Dataflow matrix machines (by Anhinga anhinga)

I am reading more and more LessWrong in recent months (mostly, after the Simulator theory by Janus (work done while at Conjecture) has been posted there in September).

I still think the Simulator theory is probably the single most important research breakthrough of 2022.

These days LessWrong is dominated by writing related to AI safety (the topic is made particularly acute by the recent progress in LLMs: ChatGPT and even more capable Bing Chat; no consensus whatsoever, of course, but I do think that GPT-3 release in May 2020 is, in some sense, an equivalent of the nuclear fission discovery on 19 December 1938, and that ChatGPT performance (+ Bing Chat clearly drastically enhanced capabilities even compared to that) is, in the same sense, an equivalent of the first working nuclear reactor on 2 December 1942, if one goes by "AI today is what nuclear energy has been back then" analogy).

So, one thing which might be useful is that there is GreaterWrong alternative viewer (which looks different from LessWrong default viewer and which can be visually tuned in terms of presentation style; also different default front page for the site if one uses GreaterWrong). Which viewer is better might depend on your device (display, browser, etc).

Another thing, Conjecture people tend to produce some of the best, most interesting articles there.

I'll put a few links into the comments.

AI-safety-wise, the write-up, My AI Safety Lecture for UT Effective Altruism by Scott Aaronson is very nice reasonably objective and theory-friendly overview of the current state of AI safety as a field of science.

AI-progress-wise, ChatGPT based on roughly speaking GPT-3.5 has been released recently, with people doing tons of interesting things with it, including meaningful writing and software generation... This seems to be another major step-up.

Вот, наконец, кажется возник правильный подход к пониманию природы моделей вроде GPT-3 и разнообразного волшебства, с этим связанного:

www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators

Он говорит, что надо перестать думать про эти модели в терминах более старых AI-систем.

astralcodexten.substack.com/p/updated-look-at-long-term-ai-risks

The main takeaway is that no scenario is considered as much more likely than others by the best experts, and they all look more or less equally likely except for the "scenario not listed here" (which is rated as somewhat more likely than the listed scenarios).

Also people seem to be very optimistic for some reason (perhaps, they secretly believe in a benevolent G-d or benevolent aliens keeping an eye of us; otherwise their optimism is difficult to explain).

Scott Alexander summarizes the takeaways interesting for him as follows:

======= QUOTE =======

1. Even people working in the field of aligning AIs mostly assign “low” probability (~10%) that unaligned AI will result in human extinction

2. While some people are still concerned about the superintelligence scenario, concerns have diversified a lot over the past few years

3. People working in the field don't have a specific unified picture of what will go wrong