NickyP

Epistemic status: Experimental results with evaluation caveat. This is exploratory work on an alternative approach to interpreting language models. Summary We tested Large Concept Models (LCMs) - base models that predict text continuations in embedding space rather than token space. Using a dataset of 1M samples with prompt→paragraph sequences, we...

Epistemic status: Old news and well-known, but I find it hard to point at a single post that encapsulates my intuitions on this, so I write them down here. One question that comes up sometimes in interpretability work, is: “why do I trust simple linear probes more than complex non-linear...

After writing about my ethics yesterday, there was some discussion about the axioms that I think are most needed to derive the rest of my ethics. > pleasure is good nobody argues against this. > suffering is bad Someone did argue that this is potentially untrue, that there exists “voluntary...

I’ve been thinking on and off about ethics for around a decade, but mostly in an informal way rather than through formal philosophy. I expect that if I spent more time seriously stress-testing my views, I’d find inconsistencies or conclusions I’m less comfortable with than I currently think. Still, this...

So as I haven’t been able to speak the past short while, one thing I have noticed is that it is harder to communicate with others. I know what you are thinking: “Wow, who could have possibly guessed? It’s harder to converse when you can’t speak?”. Indeed, I didn’t expect...

Why cryonics, and the two main methods, with practical discussion and philosophical musings on both. Epistemic status: Cryonics is a scientific field that is long established, yet long underfunded, and uncertain. I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a few years and remain cautiously optimistic. Most people who...

So, you run an airline, you have a record of people that loyally keep coming back to you, you have costs associated with flying, in particular fuel. Your customers worry about the carbon emissions. Is there a something you could do things to lower some associated costs? There is! In...