Running Lightcone Infrastructure, which runs LessWrong. You can reach me at habryka@lesswrong.com
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Promoted to curated: Formalizing what it means for transformers to learn "the underlying world model" when engaging in next-token prediction tasks seems pretty useful, in that it's an abstraction that I see used all the time when discussing risks from models where the vast majority of the compute was spent in pre-training, where the details usually get handwaived. It seems useful to understand what exactly we mean by that in more detail.
I have not done a thorough review of this kind of work, but it seems to me that also others thought the basic ideas in the work hold up, and I thought reading this post gave me crisper abstractions to talk about this kind of stuff in the future.
1Three is a bit much. I am honestly not sure what's better. My guess is putting them all into one. (Context, I am one of the LTFF fund managers)
Yeah, I feel kind of excited about having some strong-downvote and strong-upvote UI which gives you one of a standard set of options for explaining your vote, or allows you to leave it unexplained, all anonymous.
I edited the top-comment to do that.
We'll send out location details to anyone who buys a ticket (and also feel free to ping us and we'll tell you).
I've had some experience with people trying to disrupt events, and trivial inconveniences of figuring out the address makes a non negligible difference in people doing stuff like that.
I tried setting up an account, but it just told me it had sent me an email to confirm my account that never arrived.
GDPR is a giant mess, so it's pretty unclear what it requires us to implement. My current understanding is that it just requires us to tell you that we are collecting analytics data if you are from the EU.
And the kind of stuff we are sending over to Recombee would be covered by it being data necessary to provide site functionality, not just analytics, so wouldn't be covered by that (if you want to avoid data being sent to Google Analytics in-particular, you can do that by just blocking the GA script in uBlock origin or whatever other adblocker you use, which it should do by default).
I am pretty excited about doing something more in-house, but it's much easier to get data about how promising this direction is by using some third-party services that already have all the infrastructure.
If it turns out to be a core part of LW, it makes more sense to in-house it. It's also really valuable to have an relatively validated baseline to compare things to.
There are a bunch of third-party services we couldn't really replace that we send user data to. Hex.tech as our analytics dashboard service. Google Analytics for basic user behavior and patterns. A bunch of AWS services. Implementing the functionality of all of that ourselves, or putting a bunch of effort into anonymizing the data is not impossible, but seems pretty hard, and Recombee seems about par for the degree to which I trust them to not do anything with that data themselves.
You can! Just go to the all-posts page, sort by year, and the highest-rated shortform posts for each year will be in the Quick Takes section:
2024:
2023:
2022: