All of Peter Wildeford's Comments + Replies
Here's my summary of the recommendations:
- National security testing
- Develop robust government capabilities to evaluate AI models (foreign and domestic) for security risks
- Once ASL-3 is reached, government should mandate pre-deployment testing
- Preserve the AI Safety Institute in the Department of Commerce to advance third-party testing
- Direct NIST to develop comprehensive national security evaluations in partnership with frontier AI developers
- Build classified and unclassified computing infrastructure for testing powerful AI systems
- Assemble interdisciplinary team
If you've liked my writing in the past, I wanted to share that I've started a Substack: https://peterwildeford.substack.com/
Ever wanted a top forecaster to help you navigate the news? Want to know the latest in AI? I'm doing all that in my Substack -- forecast-driven analysis about AI, national security, innovation, and emerging technology!
My current working take is that it is at the level of a median-but-dedicated undergraduate of a top university who is interested and enthusiastic about AI safety. But Deep Research can do in 10 minutes what would take that undergraduate about 20 hours.
Happy to try a prompt for you and see what you think.
How about "Please summarise Eliezer Yudkowsky's views on decision theory and its relevance to the alignment problem".
This was very helpful for you to put together - thank you!
I'd also add that historically I believe about two-thirds of LTFF's money has also come from OpenPhil, so LTFF doesn't represent a fully independent funder (though the decisionmaking around grants is pretty independent).
This is a great poll and YouGov is a highly reputable pollster, but there is a significant caveat to note about the pause finding.
The way the question is framed provides information about "1000 technology leaders" who have signed a letter in favor of the pause but does not mention any opposition to the pause. I think this would push respondents to favor the pause. Ideal question construction would present more neutrally with both support and oppose statements.
Good to know you won't be out of a job just yet!
I asked GPT4 the same prompt and here is what it said:
Of course! Here's a new contra dance for you:
Contra Dance
Whirlwind Delight
By ChatGPT
(Duple improper)A1
(8) Circle left 3/4
(8) Neighbor swing
A2
(8) Long lines forward and back
(8) Ladies chain
B1
(8) Star right 1x
(8) Gents aleman left 1.5
B2
(8) Half hey, ladies pass right shoulders to start
(8) Partner balance and swing, end facing down in a line of four
Enjoy dancing Whirlwind Delight!
How did it do?
Yep! I was wrong and this is false!
If we want to know what arguments resonate with New York Times articles we can actually use surveys, message testing, and focus groups to check and we don't need to guess! (Disclaimer: My company sells these services.)
Cool - I'll follow up when I'm back at work.
That makes a lot of sense. We can definitely test a lot of different framings. I think the problem with a lot of these kinds of problems is that they are low saliency, and thus people tend not to have opinions already, and thus they tend to generate an opinion on the spot. We have a lot of experience polling on low saliency issues though because we've done a lot of polling on animal farming policy which has similar framing effects.
I'll shill here and say that Rethink Priorities is pretty good at running polls of the electorate if anyone wants to know what a representative sample of Americans think about a particular issue such as this one. No need to poll Uber drivers or Twitter when you can do the real thing!
I'd very much like to see this done with standard high-quality polling techniques, e.g. while airing counterarguments (like support for expensive programs that looks like majority but collapses if higher taxes to pay for them is mentioned). In particular, how the public would react given different views coming from computer scientists/government commissions/panels.
Yeah, it came from a lawyer. The point being that if you confess to something bad, we may be legally required to repot that, so be careful.
Feel free to skip questions if you feel they aren't applicable to you.
Does the chance evolution got really lucky cancel out with the chance that evolution got really unlucky? So maybe this doesn't change the mean but does increase the variance?as for how much to increase the variance, maybe like an additional +/-1 OOM tacked on to the existing evolution anchor?
I'm kinda thinking there's like a 10% chance you'd have to increase it by 10x and a 10% chance you'd have to decrease it by 10x. But maybe I'm not thinking about this right?
There are a lot of different ways you can talk about "efficiency" here. The main thing I am thinking about with regard to the key question "how much FLOP would we expect transformative AI to require?" is whether, when using a neural net anchor (not evolution) to add a 1-3 OOM penalty to FLOP needs due to 2022-AI systems being less sample efficient than humans (requiring more data to produce the same capabilities) and with this penalty decreasing over time given expected algorithmic progress. The next question would be how much more efficient potential AI (...
Yeah ok 80%. I also do concede this is a very trivial thing, not like some "gotcha look at what stupid LMs can't do no AGI until 2400".
This is admittedly pretty trivial but I am 90% sure that if you prompt GPT4 with "Q: What is today's date?" it will not answer correctly. I think something like this would literally be the least impressive thing that GPT4 won't be able to do.
Thanks!
Is it ironic that the link to "All the posts I will never write" goes to a 404 page?
This sounds like something that could be done as an organization creating a job for it, which could help with mentorship/connections/motivation/job security relative to expecting people to apply to EAIF/LTFF
My organization (Rethink Priorities) is currently hiring for research assistants and research fellows (among other roles) and some of their responsibilities will include distillation.
These conversations are great and I really admire the transparency. It's really nice to see discussions that normally happen in private happen instead in public where everyone can reflect, give feedback, and improve their own thoughts. On the other hand, the combined conversations combined to a decent-sized novel - LW says 198,846 words! Is anyone considering investing heavily in summarizing the content for people to get involved without having to read all that content?
Echoing that I loved these conversations and I'm super grateful to everyone who participated — especially Richard, Paul, Eliezer, Nate, Ajeya, Carl, Rohin, and Jaan, who contributed a lot.
I don't plan to try to summarize the discussions or distill key take-aways myself (other than the extremely cursory job I did on https://intelligence.org/late-2021-miri-conversations/), but I'm very keen on seeing others attempt that, especially as part of a process to figure out their own models and do some evaluative work.
I think I'd rather see partial summaries/respons...
I don't recall the specific claim, just that EY's probability mass for the claim was in the 95-99% range. The person argued that because EY disagrees with some other thoughtful people on that question, he shouldn't have such confidence.
I think people conflate the very reasonable "I am not going to adopt your 95-99% range because other thoughtful people disagree and I have no particular reason to trust you massively more than I trust other people" with the different "the fact that other thoughtful people mean there's no way you could arrive at 95-99% confidence" which is false. I think thoughtful people disagreeing with you is decent evidence you are wrong but can still be outweighed.
So it looks like we survived? (Yay)
I will be on the lookout for false alarms.
I can see whether the site is down or not. Seems pretty clear.
Attention LessWrong - I am a chosen user of EA Forum and I have the codes needed to destroy LessWrong. I hereby make a no first use pledge and I will not enter my codes for any reason, even if asked to do so. I also hereby pledge to second strike - if the EA Forum is taken down, I will retaliate.
Regarding your second strike pledge: it would of course be wildly disingenuous to remember Petrov's action, which was not jumping to retaliation, by doing the opposite and jumping to retaliation.
I believe you know this, and would guess that if in fact one of the sites went down, you'd do nothing but instead later post about your moral choice of not retaliating.
(I'd also guess, if you choose to respond to this comment, it'd be to reiterate the pledge to retaliate, as you've done elsewhere. This does make sense--threats must be unequivocal to be believed, e...
Seems like "the right prompt" is doing a lot of work here. How do we know if we have given it "the right prompt"?
Do you think GPT-4 could do my taxes?
1.) I think the core problem is that honestly no one (except 80K) actually is investing significant effort on growing the EA community since 2015 (especially comparable to the pre-2015 effort and especially as a percentage of total EA resources)
2.) Some of these examples are suspect. The GiveWell numbers definitely look to be increasing beyond 2015, especially when OpenPhil's understandably constant fundraising is removed - and this increase in GiveWell seems to line up with GiveWell's increased investment in their outreach. The OpenPhil numbers also look ...
FWIW I I put together "Is EA Growing? EA Growth Metrics for 2018" and I'm looking forward for doing 2019+2020 soon
Mr. Money Mustache has a lot of really good advice that I find a lot of value from. However, I think Mr. Money Mustache underestimates the ease and impact of opportunities to grow income relative to cutting spending - especially if you're in (or can be in) a high-earning field like tech. Doubling your income will put you on a much faster path than cutting your spending a further 5%.
PredictionBook is really great for lightweight, private predictions and does everything you're looking for. Metaculus is great for more fully-featured predicting and I believe also supports private questions, but may be a bit of overkill for your use case. A spreadsheet also seems more than sufficient, as others have mentioned.
Thanks. I'll definitely aim to produce them more quickly... this one got away from me.
My understanding is that we also have and might in the future also spend a decent amount of time in a "level 2.5", where some but not all non-essential businesses are open (i.e., no groups larger than ten, restaurants are closed to dine-in, hair salons are open).
A binary search strategy still could be more efficient, depending on the ratio of positives to negatives.
What about binary search?
This is a good answer.
Not really an answer, but a statement and a question - I imagine this is literally the least neglected issue in the world right now. How much does that affect the calculus? How much should we defer to people with more domain expertise?
Thanks!
It could also be on the list of pros, depending on how one uses LW.
I feel obligated to note that it will in fact only destroy the frontpage of LW, not the rest of the site.
Are you offering to take donations in exchange for pressing the button or not pressing the button?
What happens if you don't check off everything for the day?
What do you think of the counterargument that OpenAI announced o3 in December and publicly solicited external safety testing then, and isn't deploying until ~4 months later?