I am a PhD student in computer science at the University of Waterloo, supervised by Professor Ming Li and advised by Professor Marcus Hutter.
My current research is related to applications of algorithmic probability to sequential decision theory (universal artificial intelligence). Recently I have been trying to start a dialogue between the computational cognitive science and UAI communities. Sometimes I build robots, professionally or otherwise. Another hobby (and a personal favorite of my posts here) is the Sherlockian abduction master list, which is a crowdsourced project seeking to make "Sherlock Holmes" style inference feasible by compiling observational cues. Give it a read and see if you can contribute!
See my personal website colewyeth.com for an overview of my interests and work.
I do ~two types of writing, academic publications and (lesswrong) posts. With the former I try to be careful enough that I can stand by ~all (strong/central) claims in 10 years, usually by presenting a combination of theorems with rigorous proofs and only more conservative intuitive speculation. With the later, I try to learn enough by writing that I have changed my mind by the time I'm finished - and though I usually include an "epistemic status" to suggest my (final) degree of confidence before posting, the ensuing discussion often changes my mind again.
That looks like (minor) good news… appears more consistent with the slower trendline before reasoning models. Is Claude 4 Opus using a comparable amount of inference-time compute as o3?
I believe I predicted that models would fall behind even the slower exponential trendline (before inference time scaling) - before reaching 8-16 hour tasks. So far that hasn’t happened, but obviously it hasn’t resolved either.
Thanks, but no. The post I had in mind was an explanation of a particular person's totalizing meta-worldview, which had to do with evolutionary psychology. I remember recognizing the username - also I have that apparently common form of synesthesia where letters seem to have colors and I vaguely remember the color of it (@lc? @lsusr?) but not what is was.
I’m not sure about the rest of the arguments in the post, but it’s worth flagging that a kg to kg comparison of honey to chicken is kind of inappropriate. Essentially no one is eating a comparable amount of honey as a typical carnivore eats chicken (I didn’t, like, try to calculate this, but it seems obviously right).
Welcome to lesswrong!
I’m glad you’ve decided to join the conversation here.
A problem with this argument is that it doesn’t prove we should pause AI, only that we should avoid deploying AI in high impact (e.g. military) applications. Insofar as LLMs can’t follow rules, the argument seems to indicate that we should continue to develop the technology until it can.
Personally, I’m concerned about the type of AI system which can follow rules, but is not intrinsically motivated to follow our moral rules. Whether LLMs will reach that threshold is not clear to me (see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vvgND6aLjuDR6QzDF/my-model-of-what-is-going-on-with-llms) but this argument seems to cut against my actual concerns.
The report is partially optimistic but the results seem unambiguously bearish.
Like, yeah, maybe some of these problems could be solved with scaffolding - but the first round of scaffolding failed, and if you're going to spend a lot of time iterating on scaffolding, you could probably instead write a decent bot that doesn't use Claude in that time. And then you wouldn't be vulnerable to bizarre hallucinations, which seem like an unacceptable risk.
Agree about phones (in fact I am seriously considering switching to a flip phone and using my iphone only for things like navigation).
Not so sure about LLMs. I had your attitude initially, and I still consider them an incredibly dangerous mental augmentation. But I do think that conservatively throwing a question at them to find searchable keywords is helpful, if you maintain the attitude that they are actively trying to take over your brain and therefore remain vigilant.
Short fiction on lesswrong isn’t uncommon
That’s why I specified “close on a log scale.” Evolution may be very inefficient, but it also has access to MUCH more data than a single lifetime.
Yes, we should put some weight on both perspectives. What I’m worried about here is this trend where everyone seems to expect AGI in a decade or so even if the current wave of progress fizzles - I think that is a cached belief. We should be prepared to update.
I expect this to start not happening right away.
So at least we’ll see who’s right soon.