Gpt5.2 seems to have been trained specifically to be better at work tasks, especially long ones. It was also released early, according to articles about a "code red" in openAI. As such, (I predict) it should be a jump on the metr graph. It will be difficult to differentiate progress because it was trained to do well at long work tasks from the results of the early release and from any actual algorithms progress. (An example of algorithms progress would be a training method for using memory well - something not specific to eg programming tasks.)

Consider saying "irrational" instead of "insane"

Rationalists often say "insane" to talk about normie behaviors they don't like, and "sane" to talk about behaviors they like better. This seems unnecessarily confusing and mean to me.

This clearly is very different from how most people use these words. Like, "guy who believes in God" is very different from "resident of a psych ward." It can even cause legitimate confusion when you want to switch back to the traditional definition of "insane". This doesn't seem very rational to me!

Also, the otherizing/dismissiv... (read more)

[Fiction]

A novice needed a map of the northern mountain passes. He approached the temple cartographer.

"Draw me the northern passes," he said, "showing the paths, the fords, and the shelters."

The cartographer studied many sources and produced a map. The novice examined it carefully: the mountains were drawn, the paths clearly traced, fords and shelters marked in their proper notation. The distances seemed reasonable. The penmanship was excellent.

"This is good work," said the novice, and he led a merchant caravan into the mountains.

On the third night, they r... (read more)

Dopamine might be what regulates top-down, "will-imposing" action. 
Stimulants are great for increasing attention, motivation and mood. However, they also cause downregulation of dopamine receptors, thus potentially causing dependence and the opposite of the benefits when not taking them.

Some lesser-known ways to upregulate the dopaminergic system without (or with less of) this effect:

•  Aspirin (upregulates TH - dopamine synthesis): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30187283/ 
• Creatine (potentiates dopaminergics somehow): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.

OpenAI claims 5.2 solved an open COLT problem with no assistance: https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-2-for-science-and-math/

This might be the first thing that meets my bar of autonomously having an original insight??

One theme I've been thinking about recently is how bids for connection and understanding are often read as criticism. For example:

Person A shares a new idea, feeling excited and hoping to connect with Person B over something they've worked hard on and hold dear.

Person B asks a question about a perceived inconsistency in the idea, feeling excited and hoping for an answer which helps them better understand the idea (and Person B).

Person A feels hurt and unfairly rejected by Person B. Specifically, Person A feels like Person B isn't willing to give their sinc... (read more)

RL capability gains might mostly come from better self-elicitation.

Ran across a paper NUDGING: Inference-time Alignment of LLMs via Guided Decoding. The authors took a base model and a post-trained model. They had the base model try to answer benchmark questions, found the positions where the base model was least certain, and replaced specifically those tokens with tokens from the post-trained model. The base model, so steered, performed surprisingly well on benchmarks. Surprisingly (to me at least), the tokens changed tended to be transitional phrases rat... (read more)

Superstable proteins: A team from Nanjing University just created a protein that's 5x stronger against unfolding than normal proteins and can withstand temperatures of 150C. The upshot from some analysis on X seems to be:

• They used 3 different AI tools (RFdiffusion, ProteinMPNN, ESMFold/AlphaFold2), plus molecular dynamics software
• The protein uses standard amino acids (edit: and was made in a standard bacterial cell)
• The strength comes from increasing the number of backbone hydrogen bonds from 4 to 33.

So why is this relevant? It's basically the first step to... (read more)

For decades, people have been saying that the prediction market has the potential to become economically important, yet it remains unimportant. I would not be surprised if it becomes important over the next 4 years thanks to broadly-available AI technology.

Let's define "economically important" as a state of affairs in which there continues to be at least $50 billion riding on predictions at every instant in time.

First of all, AI tech might make prediction markets better by helping with market-making and arbitrage. Second, a sufficiently robust prediction m... (read more)

Notes to self about the structure of the problem, probably not interesting to others:

This is heavily drawn from MIRIs work and Joe Carlsmith's work

So, there are two kinds of value structure: (1) Long-term goals, and (2) immediate goals & deontological constraints. The line between them isn't sharp but that's OK.

If we imagine an agent that only has long-term goals, well, that thing is going to be a ruthless consequentialisty optimizer thingy and when it gets smart and powerful enough it'll totally take over the world if it can, unless the maxima of its ... (read more)

Do we have some page containing resources for rationalist parents, or generally for parents of smart children? Such as recommended books, toys, learning apps, etc.

I found tag https://www.lesswrong.com/w/parenting but I was hoping for some kind of best textbooks / recommendations / reference works but for parents/children.

For the last week ChatGPT 5.1 is glitching.

*It claims to be 5.1, I do not know how to check it, since I use free version (limited questions per day), and there is no version selection. 

When I ask it to explain some topic and ask deeper and deeper questions, at some point it chooses to enter the thinking mode. I see that the topics it thinks about are relevant, but as it stops thinking it and says something similar "Ah, Great, here is the answer..." and explains another topic from like 2-3 messages back, which is already not related to the question.

I do not use memory or characters features.

Am I understanding correctly that recent revelations from Ilya's deposition (e.g. looking at the parts here) suggest Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati seem like very selfish and/or cowardly people? They seem approximately as scheming or manipulative as Sam Altman, if maybe more cowardly and less competent. 

My understanding from is that they were basically wholly responsible for causing the board to try to fire Sam Altman. But when it went south, they actively sabotaged the firing (e.g. Mira disavowing it and trying to retain her role, Ilya saying he regr... (read more)

Many have asserted that LLM pre-training on human data can only produce human-level capabilities at most. Others, eg Ilya Sutskever and Eliezer Yudkowsky, point out that since prediction is harder than generation, there's no reason to expect such a cap.

The latter position seems clearly correct to me, but I'm not aware of it having been tested. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard to test, using some narrow synthetic domain.

The only superhuman capability of LLMs that's been clearly shown as far as I know is their central one: next-token prediction. But I... (read more)

Epistemic status: I think that there are serious problems with honesty passwords (as discussed in this post), and am not sure that there are any circumstances in which we'd actually want to use them. Furthermore, I was not able to come up with a practical scheme for honesty passwords with ~2 days of effort. However, there might be some interesting ideas in this post, and maybe they could turn into something useful at some later point.

Thanks to Alexa Pan, Buck Shlegeris, Ryan Greenblatt, Vivek Hebbar and Nathan Sheffield for discussions that led to me writi