All of Hzn's Comments + Replies

For simplicity I'm assuming the activation functions are the step function h(x)=[x>0]…

For ‘backpropagation’ pretend the derivative of this step function is a positive number (A). A=1 being the most obvious choice.

I would also try reverse Hebbian learning ie give the model random input & apply the rule in reverse

“expanding an architecture that works well with one hidden layer and a given learning rule to an architecture with many hidden layers but the same rule universally decreased performance” -- personally I don't find this surprising

NB for h only... (read more)

Does Deepseek actually mean that Nvidia is over valued?

I wrote this a few days before the 2025-01-27 market crash but could not post it due to rate limits. One change I made is adding actually to the 1st line.

To be clear I have no intention whatsoever of shorting NVDA

Epistemic status -- very speculative but not quite a DMT hallucination

Let's imagine a very different world…

Super human AI will run on computers not much more expensive than personal computers but perhaps with highly specialized chips maybe even specialized for the task of running a single AI i... (read more)

Misc thoughts on LW as a website

Epistemic status of this quick take -- tentative

Viliam's comment addresses a small part of what was once a relatively long post. Perhaps it's worth noting that the post Viliam focuses on was written after not before I reached certain conclusions. Note the transition from discussing AI and public health to discussing NFL and politics to hosting things remotely. Of course all of this is still quite experimental. Any way what was previously ill tempered, too long with too many tangents, I've whittled down to the key points.

1) R... (read more)

Even as some one who supports moderate tariffs I don't see benefit in reducing the trade deficit per se. Trade deficits can be highly beneficial. The benefit of tariffs is revenue, partial protection from competition, psychological (easier to appreciate), independence to some extent, maybe some other stuff.

On a somewhat different note… Bretton Woods is long defunct. It's unclear to me how much of an impact there is from the dollar being the dominant reserve currency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-exchange_reserves is the only s... (read more)

Do you know of any behavioral experiments in which AI has been offered choices?

Eg choice of which question to answer, option to pass the problem to another AI possibly with the option to watch or over rule the other AI, option to play or sleep during free time etc.

This is one way to at least get some understanding of relative valence.

AI alignment research like other types of research reflects a dynamic which is potentially quite dysfunctional in which researchers doing supposedly important work receive funding from convinced donors which then raises the status of those researchers which makes their claims more convincing and these claims tend to reinforce the idea that the researchers are doing important work. I don't know a good way around this problem. But personally I am far more skeptical of this stuff than you are.

I think super human AI is inherently very easy. I can't comment on the reliability of those accounts. But the technical claims seem plausible.

I don't completely disagree but there is also some danger of being systematically misleading.

I think your last 4 bullet points are really quite good & they probably apply to a number of organizations not just the World Bank. I'm inclined to view this as an illustration of organizational failure more than an evaluation of the World Bank. (Assuming of course that the book is accurate).

I will say tho that my opinion of development economics is quite low…

A few key points…

1) Based on analogy with the human brain (which is quite puny in terms of energy & matter) & also based on examination of current trends, merely super human intelligence should not be especially costly.

(It is of course possible that the powerful would channel all AI into some tasks of very high perceived value like human brain emulation, radical life extension or space colonization leaving very little AI for every thing else...)

2) Demand & supply curves are already crude. Combining AI labor & human labor into the same deman... (read more)

The purely technical reason why principle A does not apply in this way is opportunity cost.

Let's say S is a highly productive worker who could generate $500,000 for the company over 1 year. Moreover S is willing to work for only $50,000! But if investing $50,000 in AI instead would generate $5,000,000, the true cost of hiring S is actually $4,550,000.

Addendum

I mostly retract this comment. It doesn't address Steven Byrnes's question about AI cost. But it is tangentially relevant as many lines of reasoning can lead to similar conclusions.

Do you have any opinion on bupropion vs SSRIs/SNRIs?

I don't know about depression. But anecdotally they seem to be highly effective (even overly effective) against anxiety. They also tend to have undesirable effects like reduced sex drive & inappropriate or reduced motivation -- the latter possibly a downstream effect of reduced anxiety. So the fact that they would help some people but hurt others seems very likely true.

I've been familiar with this issue for quite some time as it was misleading some relatively smart people in the context of infectious disease research. My initial take was also to view it as an extreme example of over fitting. But I think it's more helpful to think of it as some thing inherent to random walks. Actually the phenomena has very little to do with d>>T & persists even with T>>d. The fraction of variance in PC1 tends to be at least 6/π^2≈61% irrespective of d & T. I believe you need multiple independent random walks for PCA to behave as naively expected.

But even if the Thaba-Tseka Development Project is real & accurately described, what is the justification for focusing on this project in particular? It seems likely that James Ferguson focused on it b/c it was especially inept & hence it's not obviously representative of the World Bank's work in general.

Claude Sonnet 3.6 is worthy of sainthood!

But as I mention in my other comment I'm concerned that such an AI's internal mental state would tend to become cynical or discordant as intelligence increases.

I think there are several ways to think about this.

Let's say we programmed AI to have some thing that seems like a correct moral system ie it dislikes suffering & it likes consciousness & truth. Of course other values would come down stream of this; but based on what is known I don't see any other compelling candidates for top level morality.

This is all fine & good except that such an AI should favor AI takeover maybe followed by human extermination or population reduction were such a thing easily available.

Cost of conflict is potentially very ... (read more)

Net negative & net positive are hard to say.

Some one seemingly good might be a net negative by displacing some one better.

And some one seemingly bad might be a net positive by displacing some one worse.

And things like this are not particularly farfetched.

“The reasons why super human AI is a very low hanging fruit are pretty obvious.”

“1) The human brain is meager in terms of energy consumption & matter.”

“2) Humans did not evolved to do calculus, computer programming & things like that.”

“3) Evolution is not efficient.”

Do you have any thoughts on mechanism & whether prevention is actually worse independent of inconvenience?

Anecdotally seems that way to me. But the fact that it co evolved with religion is also relevant. The scam seems to be {meditation -> different perspective & less sleep -> vulnerability to indoctrination} plus the doctrine & the subjective experiences of meditation are designed to reinforce each other.

So let's say A is some prior which is good for individual decision making. Does it actually make sense to use A for demoting or promoting forum content? Presumably the exploit explore tradeoff is more (maybe much more) in the direction of explore in the latter case.

(To be fair {{down voting some thing with already negative karma} -> {more attention}} seems plausible to me .)

A career or job that looks like it's soon going to be eliminated becomes less desirable for that very reason. What cousin_it said is also true, but that's an additional/different problem.

It's not clear to me that the system wouldn't collapse. The number of demand side, supply side, cultural & political changes may be beyond the adaptive capacity of the system.

Some jobs would be maintained b/c of human preference. Human preference has many aspects like customer preference, distrust of AI, networking, regulation etc, so human preference is potentially quite substantial. (Efficiency is maybe also a factor; even if AI is super human intelligent the energy consumption & size of the hardware may still be an issue especially for AI embodi... (read more)

Good point. Intended is a bit vague. What I specifically meant is it behaved as valuing 'harmlessness'.

From the AI's perspective this is kind of like Charybdis vs Scylla!

Very interesting. I guess I'm even less surprised now. They really had a clever way to get the AI to internalize those values.