One True Love

We have long been waiting for a version of this story, where someone hacks together the technology to use Generative AI to work the full stack of the dating apps on their behalf, ultimately finding their One True Love.

Or at least, we would, if it turned out he is Not Making This Up.

AI #50: The Most Dangerous Thing

In a week with two podcasts I covered extensively, I was happy that there was little other news.

That is, until right before press time, when Google rebranded Bard to Gemini, released an app for that, and offered a premium subscription ($20/month) for Gemini Ultra.

On the Debate Between Jezos and Leahy

Previously: Based Beff Jezos and the Accelerationists

Based Beff Jezos, the founder of effective accelerationism, delivered on his previous pledge, and did indeed debate what is to be done to navigate into the future with a highly Worthy Opponent in Connor Leahy.

On Dwarkesh’s 3rd Podcast With Tyler Cowen

This post is extensive thoughts on Tyler Cowen’s excellent talk with Dwarkesh Patel.

AI #49: Bioweapon Testing Begins

Two studies came out on the question of whether existing LLMs can help people figure out how to make bioweapons. RAND published a negative finding, showing no improvement. OpenAI found a small improvement, bigger for experts than students, from GPT-4. That’s still harmless now, the question is what will happen in the future as capabilities advance.

Another news item was that Bard with Gemini Pro impressed even without Gemini Ultimate, taking the second spot on the Arena leaderboard behind only GPT-4-Turbo. For now, though, GPT-4 remains in the lead.

A third cool item was this story from a Russian claiming to have used AI extensively in his quest to find his one true love. I plan to cover that on its own and have Manifold on the job of figuring out how much of the story actually happened.

Childhood and Education Roundup #4

Before we begin, I will note that I have indeed written various thoughts about the three college presidents that appeared before Congress and the resulting controversies, including the disputes regarding plagiarism. However I have excluded them from this post.

AI #48: The Talk of Davos

While I was in San Francisco, the big head honchos headed for Davos, where AI was the talk of the town. As well it should be, given what will be coming soon. It did not seem like anyone involved much noticed or cared about the existential concerns. That is consistent with the spirit of Davos, which has been not noticing or caring about things that don’t directly impact your business or vibe since (checks notes by which I mean an LLM) 1971. It is what it is.

Otherwise we got a relatively quiet week. For once the scheduling worked out and I avoided the Matt Levine curse. I’m happy for the lull to continue so I can pay down more debt and focus on long term projects and oh yeah also keep us all farther away from potential imminent death.

Monthly Roundup #14: January 2024

There’s always lots of stuff going on. The backlog of other roundups keeps growing rather than shrinking. I have also decided to hold back a few things to turn them into their own posts instead.

AI #47: Exponentials in Geometry

The biggest event of the week was the Sleeper Agents paper from Anthropic. I expect that to inform our thoughts for a while to come, and to lay foundation for additional work. We also had the first third of the IMO solved at almost gold metal level by DeepMind, discovering that math competition geometry is actually mostly composed of One Weird Trick. I knew that at the time I was doing it, though, and it was still really hard.

As usual, there was also a bunch of other stuff.

Tomorrow the 19th, I am going to be off to San Francisco for the weekend to attend a workshop. That leaves a lot of time for other events and seeing other people, a lot of which remains unfilled. So if you are interested in meeting up or want to invite me to a gathering, especially on Sunday the 21st, drop me a line.

On Anthropic’s Sleeper Agents Paper

The recent paper from Anthropic is getting unusually high praise, much of it I think deserved.

The title is: Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training.

Scott Alexander also covers this, offering an excellent high level explanation, of both the result and the arguments about whether it is meaningful. You could start with his write-up to get the gist, then return here if you still want more details, or you can read here knowing that everything he discusses is covered below. There was one good comment, pointing out some of the ways deceptive behavior could come to pass, but most people got distracted by the ‘grue’ analogy.