on these "adversarial" examples

the phenomenon of programmers introducing similar bugs in similar situations might be fascinating, but I wouldn't expect a clear answer to the question "Is this true?" without a slightly more precise definitions of:

• "same" bug
• same "bug"
• "hastily" cobbled-together programs
• hastily "cobbled-together" programs ...

To me as a programmer and not a mathematitian, the distinction doesn't make practical intuitive sense.

If we can create 3 functions f, g, h so that they "do the same thing" like f(a, b, c) == g(a)(b)(c) == average(h(a), h(b), h(c)), it seems to me that cross-entropy can "do the same thing" as some particular objective function that would explicitly mention multiple future tokens.

My intuition is that cross-entropy-powered "local accuracy" can approximate "global accuracy" well enough in practice that I should expect better global reasoning from larger model ... (read more)

transformer is only trained explicitly on next token prediction!

I find myself understanding language/multimodal transformer capabilities better when I think about the whole document (up to context length) as a mini-batch for calculating the gradient in transformer (pre-)training, so I imagine it is minimizing the document-global prediction error, it wasn't trained to optimize for just a single-next token accuracy...

Can you help me understand a minor labeling convention that puzzles me? I can see how we can label $S_R$ from the Z1R process as ${\eta }_{11}$ in MSP because we observe 11 to get there, but why $S_1$ is labeled as ${\eta }_{01}$ after observing either 100 or 00, please?

Pushing writing ideas to external memory for my less burned out future self:

• agent foundations need path-dependent notion of rationality

  • economic world of average expected values / amortized big O if f(x) can be negative or you start very high
  • vs min-maxing / worst case / risk-averse scenarios if there is a bottom (death)
  • pareto recipes

• alignment is a capability

  • they might sound different in the limit, but the difference disappears in practice (even close to the limit? 🤔)

• in a universe with infinite Everett branches, I was born in the subset tha

Now, suppose Carol knows the plan and is watching all this unfold. She wants to make predictions about Bob’s picture, and doesn’t want to remember irrelevant details about Alice’s picture. Then it seems intuitively “natural” for Carol to just remember where all the green lines are (i.e. the message M), since that’s “all and only” the information relevant to Bob’s picture.

(Writing before I read the rest of the article): I believe Carol would "naturally" expect that Alice and Bob share more mutual information than she does with Bob herself (even if they... (read more)

yeah, I got a similar impression that this line of reasoning doesn't add up...

we interpret other humans as feeling something when we see their reactions

we interpret other eucaryotes as feeling something when we see their reactions 🤷

(there are a couple of circuit diagrams of the whole brain on the web, but this is the best.  From this site.)

could you update the 404 image, please? (link to the site still works for now, just the image is gone)

S5

What is S5, please?

I agree with what you say. My only peeve is that the concept of IGF is presented as a fact from the science of biology, while it's used as a confused mess of 2 very different concepts.

Both talk about evolution, but inclusive finess is a model of how we used to think about evolution before we knew about genes. If we model biological evolution on the genetic level, we don't have any need for additional parameters on the individual organism level, natural selection and the other 3 forces in evolution explain the observed phenomena without a need to talk about... (read more)