Every couple of years I look back on LessWrong posts from a couple of years back, and I think to myself: "I could have profited from this."
First it was cryptocurrencies, which I didn't fully ignore, but could have done much more with.
Then it was everything AI-related, which I sort of ignored, instead of buying NVDA stock.
I also distinctly remember that Anthropic basically had a launch here as well, and they were a nobody in the SV scene back then. They had some job postings and I briefly considered applying, but didn't go through with it.
I hope not to have any more future moments where I say "Damn, I read about this on LW a couple of years ago."
The main concern around superintelligence is the recursive AI research.
Can someone taboo what "recursive AI research" is?
What kinds of experiments are we talking about here?
LLM agents are good at writing code. Presumably they can write code that can test various ML papers and such. If a subset of these experiments produces useful results (on benchmarks, or other tests), the findings will coalesce into the next generation that will then do the same things.
1) There is an expectation that there will definitely be useful findings. This is reasonable, because why wouldn't there be one.
2) There is an expectation that models writing code to run experiments will cause the entire process to go faster. Is the bottleneck models writing code, or is the bottleneck some other aspects that models cannot affect? (e.g. access to compute)
The main concern is that AI researchers will raise their productivity using AI tools (which then feeds back into AI development). But do AI tools actually increase productivity? Anecdotally, they do, for some capabilities (the "jagged frontier").
Self-improving AI was a classic scenario for creating superintelligence. But in the era of scaling, it's also possible that a known AI architecture becomes superintelligent if you simply make it big enough (and scale up everything else about its training protocol as necessary, like the size of training sets).
I strongly suspect that recursive self-improvement as we know it was supposed to mean developing novel ways to teach neural nets (e.g. optimizers like MuonClip?). However, I cannot find the evidence for it working and suspect that it will be less visible until it emerges.
Has anyone done a Brier scoring of Gartner reports, that is, their predictions? Seems like a bunch of companies are relying on their predictions but I can't find anyone evaluating them. Looks like a lot of money on the table.
"Embracing the Extended Mind" is my short film (8 min) about the importance of embracing things outside of your head so that things inside of your head can work better. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWDp4IzjrQ8
I want to share one of the most useful articles I read: You Might as Well Be a Great Copy Editor.
https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1471
Most writing is MUCH better if it goes through at least one editing pass, with diminishing returns the more editing you do. The trick is not to mix writing with editing - write first, let it be ugly, let your stream of consciousness take you away. And when you're done, then become the critic and the editor.
source on my blog: https://sundaystopwatch.eu/some-thoughts-in-traffic/
(these are literally thoughts I had sitting in traffic and that relate to traffic, but you're free to extract generalized life lessons from them if you want)
When someone cuts you off in traffic, you might get angry, but their behavior, their cutting-off-other-people-in-traffic personality guarantees that you will never be stuck behind them, unable to go faster.
Unless he is the kind of person who cuts you off and then slows down, satisfied that he is now at the front of the line. (I am using "he" on purpose here, because it will almost certainly be a guy.)
My friend ended up in hospital in a similar way. He kept a safe distance from a vehicle in front of him. The guy behind him got impatient and pushed himself narrowly between them... and then had to hit the breaks because the first car unexpectedly slowed down for some reason... and my friend crashed into him (the weather was bad, the road slippery, he was trying to keep the safe distance for a very good reason).
Generalized life lesson: Some people actually care about their position relative to you. Avoid them, if you can.