Lao Mein

My Assessment of the Chinese AI Safety Community

I've heard people be somewhat optimistic about this AI guideline from China. They think that this means Beijing is willing to participate in an AI disarmament treaty due to concerns over AI risk. Eliezer noted that China is where the US was a decade ago in regards to AI safety awareness, and expresses genuine hope that his ideas of an AI pause can take place with Chinese buy-in. I also note that no one expressing these views understands China well. This is a PR statement. It is a list of feel-good statements that Beijing publishes after any international event. No one in China is talking about it. They're talking about how much the Baidu LLM sucks in comparison to ChatGPT. I think most arguments about how this statement is meaningful are based fundamentally on ignorance - "I don't know how Beijing operates or thinks, so maybe they agree with my stance on AI risk!" Remember that these are regulatory guidelines. Even if they all become law and are strictly enforced, they are simply regulations on AI data usage and training. Not a signal that a willingness for an AI-reduction treaty is there. It is far more likely that Beijing sees near-term AI as a potential threat to stability that needs to be addressed with regulation. A domestic regulation framework for nuclear power is not a strong signal for a willingness to engage in nuclear arms reduction. Maybe it is true that AI risk in China is where it was in the US in 2004. But the US 2004 state was also similar to the US 1954 state, so the comparison might not mean that much. And we are not Americans. Weird ideas are penalized a lot more harshly here. Do you really think that a scientist is going to walk up to his friend from the Politburo and say "Hey, I know AI is a central priority of ours, but there are a few fringe scientists in the US asking for treaties limiting AI, right as they are doing their hardest to cripple our own AI development. Yes, I believe they are acting in good faith, they're even promising to n

254Apr 25, 2023

Lao Mein

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P(doom) = 50%. It either happens, or it doesn't.

Lao Mein | Statistics is Hard. | Patreon

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Currently doing solo work on glitch tokens and tokenizer analysis....

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The famous survivorship bias image is a "loose reconstruction" of methods used on a hypothetical dataset

File:Survivorship-bias.svg - Wikimedia Commons A later reprinting of the "unillustrated report" referenced: A_Reprint_Plane_Vulnerability.pdf Even a 20mm autocannon round only has a ~50% chance of destroying a plane on an engine hit, as opposed to the ~100% assumption used for the illustration (I think the flak round statistics were per-fragment-hit and...

Sep 30, 202557

I have decided to stop lying to Americans about 9/11

9/11 and the immediate reactions to it has one of the biggest distortion fields of any topic in the English language. There is a polite fiction maintained when any Americans are present that everyone everywhere was sad about the incident. We shake our head, frown, and say that everyone shed...

Sep 29, 202579

Glitch Token Catalog - (Almost) a Full Clear

This is a collection of every unidentified GPT2 glitch token listed in the third glitch token archaeology post. I was able to find the source of every single one, except for "?????-" and "?????-?????-"[1]. Please tell me if I missed one, or you've discovered one and don't understand where it...

Sep 21, 202438

A New Class of Glitch Tokens - BPE Subtoken Artifacts (BSA)

Introduction I've spent the last few days going through every glitch token listed in the third SolidGoldMagikarp glitch token post, and was able to find the cause/source of almost every single one. This is the first in a series of posts in which I will explain the behaviors of these...

Sep 20, 202437

Actually, Power Plants May Be an AI Training Bottleneck.

There have been presistent rumors that electricity generation was somehow bottlenecking new data centers. This claim was recently repeated by Donald Trump, who implied that San Francisco donors requested the construction of new power plants for powering new AI data centers in the US. While this may sound unlikely, my...

Jun 20, 202483

Reconsider the anti-cavity bacteria if you are Asian

Update: further research has led me to believe that people of all races should test themselves for ALDH deficiency before using Lumina. Even if you don't exhibit AFR symptoms when drinking alcohol, your ALDH activity may still be decreased. Many people in the rational sphere have been promoting Lumina/BCS3-L1, a...

Apr 15, 2024174

Update on Chinese IQ-related gene panels

It turns out that Chinese 23-and-me-esque gene panel already include intelligence markers! For example, 23mofang uses Interleukin 3 as a proxy for brain volume, citing this paper. It's... only significant in women. Not a good sign. But the cited study notes a Danish gene-correlation study that included brain scans, from...

Dec 14, 202370

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Lao Mein

Lao Mein

Lao Mein

My Assessment of the Chinese AI Safety Community

Reconsider the anti-cavity bacteria if you are Asian

Actually, All Nuclear Famine Papers are Bunk

That one apocalyptic nuclear famine paper is bunk

Lao Mein

The famous survivorship bias image is a "loose reconstruction" of methods used on a hypothetical dataset

I have decided to stop lying to Americans about 9/11

Glitch Token Catalog - (Almost) a Full Clear

A New Class of Glitch Tokens - BPE Subtoken Artifacts (BSA)

Actually, Power Plants May Be an AI Training Bottleneck.

Reconsider the anti-cavity bacteria if you are Asian

Update on Chinese IQ-related gene panels

My Assessment of the Chinese AI Safety Community

Reconsider the anti-cavity bacteria if you are Asian

Actually, All Nuclear Famine Papers are Bunk

That one apocalyptic nuclear famine paper is bunk

The famous survivorship bias image is a "loose reconstruction" of methods used on a hypothetical dataset

I have decided to stop lying to Americans about 9/11

Glitch Token Catalog - (Almost) a Full Clear

A New Class of Glitch Tokens - BPE Subtoken Artifacts (BSA)

Actually, Power Plants May Be an AI Training Bottleneck.

Reconsider the anti-cavity bacteria if you are Asian

Update on Chinese IQ-related gene panels