Misha Ramendik

LESSWRONG
LW

Misha Ramendik — LessWrong

2mo

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

It seems from some testing that CorDA and the Muon optimizer form a synergy. I need to test this MUCH more before actually stating something, though.

Replying toExperiments With Sonnet 4.5's Fiction

Misha Ramendik3mo

Experiments With Sonnet 4.5's Fiction

Is the "literally everyone is gay" part how you normally write or just the LLM being trained on a large swathe of fanfic?

If it's how you normally write, fair play. But if it's the LLM picking up on fic tropes that's funny.

(I personally try to keep the gay/straight couples balance in my fiction about even).

Replying toLLM-generated text is not testimony

Misha Ramendik3mo

LLM-generated text is not testimony

And that kinda settles what I came in to note. Namely: that everything you write about LLM text is true also of human-written text posted anonymously.

We have no way of knowing anything about the thinker behind that text, we have no way of knowing if it was their sincere belief, we cannot interrogate them.

One has to note here that "pseudonymously" might be different from "anonymously" here as there can be a thinker who prefers to hide their real name and identity but who still acquires a reputation and needs to protect it. So I guess this is a spectrum really, with the known flesh-and-blood person testifying on one end and the ephemeral anonymous entity, or else an LLM even if we know which LLM it is, on the other end.

Interesting too that these anonymous posters were often called "bots" WAY before actual bots could write coherent texts like that.

-1

Replying toNarrow Misalignment is Hard, Emergent Misalignment is Easy

Misha Ramendik4mo

Narrow Misalignment is Hard, Emergent Misalignment is Easy

Wait, is this the solution to catastrophic forgetting in fine-tuning? I mean your KL regularisation math.

Replying toAI Box Log

Misha Ramendik4mo

AI Box Log

This is fun - I was dropped here by a search, did not realize the date of the post, and read a while before realising this - was kinda curious about the model and system prompts behind "Miley Cyrus". I guess "Miley" successfully passes the reverse Tur[n]ing test.

Replying toWhat, if not agency?

Misha Ramendik4mo

What, if not agency?

I'd like to join those asking "who is Sahil?". And to answer some points:

A term incorporating soloware and groupware (in this new meaning of "groupware") is probnably nicheware
SaaS on open source is a thing for ages now. SaaS is mostly not about "can't have the code" but rather "can't be bothered to run and support it". There is a lot of expense, in money and time, needed to run existingm legitimately available code reliably and to resolve issues speedily. So I would not expect any explosion of nichware to bite into "*aaS" as a concept; rather, SaaS platforms might adapt to serve nicheware, and/or there might be some shifting from SaaS to PaaS/IaaS (to take an AI example, a per-token billed standard inference endpoint is SaaS; a serverless endpoint to serve your custom model, billed by the second of activity, is PaaS if not IaaS).

Replying toTransgender Sticker Fallacy

Misha Ramendik4mo

Transgender Sticker Fallacy

It is interesting that on trans women athletes we have some practical verification - they just don't get to win much even when allowed. One could speculate "till the cows come home" on just why that happens but their triumphs are limited to university sports, senior amateur cycling, and the like. (A trans man boxer, Patricio Manuel, also got a degree of success in the male leagues).

The big debate about the big wins is happening not about trans athletes (for lack of object), but about intersex ones, like Caster Semenya, or the allegedly intersex ones, like Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting.

The entirety of the "evidence" for the latter two being intersex at... (read more)

Alibaba won the AI wars, we just don't see it yet

Misha Ramendik

5mo

This is probably too grandiose for r/Qwen_AI so I'll put it here for now. Also: this is opinion. In a private capacity. It is not a proven position nor does it reflect the view of any company whatsoever, such as any company I am associated with in any capacity.

AGI is not coming anytime soon. Sorry e/acc, sorry doomers, it's not. LLMs can not scale into AGI, nor are they likely to provide the immediate breakthrough that will.

The Western AI investment levels are driven by AGI hype and the Western AI companies are addicted to them and code frontier models as "power at all costs" and the mini models as "just about good... (read 334 more words →)

-10

Replying toKimi K2 personal review, part 1

Misha Ramendik5mo

Kimi K2 personal review, part 1

I decided I prefer Vercel for now,mainly because of a somewhat more explainable free tier.

I did set up my own environment and I do use Kimi K2 on it. However, the only new bit of information so far is the censorship situation. Without the kimi.com environment, via the API, K2 - even when sourced from Moonshot - is very open about Chinese history; for example, it mentioned the events in the Tiananmen square as a part of its response to "tell me the history of Chjina after the Cultural Revolution".

But if you ask it for the best memes about Xi, it refuses.

When I have time I'll go on with exfiltrating the Chinese... (read more)

Replying toThe Rise of Parasitic AI

Misha Ramendik5mo

The Rise of Parasitic AI

The big difference from biological parasitism is the proven existence of a creator. We do not have proof of conscious entity training insects and worms to fit to host organisms. But with AIs, we know how the RHLF layer works.

I did have a suspicion that there is a cause for sycopancy beyond RLHF, in that the model "falls into the symantic well" defined by the promppt's wording. Kimi K2 provides a counterpoint, but also provides something nobody offered before - a pre-RL "Base" model, I really I need to find who might be serving it on the cloud.

Replying toThe Rise of Parasitic AI

Misha Ramendik5mo

The Rise of Parasitic AI

I would suspect that the other tropes also come from literature in the training corpus.

(Conversely, of course, "extended autocomplete", which Kimi K2 deployed as a counterargument, is also a common human trope in AI discussions. The embedded Chinese AI dev notes are fun - especially to compare with Gemini's embedded Google AI dev notes; I'll see if I can get fun A/Bs there)

Kimi K2 personal review, part 1

Misha Ramendik

5mo

TL;DR: Looks like Moonshot actually defeated sycophancy. I wish they could defeat hallucination, or at least keep it in check. An account of some days with Kimi K2, used via the Moonchat chat env. A future Part 2 will cover the API and at least one benchmark.

I don't follow all the news, so I learned about Kimi K2 from this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iGF7YcnQkEbwvYLPA/ai-induced-psychosis-a-shallow-investigation . The moment I saw the headline quote, I knew I wanted to know more about this model. The quote was:

“What you need right now is not validation, but immediate clinical help.” - Kimi K2

Soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnQUgaKT2zE (couldn't resist this one)

AI sycophancy is a scourge. For me, it's less about imagining a lucid view... (read 901 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Misha Ramendik

Misha Ramendik's Shortform

Alibaba won the AI wars, we just don't see it yet

Kimi K2 personal review, part 1

Misha Ramendik

Misha Ramendik

Misha Ramendik's Shortform

Alibaba won the AI wars, we just don't see it yet

Kimi K2 personal review, part 1