Some critique on reasoning models like o1 (by OpenAI) and r1 (by Deepseek). > OpenAI admits that they trained o1 on domains with easy verification but hope reasoners generalize to all domains. Whether or not they generalize beyond their RL training is a trillion-dollar question. Right off the bat, I’ll...
Not directly related to the question, but Optimizers Qualitatively Alter Solutions And We Should Leverage This (2025) argues that the choice of optimizer (e.g. first-order methods like AdamW vs second-order methods like Shampoo) not only affects speed of convergence, but properties of the final solution.
... (read more)Our position is that the choice of optimizer itself provides an effective mechanism to introduce
an explicit inductive bias in the process, and as a community we should attempt to understand
it and exploit it by developing optimizers aimed at converging to certain kinds of solutions. The
additional implication of this stance is that the optimizer can and does affect the effective expressivity
of the model class (i.e. what solutions we can
Do you watch sport climbing at all? There's a lot of fun overlap in skills and techniques between ANW and IFSC-style climbing.
As sport climbing matures as a sport, there's more videos about top-level climbers discussing how they balance their training, conditioning, what they consider in and out of their style.
A general tip when editing pieces is that if you ctrl+f for "I think" and you cut out 90-95% of them, it makes the piece better. The (respected) reader knows that everything you write is what you think, and a good piece should make the hedging explicit for a claim that needs deeper consideration -- not every claim.
What about readers you don't respect? Well, who cares what they think.
I want to clarify that this is Anthropic choosing to display a testimonial from one of their customers on the release page. Anthropic's team is editorializing, but I don't think they intended to communicate that the models are consistently completing tasks that require 10s of hours (yet).
I included the organization and person making the testimonial to try and highlight this, but I should've made it explicit in the post.
re: how this updated my model of AI progress:
We don't quite know what the updates were that improved this model's ability at long contexts, but it doesn't seem like it was a dramatic algorithm or architecture update. It also doesn't seem like it was... (read more)
Anthropic's new model seems quite good for longer horizon tasks.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-5
a reminder of timelines
a claim
How are folks interpreting this?
what's the relationship between attachment and memory?
are people with good/great memories less sentimental?
if you're someone with less recall of events, especially ones that happened many years ago, do you feel more attached to holding onto momentos that act as triggers for special moments in your life? conversely, if you have great memory, do you feel less attached to momentos because you can recall an event on demand?
I think the main challenge to monitoring agents is one of volume/scale, re:
Agents are much cheaper and faster to run than humans, so the amount of information and interactions that humans need to oversee will drastically increase.
But 1, 2, 4 are issues humans already face with managing other humans.
I interpreted loop as referring to an "OODA loop" where managers are observing those they are managing, delegating and action, and then waiting for feedback to then go back to the beginning of the loop.
e.g. nowadays, I delegate a decent chunk of implementation work to coding agents and the "loop" is me giving them a task, letting them riff on it for a few minutes, and then reviewing output before requesting changes or committing them in.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the
TL;DR
I have Aranet4 CO2 monitors inside my apartment, one near my desk and one in the living room both at eye level and visible to me at all times when I'm in those spaces. Anecdotally, I find myself thinking "slower" @ 900+ ppm, and can even notice slightly worse thinking at levels as low as 750ppm.
I find indoor levels @ <600ppm to be ideal, but not always possible depending on if you have guests, air quality conditions of the day, etc.
I unfortunately only live in a space with 1 window, so ventilation can be difficult. However a single well placed fan facing outwards blowing towards the window improves indoor circulation. With the... (read more)
Want to know what AI will do to the labor market? Just look at male labor force participation (LFP) research.
US Male LFP has dropped since the 70s, from ~80% to ~67.5%.
There are a few dynamics driving this, and all of them interact with each other. But the primary ones seem to be:
Our economy shifted from labor that required physical toughness (manufacturing) to labor that required more intelligence (services). At the same time, our culture empowered women to attain more education and participate in... (read more)
Some critique on reasoning models like o1 (by OpenAI) and r1 (by Deepseek).
OpenAI admits that they trained o1 on domains with easy verification but hope reasoners generalize to all domains. Whether or not they generalize beyond their RL training is a trillion-dollar question. Right off the bat, I’ll tell you my take:
o1-style reasoners do not meaningfully generalize beyond their training.
... (read 175 more words →)A straightforward way to check how reasoners perform on domains without easy verification is benchmarks. On math/coding, OpenAI's o1 models do exceptionally. On everything else, the answer is less clear.
Results that jump out:
o1-previewdoes worse on personal writing thangpt-4oand no better on editing text, despite costing 6 × more.- OpenAI didn't release scores for
o1-mini,
I'm giving up on working on AI safety in any capacity.
I was convinced ~2018 that working on AI safety was an Good™ and Important™ thing, and have spent a large portion of my studies and career trying to find a role to contribute to AI safety. But after several years of trying to work on both research and engineering problems, it's clear no institutions or organizations need my help.
First: yes, it's clearly a skill issue. If I was a more brilliant engineer or researcher then I'd have found a way to contribute to the field by now.
But also, it seems like the bar to work on AI safety seems higher than AI... (read more)
Have you experimented with ComfyUI? Image generation for "power users" -- many more knobs to turn and control output generation. There's actually a lot of room for steering during the diffusion/generation process, but it's hard to expose it in the same intuitive/general way as a prompt in language. Comfy feels more like learning Adobe or Figma.