Kobi Hackenburg has released a fascinating new paper: "The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence"

The short story is that AI persuasion were most effective using methods for post training and rhetorical strategy. Interestingly, personalization of responses had a comparatively small effect.

He has a great thread here outlining the major findings.

"Scale increases persuasion, +1.6pp per OOM

Post-training more so, as much as +3.5pp

Personalization less so, <1pp

Information density drives persuasion gains

Increasing persuasion decreased factual accuracy

Convo > static, +40%"

Thank you very much for reading and the comment!

Thanks, I missed that!

I found this paper by Amir Zur and others really interesting: It's Owl in the Numbers:
Token Entanglement in Subliminal Learning where they try to explain subliminal learning (the notion that "language model fine-tuned on seemingly meaningless data from a teacher model acquires the teacher's hidden behaviors.")

The researchers found that certain concepts like "owl" and "087" can become entangled during training (the probability of one increases the probability of the other.)

Fascinating and would be curious to hear what others think!

What is the total number of dinosaur species that existed?

What statistical approach would you use to make your estimate?

Current estimates for animals on earth seem to be 1M+ known species?

Thank you John! Is there an high-bit or confounder controlling evidence that would move your prior? Say something like english + some other language? (Also I might be missing something deeper about the heuristic in general, if so I apologize!)

Jack Morris has posted this thread https://x.com/jxmnop/status/1925224612872233081 about his paper "Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings" 

Have others thought through what this means for the notion of fundamentally alien internal ontologies? Would love any ideas! Sorry if missed a post on it.

Excellent post. How refreshing to see that we have a say in the moral and ethical repercussions of our interactions.