flâneur

Sarah Pan

13 followers · 15 following · 693 views

on the atlas — 80

highlights — 139

  • From a behavioral standpoint, trying to generate fiction (which I’ve done a lot with base models) with text-davinci-002 made the differences in its nature from the probabilistic simulator exemplified by base models like davinci manifest. For self-supervised base models like davinci, a prompt functions as a window into possible worlds that are consistent with or plausible given the words fixed by the context window. Every time you sample, you'll unravel a different world. For most prompts, the multiverse generated by base models immediately branches into wildly different continuities, many of t…
    Mysteries of mode collapse — LessWrong
  • We found that token usage by itself explains 80% of the variance, with the number of tool calls and the model choice as the two other explanatory factors
    How we built our multi-agent research system \ Anthropic
  • And only if you looked at Intel as being an insurance policy, it's almost like you call up Allstate or GEICO and the gecko comes out.
    Intel: Cyclical Recovery or Secular Demise? - Colossus
  • incomprehensible system is optimizing.
    What failure looks like - LessWrong
  • Socrates' classical inquiry method of engaging in cooperative dialogue and responding to everything with a question. Enabled critical thinking and scepticism of every possible assumption and presupposition in an argument.
    Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
  • They shift us from an “egocentric” view of the world to an “allocentric”
    Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
  • Our aim at scite is to introduce the next generation of citations — called Smart Citations — which show how and why any article, researcher, journal, or topic has been cited and more generally discussed in the literature. By working with publishers, we extract the sentences directly from full-text articles where they use their references in-text. These sentences offer a qualitative insight into how papers were cited by newer work. It’s a bit like Rotten Tomatoes for research.
    How to Build a GPT-3 for Science | Future
  • However, according to our count, only 3,639 of the 19,255 human protein-coding genes recognized by the HGNC have high-quality (non-stub) summaries on Wikipedia; the other 15,616 lack pages or are incomplete stubs. Often, plenty is known about the gene, but no one has taken the time to write up a summary.
    WikiCrow | Future House
  • The idea is to find the best way to project our range [a, b] of float32 values to the int8 space.
    Quantization
  • we are in danger of letting the algorithms gaslight us
    The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari ❧ Current Affairs
  • We explore whether extended training beyond overfitting leads to improved generalization abilities, a phenomenon known as grokkin
    2305.18654.pdf
  • These findings suggest that the autoregressive characteristic of transformers, which forces them to tackle problems sequentially, presents a fundamental challenge that cannot be resolved by instructing the model to generate a step-by-step solution. Instead, models depend on a greedy process of producing the next word to make predictions without a rigorous global understanding of the task.
    2305.18654.pdf
  • Scratchpads are a verbalization of the computation graphs (i.e., a linearized representation of a topological ordering of G A ( x ) ).
    2305.18654.pdf
  • multi-step compositional reason- ing into linearized subgraph matching
    2305.18654.pdf
  • Once you have some bits of evidence from your experiment, it’s easy to over-interpret them (perhaps you interpret them as more bits than they actually are, or perhaps you were failing to consider how large hypothesis space is to start with). To counteract this, you need sufficient paranoia about your results, which mainly just takes careful and creative thought, and good epistemics.
    A model of research skill — LessWrong
  • Today, that redistributive pump has been thrown into reverse: The poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer (especially in the Global North). When AI is characterized as “neither artificial nor intelligent,” but merely a repackaging of human intelligence, it is hard not to read this critique through the lens of economic threat and insecurity.
    Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here
  • Without explicit symbols, according to these critics, a merely learned, “statistical” approach cannot produce true understanding. Relatedly, they claim that without symbolic concepts, no logical reasoning can occur, and that “real” intelligence requires such reasoning.
    Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here
  • An ideological commitment to alternative AI theories or techniques A devotion to human (or biological) exceptionalism
    Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here
  • Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.
    What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman
  • At Answer.AI we will be doing genuinely original research into questions such as how to best fine-tune smaller models to make them as practical as possible, and how to reduce the constraints that currently hold back people from using AI more widely. We’re interested in solving things that may be too small for the big labs to care about-—but our view is that it’s the collection of these small things matter a great deal in practice.
    Answer.AI - A new old kind of R&D lab
  • Controlling the universal prior could have many possible advantages for a consequentialist civilization—for example, if someone uses the universal prior to make decisions, then a civilization which controls the universal prior can control those decisions.
    What does the universal prior actually look like? | Ordinary Ideas
  • From Right Speech, the fourth step is Right Activity, not messing up the universe with an insistence that other people follow you towards your obsessive wars, either wars against God or for God, or for Hitler or against Hitler, or for your mother or against your mother.
    Jack Kerouac and His Buddhist Ethic - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
  • We end liberated from the suffering either by death, or in life, by waking up to the nature of our situation and not clinging and grasping, screaming and being angry, resentful, irritable or insulted by our existence.
    Jack Kerouac and His Buddhist Ethic - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
  • He had the sense of the reality of existence and at the same time the unreality of existence. To Western minds this is a contradiction and an impossibility.
    Jack Kerouac and His Buddhist Ethic - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
  • t’s more accurate to think of those inputs as imposing parameters rather than determining specific outcome
    U.S. scientist Robert Sapolsky says humans have no free will - Los Angeles Times
  • by grade school he was writing fan letters to primatologists and lingering in front of the taxidermied gorillas at the American Museum of Natural History
    U.S. scientist Robert Sapolsky says humans have no free will - Los Angeles Times
  • Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.
    The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press | devonzuegel.com
  • Little by little, over repeated instances of recall, I’ve created a happy memory for myself.
    The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press | devonzuegel.com
  • episodic memories as such an integral part of our identities that we were reluctant to externalize them,
    The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press | devonzuegel.com
  • but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces
    The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press | devonzuegel.com
  • The way we build AI is likely to influence the values we are able to load, and a clearer understanding of the value dimension can shape AI research in productive ways.
    [2001.09768] Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment
  • This approach would also serve to limit the prospect of alignment with malicious goals or behav - iour in many cases
    [2001.09768] Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment
  • there are significant differences between desires, values, and intentions
    [2001.09768] Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment
  • Who is the moral expert from which AI should learn? From what data should AI extract its conception of values, and how should this be decided? Should this data include everyone’s behaviour, or should it exclude the behaviour of those who are manifestly unethical (sociopathic) or unreasonable (fundamental- ists)?
    [2001.09768] Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment
  • Apprenticeship or imitation learning could be used to learn good or virtuous conduct from a moral expert, if such a person exists and can be reli- ably identified—a question that forms the crux of virtue ethics (MacIntyre 2013; McDowell 1979; Vallor 2016). The second family of approaches, involving large datasets, could be used to learn values or preferences from large numbers of people and provide aggregate guidance about their preferred outcomes or beliefs concern- ing good conduct (Russell 2019, 177). Finally, evolutionary processes could be used to explore how different agents interact wit…
    [2001.09768] Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment
  • In the light of these considerations, it seems possible that the methods we use to build artificial agents may influence the kind of values or principles we are able encode.
    [2001.09768] Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment
  • According to the simple thesis, it is possible to solve the technical problem of AI alignment in such a way that we can ‘load’ whatever system of principles or values that we like later on.
    [2001.09768] Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment
  • Consequen- tialist moral theories, the most famous of which is act utilitarianism, fit the bill.
    [2001.09768] Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment
  • There are no Asian or Chinese bodies in this feature, but the feature’s focus on how white residents feel comforted by their Asian objects serves as a metaphor for the reality of white security within the economic and cultural globalization of the region. For Fenwick and Rafferty, the plea- sure of Orientalized Asian objects “at home” in the valley symbolically represents the real-life encounters with such idealized Chinese subjects, whose conferred privileged status is tied to the future of suburban white accumulation following two recessions. The “nice warm fuzzy feelings”
    Finding Happiness in the Chinese Suburban Technopolis: White Supremacy in Silicon Valley, California
  • This antiracist discourse of multi- culturalism follows what Jodi Melamed (2011, 39–40) conceptualizes as “neoliberal multiculturalism,” wherein white supremacy is reconfig- ured as “antiracism” through the making of “new privileged subjects”
    Finding Happiness in the Chinese Suburban Technopolis: White Supremacy in Silicon Valley, California
  • Rather, their refusal to partake in these multicultural narratives of suburban technopolis building confounded some folks in my city. Their opinion unsettled a “settler grammar of space,” challenging such regional cultural mythologies of Silicon Valley metropolitan space as American exceptionalism that continuously make Native presence and self-determination claims appear unwarranted
    Finding Happiness in the Chinese Suburban Technopolis: White Supremacy in Silicon Valley, California
  • dominated by American Standard Codes for Information Exchange."49 In fact, the Net is arguably-like the winning of the Cold War-an extension of Mani- fest Destiny; some see it as yet another form of U.S. economic and cultural imperialism with the potential to penetrate nearly every home on the planet to an even greater degr
    The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier
  • Despite their parallels with western frontier ideology, these advertisements, and others like them, usually do not use explicit images of western landscapes or figures. This is probably because they wish to emphasize their cutting-edge millennial tech- nology and not hark back to an antiquated rural, agrarian life-style. Yet, paradoxically, they invoke deep cultural myths about certain traits of an American "national charac- ter"-rugged individualism, practical genius, contempt for artificial social conven- tions-that are inextricably linked with the American West.
    The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier
  • obalHell, or the Cult of the Dead Cow. Unlike the ten "Cowboy Commandments," which emphasized moral virtue and social responsibility, and were practiced on screen by Western stars such as Gene Autry, the so-called "Hacker Ethic" insists that the personal freedom to "figure out how things work" and then "pointing out flaws in t
    The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier
  • The western roots of Bezos the e-frontiersman were (apparently) fur- ther strengthened by summers spent at his grandparents' 25,000 acre ranch in Cotulla, Texas. In a seemingly natural progression, the photo of a little boy in a cowboy hat morphs into a computer-generated image of Bezos as a slyly smiling Indiana Jones. The trailblazer of "e-tailing" paddles a small canoe toward a distant, enticingly mysterious river jungle wherein a treasure surely awaits for the adventurer bold enough to claim it
    The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier
  • her recent conceptions of cyberspace include com- paring "the building of the Internet to the construction of great cathedrals, inspiring the same fervor and encompassing a similar scope" or even depicting the Net as "a place like heaven ... where you can float, bodiless, as an angel or live forever as pure data, in God's image." A television commercial for Nortel Networks asks, "What do you want the Internet to be?" Ultimately, perhaps, like the malleable West of the imagination, cyberspace is constructed differently by everyone who thinks or talks or writes about it.5
    The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier
  • hus, New West concep- tions of a "frontier" as a zone where people of different cultures, races, religions, and classes interact and compete become all the more relevant to the future of a wired world
    The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier
  • Almost irresistibly, it seems, words such as "cyberspace" and "netscape" attempt to create a region, an intangible but accessible location for explorers, pioneers, and settlers. The term "electronic frontier" is particularly rich with images that evoke both the Old and the New West, and also suggests a logical continuity, another phase in an ongoing American experience of technology linked with territorial and/or eco- nomic expansion. Elements of the Old West survive in the gold rush mentality and lawlessn
    The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier
  • dominant approach is now the rational agent approach
    Constructivism and its risks in artificial intelligence
  • researcher gives a talk about using RL to train a simulated robot hand to pick up a hammer and hammer in a nail. Initially, the reward was defined by how far the nail was pushed into the hole. Instead of picking up the hammer, the robot used its own limbs to punch the nail in. So, they added a reward term to encourage picking up the hammer, and retrained the policy. They got the policy to pick up the hammer…but then it threw the hammer at the nail instead of actually using it.
    Deep Reinforcement Learning Doesn't Work Yet