I am a PhD student in computer science at the University of Waterloo, supervised by Professor Ming Li and advised by Professor Marcus Hutter.
My current research is related to applications of algorithmic probability to sequential decision theory (universal artificial intelligence). Recently I have been trying to start a dialogue between the computational cognitive science and UAI communities. Sometimes I build robots, professionally or otherwise. Another hobby (and a personal favorite of my posts here) is the Sherlockian abduction master list, which is a crowdsourced project seeking to make "Sherlock Holmes" style inference feasible by compiling observational cues. Give it a read and see if you can contribute!
See my personal website colewyeth.com for an overview of my interests and work.
I do ~two types of writing, academic publications and (lesswrong) posts. With the former I try to be careful enough that I can stand by ~all (strong/central) claims in 10 years, usually by presenting a combination of theorems with rigorous proofs and only more conservative intuitive speculation. With the later, I try to learn enough by writing that I have changed my mind by the time I'm finished - and though I usually include an "epistemic status" to suggest my (final) degree of confidence before posting, the ensuing discussion often changes my mind again. As of mid-2025, I think that the chances of AGI in the next few years are high enough (though still <50%) that it’s best to focus on disseminating safety relevant research as rapidly as possible, so I’m focusing less on long-term goals like academic success and the associated incentives. That means most of my work will appear online in an unpolished form long before it is published.
I expect this to start not happening right away.
So at least we’ll see who’s right soon.
But it doesn’t come from indistinguishability, it comes from programs halting / looping. I don’t know what you’re trying to say.
I'm giving a talk at the AIXI research meeting today which will summarize my work on embedded versions of AIXI and point to some future directions: https://uaiasi.com/2025/10/26/cole-wyeth-on-embedded-agency
Every time I see a story about an LLM proving an important open conjecture, I think "it's going to turn out that the LLM did not prove an important open conjecture" and so far I have always been somewhat vindicated for one or more of the following reasons:
1: The LLM actually just wrote code to enumerate some cases / improve some bound (!)
2: The (expert) human spent enough time iterating with the LLM that it is not clear the LLM was driving the proof.
3: The result was actually not novel (sometimes the human already knew how to do it and just wanted to test the LLM out on filling in details), or the result is immediately improved or proven independently by humans, which seems suspicious.
4: No one seems to care about the result.
In this case 2 and 3 apply.
It's because we care about other things a lot more than chimps, and would happily trade off chimp well being, chimp population size, chimp optionality and self-determination etc. in favor of those other things. By itself that should be enough to tell you that under your analogy, superintelligence taking over is not a great outcome for us.
In fact, the situations are not closely analogous. We will build ASI, whereas we developed from chimps, which is not similar. Also, there is little reason to expect ASI psychology to reflect human psychology.
The point is that most people don’t care much about chimp rights, and this is still true of highly intelligent people.
I don’t think that was because she was particularly intelligent. It’s not like our top mathematicians consistently become environmentalists or conservationists.
You may have noticed that chimps don’t have a lot of rights.
I think if someone is very well-known their making a particular statement can be informative in itself, which is probably part of the reason it is upvoted.
Semantics; it’s obviously not equivalent to physical violence.