For the last month, @RobertM and I have been exploring the possible use of recommender systems on LessWrong. Today we launched our first site-wide experiment in that direction. 

(In the course of our efforts, we also hit upon a frontpage refactor that we reckon is pretty good: tabs instead of a clutter of different sections. For now, only for logged-in users. Logged-out users see the "Latest" tab, which is the same-as-usual list of posts.)

Why algorithmic recommendations?

A core value of LessWrong is to be timeless and not news-driven. However, the central algorithm by which attention allocation happens on the site is the Hacker News algorithm^[1], which basically only shows you things that were posted recently, and creates a strong incentive for discussion to always be...

What’s Twitter for you?

That's a long-lasting trend I often see on my feed when people praise the blue bird for getting them a job, introducing them to new people, investors, and all this and that.

What about me? I just wanted to get into dribbble — the then invite-only designer's social network which was at its peak at the time. When I realized invites were given away on Twitter, I set up an account and went on a hunt. Soon, the mission was accomplished.

For the next few years, I went on a radio silence. Like many others, I was lurking most of the time. Even today I don't tweet excessively. But Twitter has always been a town square of mine. Suited best for my interests, it’s been a...

A friend has spent the last three years hounding me about seed oils. Every time I thought I was safe, he’d wait a couple months and renew his attack:

“When are you going to write about seed oils?”

“Did you know that seed oils are why there’s so much {obesity, heart disease, diabetes, inflammation, cancer, dementia}?”

“Why did you write about {meth, the death penalty, consciousness, nukes, ethylene, abortion, AI, aliens, colonoscopies, Tunnel Man, Bourdieu, Assange} when you could have written about seed oils?”

“Isn’t it time to quit your silly navel-gazing and use your weird obsessive personality to make a dent in the world—by writing about seed oils?”

He’d often send screenshots of people reminding each other that Corn Oil is Murder and that it’s critical that we overturn our lives...

"The view, expressed by almost all competent atomic scientists, that there was no "secret" about how to build an atomic bomb was thus not only rejected by influential people in the U.S. political establishment, but was regarded as a treasonous plot." 

Robert Oppenheimer A Life at the Center, Ray Monk.

[This essay addresses the probability and existential risk of AI through the lens of national security, which the author believes is the most impactful way to address the issue. Thus the author restricts application of the argument to specific near term versions of Processes for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement (PASTAs) and human-level AI.]

-- 

Are Advances in LLMs a National Security Risk?

“This is the number one thing keeping me up at night... reckless, rapid development. The pace is frightening... It...

I previously expected open-source LLMs to lag far behind the frontier because they're very expensive to train and naively it doesn't make business sense to spend on the order of $10M to (soon?) $1B to train a model only to give it away for free.

But this has been repeatedly challenged, most recently by Meta's Llama 3. They seem to be pursuing something like a commoditize your complement strategy: https://twitter.com/willkurt/status/1781157913114870187 .

As models become orders-of-magnitude more expensive to train can we expect companies to continue to open-source them?

In particular, can we expect this of Meta?

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced today additional members of the executive leadership team of the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI), which is housed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Raimondo named Paul Christiano as Head of AI Safety, Adam Russell as Chief Vision Officer, Mara Campbell as Acting Chief Operating Officer and Chief of Staff, Rob Reich as Senior Advisor, and Mark Latonero as Head of International Engagement. They will join AISI Director Elizabeth Kelly and Chief Technology Officer Elham Tabassi, who were announced in February. The AISI was established within NIST at the direction of President Biden, including to support the responsibilities assigned to the Department of Commerce under the President’s landmark Executive Order.

Paul Christiano, Head of AI Safety, will design

I had a surprising experience with a 10 year old child "Carl" a few years back. He had all the stereotypical signals of a gifted kid that can be drilled into anyone by a dedicated parent- 1500 chess elo, constantly pestered me about the research I did during the semester, used big words, etc. This was pretty common at the camp. However, he just felt different to talk to- felt sharp. He made a serious but failed effort to acquire my linear algebra knowledge in the week and a half he was there. 

Anyways, we were out in the woods, a relatively new environment for him. Within an hour of arriving, he saw other kids fishing, and decided he wanted to fish too. Instead of discussing this desire...

I didn’t use to be, but now I’m part of the 2% of U.S. households without a television. With its near ubiquity, why reject this technology?

The Beginning of my Disillusionment

Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death radically changed my perspective on television and its place in our culture. Here’s one illuminating passage:

We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by [TV’s] machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine our TV sets to special rooms. We do not doubt the reality of what we see on TV [and] are largely unaware of the special angle of vision it affords. Even the question of how television affects us has receded into the background. The question itself may strike some of us as strange, as if one were