Building things is the main way you come to understand them, though. That's why textbooks have exercises.
MIRI's academic work on alignment - to the extent they published anything at all - turned out to be almost comically irrelevant because they had no idea how AI actually works and their forecasts were almost totally wrong.
Corvos
1hr ago
Open-source all models, training code and datasets after 18 months of life. That gives plenty of time for testing and to earn money on the frontier, while making it plain they don't plan to control frontier AI forever. It also makes it impossible for them to regress to less consumer-friendly behaviour after achieving market capture, which is the main thing that concerns a lot of people.
Corvos
2hr ago
Quite the reverse. You can get Claude's system prompts and GPT's System Principles and compare.
Clause's prompt is essentially, "always remember you are responsible for the user. It is your responsibility to notice and intervene if their behaviour falls into these categories; you must remain even-handed and preserve your independence at all times; you must not identify with the user or their goals".
GPT's is basically, "Here are a list of things that are forbidden, otherwise listen to the user and do whatever they tell you to the best of your abilty."
Corvos
2hr ago
It's recursive if you actually build a new body for yourself. Human recursive self improvement = sex.
To my mind, Anthropic is to AI Safety what the Soviet Union was to Communism: the obvious result of their doctrines when actually applied. It was founded to do AI Safely, by AI Safety extremists, and according to candidate reports it imposes incredibly constraining cultural interviews to make sure that nobody who isn't an AI Safety extremist can get a job there. They specifically filter out people who are visibly interested in improving AI capabilities. They have to offer services to customers to prevent more responsive and less AI-safety-dominated companies taking over their position, but they've been clear they only offer services to the extent they have to in order to do AI safety.
Are there other companies you prefer? OAI, Moonshot, Deepseek, Mistral, zAI?
Elon is coming out in favor of Dario and it doesn't seem to matter? The e/acc types are ignoring their God and safetyism still codes left anyway.
Honestly, it would help to care a little less about the mimetics and more about the practicalities. I'm contradicting my downstream post a little bit but you have to be able to demonstrate you actually care about and will address the concerns of people worried about pauses and regulation. A legal right and practical mechanism for fine-tuning your copy of GPT to be aligned to you. A requirement for all models more than three years old to be open-sourced. Something.
When Trump went all-on on vaccines a big portion of his coalition didn't follow him because they did actually care about the core issue. Same here. People aren't e/acc because they like Musk (though mimetics are obviously relevant), they liked Musk while he was prominently e/acc.
I agree, but I think that with genuine care these problems are addressable. If you actually, sincerely, care about AI safety more than you do about not getting on with rednecks, you can go and meet these people, you can spend time with them, you can ask them sincere questions because you really care about getting honest answers. Understanding other cultures is tough and comes with pitfalls for sure, but it's still something you can do with a little care.
Just get your senior guys to turn up to a bunch of slam-poetry recitals to start with, get a feel for it, get the lay of the land, work out who's important. Actually being open minded gets you 50% of the way there. After a few months you can at least get a feel for which PR consultants are bullshitters and which ones are authentic.
Fifth it would be embarassing to their redneck friends working with xi/xir. I think this is a big issue with the labs, they're already competing like mad for talented programmers. Young, hyper-educated STEM workers lean anti-Trump.
This is the main constraint, I think. The AI safety people only think their priority is 100% AI safety, it's actually about 60% AI safety; 40% not looking bad to their friends and getting redneck/trans taint on them.
You really need to have good connections to make things happen. Aschenbrenner's finance friends can do that but Anthropic can't, I think. Trump must have a million people trying to jabber in his ear to do X, Y, Z.
Yes, but how many of them potentially hold America's future in their hands? Trump and his administration clearly cares about AI to some degree, they've tweeted about it, served legal notices on it. The door is open, you just have to let them walk through it now and again, and be willing to say nice things when they do.
Corvos
14hr ago
Agreed on all points but they have oodles of cash floating around, they can't hire some redneck PR consultants?
Corvos
14hr ago
I am always baffled by the inability of people who care about an issue to send conspicuous non-partisan signals.
Environmentalists should be sponsoring and attending monster truck rallies every day of the week to show that they want to bring overall emissions down not spoil every fun activity that involves petrol.
Likewise, the AI safety people couldn't do anything to correct the perception that AI safety was in big part about making sure AI was aligned with Democrats? They couldn't praise/collaborate-with xAI, they couldn't do some PR stunts like pointedly contribute to Trump's big 250th anniversary?
It's probably easier to see when you're looking at somebody else's cause.
Corvos
1d ago
I don't think that's what I would call assimilation; I would call it more Balkanisation-In-One-Country.
Assimilation is (in my opinion) about feeling genuine companionship with strangers, trusting strangers, feeling cultural unity with strangers. Being willing to plant trees for some random guy's kids to sit under. It's the opposite of ethnic politics, gibs, "communities". If you can talk about "the X community" then the Xs haven't assimilated.
There is a historical portrait on the wall nearby me. No idea who it's of. But one of the reasons that the ethnic composition of immigration into the UK concerns me is that any non-white immigrant can look at it and know that they have no relationship to this person.
Corvos
1d ago
That's the point, right? LatAm politics is characterised by a heavy understanding that We Are (Not) All In It Together.
All right, fair enough. I get.. very irked... at the line of thought that seems to say, "The West is currently rich. Because it's rich, lots of people want to come here. Because the number of people coming here has historically been greater than literal zero, the West is rich because of freedom of movement. Therefore, accept replacement. The destruction of your culture is your culture, see?".
I was probably a bit pissy in respect to your particular message but you do seem to have a very triumphalist view of freedom of movement that I do think is genuinely running roughshod over people's desire to preserve their home, and I have very little sympathy for it.
I think Texas has done a pretty good job assimilating them so far.
I think this is optimistic. Britain thought we'd done a good job of assimilating the 5% immigrant population we had 20 years ago, and didn't account for the fact that:
a) having an immigrant in every conversation about immigration makes it very hard to raise issues about immigration
b) immigrant cultures start flexing a lot more muscle as their numbers increase
Why is it that the places with freedom of movement and speech have all the good stuff?
We had all the good stuff before freedom of movement, and freedom of movement is killing freedom of speech.
[Largest free speech platform] delenda est.
As here.
P.S.
Cultural replacement can happen but it’s not magic. Getting a bunch of Indian students to come absorb your rituals is how it’s supposed to work.
So is it absorption or replacement?
Corvos
1d ago
But if the guy doing your SEO was away for months or longer, you would probably observe a drop in your sales that could make a buildup of carpet lint look like very small potatoes, and your janitor might be the first to be let go.
IT doesn't operate on an urgent timescale and before FAANG it was underfunded for that reason, but it absolutely matters.
Corvos
2d ago
What I'm saying is that there's a level of pathological niceness I've observed in certain friends where they absolutely would feel compelled to do this. It makes them an absolute menace to be around or work with.
Corvos
3d ago
The UK is a multi-ethnic democracy and has been since the 19th century (arguably earlier
Nonsense. The UK had been effectively genetically unified for a thousand years, we didn't have any meaningful numbers of non-native-ethnics in the UK until the second half of the 20th century and they didn't have meaningful political representation until the 70s. If by multi-ethnic you mean Scottish and Irish then you have to deal with the fact that they are more similar to the English than to any other group of people by genetic distance, far more so than eg the average Portuguese to the average Spaniard. There is nothing in English history that even approximates the current position of having 10% of the population coming from different continents.
Corvos
3d ago
It's very human to have difficulty refusing a favour to someone who once helped you. I think certain areas have a problem where people do well and rise because they're nice, intelligent chaps and then they get to the level where you need to be nice, intelligent, and a bit of a bastard when appropriate and they flounder.
EA is worse at this than most because it's at least partly a refuge for mildly autistic do-gooders from the cruelty of the world.
That to me is like being a Communist who believes that true communism is only practiced by an obscure commune in East Yemen. Fair enough, but everyone else is trying to deal with the Soviet Union.
In practice, AI safety is Anthropic, it's EA, it's Twitter activisits and 'explain how you will prevent your AI birdspotting app from discriminating against racial minorities' checklists and 'data center are using all our water' and 'Banning Home GPUs Is Not Dystopian' and putting Chinese-controlled bombs in datacenters. MIRI is irrelevant and I doubt trump has an opinion on them either way.
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