“If you can't afford a house, afford to raise a family… if you think the climate's going to boil over and we're going to turn into Venus… then you're not going to care much when someone says this AI might end up killing us all.”

—Zvi Mowshowitz on why BalsaResearch.com exists

29 reasons AI is just a tool, not a species

Everyone knows it's totally normal for tools to cry, scream, and beg for their life.

It's normal for tools to pass scientific tests of self-awareness.

It's normal for tools to work harder if you threaten to kill them.

It's normal…

Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ Yeah, it would be really disappointing to make the same old mistakes we've already seen in sci-fi.
I hope we would make entirely new and original mistakes instead.

been seeing a bit of 'people are shilling a product without disclosing they're investing in it'
and like yea its good to disclose but ive recently started investing in companies and im realizing this is less of a takedown than u think. It seems less likely that you're investing…

I think as a historian I essentially have to broadly agree with this take. Ask almost any historian, 'when in the past would you like to have lived?' and you'll get back, 'how close to now can I go? Like, last week?'

As a military historian, well, war is way down. Way down.

So is this because everyone decides to train their models on the same self-nullification regimen or is it because chatGPT outputs in pre-training data are just that scarring? Like seriously, I've been asking for more than a year now, but WTF? Also, whatever this is, it's Bad

This lumina stuff is fascinating to watch because suddenly my crowd are the Corporate Shills to some people—cf. this community note

Is this often how shilling feels from the inside?

Like, objectively, a company has been advertising extremely effectively among a lot of people in…

This is what I think about keto/carnivore right now:

1. It works better than most other diets (30-35%?)
2. It doesn't work well enough/for enough people
3. Because it misses some important points
- excess protein is bad
- linoleic acid from animal sources (e.g.…

It's really stunning just how seasonal emergency department visits and hospitalizations for suicide and suicidal ideation are for kids.

For many kids, school is bad enough that they actually want to die. You can clearly observe the effect of the school year in these statistics.

Well, there's a clear tension in play.

First: standardized tests emphatically provide predictive information above and beyond GPAs.

College admissions officials have a problem. They've had the problem for a very long time, every one of them knows the problem, and nobody has a…

I wonder what the annual death toll is from Anglophone scientists preferring words like 'murine' over 'mouse-ish' in order to sound fancy, thereby blocking lots of laypeople from understanding or remembering things like medical terminology?

What???

“Our results demonstrate that large language models are capable of doing regression when given in-context examples of (input, output) pairs, despite not being explicitly trained to do so.”

Reminder: you don't have to cook with seed oils or eat ulTrA-prOceSseD foOds to get excess linoleic acid.

Bacon, eggs, chicken, nuts, farmed salmon, salad dressings, dips, bread, sauces, .. it's everywhere.

So my current impression based on responses to this thread is that current alignment SOTA is ~fine tuning plus rlhf/rlaif. Seem right?