AI Now co-Executive Director Amba Kak was invited to provide a keynote address at the German Green Party’s ‘Shaping AI’ conference on April 19. The following are her remarks: Thank you so much for inviting AI Now to share our thoughts at this conference. My vision for AI is a world in which AI is […].
Executive Summary. The animal advocacy movement regularly invests resources into campaigns that aim to reduce people's consumption of meat and/or animal products. Many of these campaigns are conducted using digital media (e.g. social media ads) and/or mass media (e.g. radio, TV, newspapers). In this report, we summarise the evidence on these campaigns.
Why it matters, and why it shouldn't stop the clean energy buildout
The Washington Post visited our program By Katharine HoureldApril 19, 2024 CHAMBA, Malawi — The cyclone tore through Magret Frank’s village two years ago, ripping apart the thatched mud huts. She dragged her four children from their beds just before the roof beams collapsed, and their chickens and clothes were swept away into the howling […]...
Social norms
Speaker. Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. She advises companies and projects, such as Cosmica, and The Roots of Progress Fellowship, and is on the Executive Committee of the Biomarker Consortium.
This study reveals how public policies and lobbying uphold the animal farming industry, often at the expense of plant-based foods or green technologies. The post Is The Animal Farming “Regime” Preventing Food Reform? appeared first on Faunalytics.
A housing success story
Liron Shapira joins the podcast to discuss superintelligence goals, what makes AI different from other technologies, risks from centralizing power, and whether AI can defend us from AI. Timestamps:
00:00 Intelligence as optimization-power
05:18 Will LLMs imitate human values? 07:15 Why would AI develop dangerous goals? 09:55 Goal-completeness
12:53 Alignment to which values?
Liron Shapira joins the podcast to discuss superintelligence goals, what makes AI different from other technologies, risks from centralizing power, and whether AI can defend us from AI. Timestamps:
00:00 Intelligence as optimization-power
05:18 Will LLMs imitate human values? 07:15 Why would AI develop dangerous goals? 09:55 Goal-completeness
12:53 Alignment to which values?
As we gear up for the 2024 show season, we’re pleased to confirm our attendance at the following shows, where our team of animal welfare experts will be present at our stand to answer your questions and provide advice: National Beef Expo, North West Auctions 27 April Pig and Poultry, NEC Birmingham 15-16 May Welsh Smallholding and Country Festival, Welsh Showground 18-19 May.
Plastic covers the exterior of the fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Boeing 737-9 MAX on January 7, 2024, in Portland, Oregon. | Getty Images
Noticing more problems with Boeing planes doesn’t mean there are actually more problems with aviation safety. Is it just me, or does it seem like a lot of bad things keep happening to Boeing airplanes lately? .
Open Philanthropy’s “Day in the Life” series showcases the wide-ranging work of our staff, spotlighting individual team members as they navigate a typical workday. We hope these posts provide an inside look into what working at Open Phil is really like.
A child dies almost every minute from malaria. While huge gains have been made in recent history in reducing the burden of malaria — with deaths falling by 50 percent between 2000 and 2015 — progress has stalled and we have seen the numbers of cases and deaths creeping back up in recent years.
We recently spoke with Dr. Angela Weaver, Vice President for Neglected Tropical Diseases. Angela leads Helen Keller Intl’s work to. The post Speaking Technically: Investing in the Fight Against Neglected Tropical Diseases appeared first on Helen Keller Intl.
We are excited to announce that Alexandru Marcoci, Senior Research Associate in AI Risk and Foresight at CSER, was awarded funding from Open Philanthropy’s Benchmarking LLM agents on consequential real-world tasks program. Together with Abel Brodeur (University of Ottawa/ Institute for Replication) and Rohan Alexander (University of Toronto), they will investigate the ability of LLMs to...
ProVeg is looking to fill the following position: People and Culture Manager (Focus Recruiting). About ProVeg. ProVeg International is a food awareness organisation working to transform the global food system by replacing animal-based products with plant-based and cultured alternatives.
Open Philanthropy’s “Day in the Life” series showcases the wide-ranging work of our staff, spotlighting individual team members as they navigate a typical workday. We hope these posts provide an inside look into what working at Open Phil is really like.
Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.
Today I handed in my laptop. A part of my extended mind was removed. The shutdown of the Future of Humanity Institute has many odd effects. I have been at FHI since 2006. I interviewed for the job a rainy July day in 2005, apparently impressing people with my interdisciplinary knowledge… and the fact that […]...
Summary: A shallow overview of the EA & global development ecosystem. There isn't one large EA & GD ecosystem, it is mainly individuals considering their own path to impact, with minor coordination amongst people who are part of the wider network and closer coordination amongst groups in a couple of areas (effective giving/charity entrepreneurship)... . Resources.
GiveWell recently recommended a grant of up to $750,000 to Malengo, an educational migration program. Malengo supports students from low-income countries in moving to high-income countries for university. The goal is to enable them to earn a higher income over time, benefiting both the students and their families.
In a new preprint, Sparse Feature Circuits: Discovering and Editing Interpretable Causal Graphs in Language Models, my coauthors and I introduce a technique, Sparse Human-Interpretable Feature Trimming (SHIFT), which I think is the strongest proof-of-concept yet for applying AI interpretability to existential risk reduction.
The post Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
Career decisions are big decisions—ones worth thinking carefully about. That’s why a lot of our top advice focuses on tools to help you plan and strategize your career to help the world. But let’s be honest. It’s much easier to think about your career in the abstract than to take... Read more...
There are a lot of important problems worth tackling, but with just one career (and thus, limited time and effort) you can’t help every cause at once. So how do you decide what to work on? It’s natural to focus on a cause that you feel a personal connection to. ... Read more...
Where do you see yourself in 5 years? It’s a common interview question, usually answered with a polite but vague response that aligns with whatever job you’re applying for. But if you really think about it, do you have an idea of what your career will look like in 5... Read more...
When reflecting on pivotal moments in your past, it’s natural to spend some time thinking about the what if’s… What if I had moved to a different city instead of staying put? Would I be happier? What might have happened if I studied something different? How would my life look... Read more...
If you’re going to buy a new car, you probably won’t just walk into a showroom and pick the first car that stands out. More likely, you’ll do some research: reading online forums, comparing models and features, finding something that checks all your boxes. Sure, it’s more effort, but you’ll... Read more...
Forty years ago, scientists estimated there were 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Upon hearing this, you might think, wow, that’s a lot of galaxies. Today, some scientists estimate this number is actually closer to 2 trillion. Yet upon hearing this massive increase in estimates, you might have about... Read more...
A lot of people who want to make a difference fall into a common conundrum: wanting to help but not knowing how. It’s understandable to feel disheartened by everything that’s wrong with the world, especially when so many of our problems are global in scale (from widespread disease, to climate... Read more...
"if you don’t live in an apothesis you must accept the continuum hypothesis."...
Listen now | Mark Zuckerberg on: Llama 3 - open sourcing towards AGI what he would have done as CEO of Google+ energy constraints on scaling Caeser Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, & much more Enjoy! Timestamps (00:00:00) - Llama 3 (00:08:32) - Coding on path to AGI
People behave differently from one another on all manner of axes, and each person is usually pretty consistent about it. For instance: how much to spend money how much to worry how much to listen vs. speak how much to jump to conclusions how much to work how playful to be how spontaneous to be how much to prepare How much to socialize How much to exercise How much to smile how honest to be How...
In this blog post, we examine the overlooked relationship between companion and wild animals. Emphasizing shared spaces and resources, we advocate for education to bridge communities and wildlife. Donations and social media integration by humane societies can aid in wild animal welfare. This underscores the importance of systemic change and inclusivity in animal welfare. … Read more.
This survey explores what people in the U.S. know about meat labeling practices and how they feel about transparency issues in meat labeling and marketing. The post How The U.S. Public Feels About Humanewashing appeared first on Faunalytics.
A new OSF feature makes it possible and easy for researchers to make their research FAIR by annotating their research artifacts with specialized metadata. The feature is enabled by an integration with Stanford’s CEDAR embeddable editor. Four templates are initially available, and readers are invited to nominate more.
This is a presentation on Representation Engineering by Andy Zou from the Center for AI Safety. 2:49 references work from Barack and Krakauer (2021) Two views on the cognitive brain (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-021-00448-6)
The slide used at 6:52 is taken from Krakauer (2023) What is Complexity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR93X7xK05o)...
After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails.
The two podcasts where I discuss FTX are now out: Making Sense with Sam Harris. Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg. The Sam Harris podcast is more aimed at a general audience; the Spencer Greenberg podcast is more aimed at people already familiar with EA.
April 25th is World Malaria Day, an annual observance to call attention to the worldwide fight against malaria and look back on developments from the past year. This year, the malaria community picked the theme of ‘Gender, Equity and Human Rights’ highlighting the disproportionate effect that the malaria endemic has on women and girls, as […].
Self-evaluation using LLMs is used in reward modeling, model- based benchmarks like GPTScore and AlpacaEval, self- refinement, and constitutional AI. LLMs have been shown to be accurate at approximating human annotators on some tasks. But these methods are threatened by self-preference, a bias in which an LLM evaluator scores its own outputs higher than than texts written by other LLMs or...
The gift will be regranted to a portfolio of nonprofits to power high-impact climate initiatives Giving Green’s regranting fund has...
A leadership transition, an Athens Roundtable report, and a few more big announcements!. The post Springtime Updates appeared first on The Future Society.
How can you tell who is a valid expert, and who is full of B.S.? On almost any topic of importance you can find a mix of valid experts...
EA Forum Digest #185
Hello!. No news this week, enjoy the posts! — JP (for the Forum team)
We recommend: Writing about my job on Open Phil's Global Aid Policy program (Sam Anschell, 14 min). A Gentle Introduction to Risk Frameworks Beyond Forecasting (pending_survival, NunoSempere, 33 min).
Summary: Fishing is typically less responsive to price and demand shifts than aquaculture is, and in many wild fisheries, quite unresponsive overall on the margin. I discuss multiple reasons for this. In some wild fisheries, lower prices and negative demand shifts for wild-caught species, e.g.
Will AI safety tests be ready in time? Also: the small body problem, reforming research, and more
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Hello! Our favourite links this month include:
Nobody Knows How to Safety-Test AI, an article from Time.
Package labels are a key way consumers evaluate the "humaneness" of animal products. This Faunalytics factsheet gives insight into what these labels actually mean, and how they can be improved. The post What’s In A Label? : Deciphering And Improving Animal Product Welfare Labels appeared first on Faunalytics.
Previous research found that “cell-based” and “cell-cultured” were the best terms to describe lab-grown seafood. This study asks which one will meet U.S. regulatory demands and consumer expectations. The post What Should We Call Lab-Grown Fish Products? appeared first on Faunalytics.
Why are the most popular people representing various fringe ideas braindead?
Anders Sandberg has written a “final report” released simultaneously with the announcement of FHI's closure. The abstract and an excerpt follow. Normally manifestos are written first, and then hopefully stimulate actors to implement their vision.
This post is a short summary of A long-read draft assembly of the Chinese mantis (Mantodea: Mantidae: Tenodera sinensis) genome reveals patterns of ion channel gain and loss across Arthropoda, a peer-reviewed, open-access publication in G3: Genes | Genomes | Genetics under a CC BY license. The paper and supplemental information can be accessed here.
Concerns over AI safety and calls for government control over the technology are highly correlated but they should not be. There are two major forms of AI risk: misuse and misalignment. Misuse risks come from humans using AIs as tools in dangerous ways. Misalignment risks arise if AIs take their own actions at the expense of human interests.
A doctor holds one of the more than 1,200 butterflies that are placed on the lawn at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, CA on Wednesday, April 12, 2023. The butterflies represent the number of organ transplants performed during the last 50 years at the hospital. | Photo by Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Giving a kidney saves a life.
Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments—almost certainly AI-generated—to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption. I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hacker’s Mind, but this is a new one.
It was the uranium enriched at the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee that was used in Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August of 1945. Today, every single weapon in the US’ nuclear arsenal, all 5,000, has parts that were built or maintained at Y-12.
Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet. People talk about unconditional love and conditional love. Maybe I’m out of the loop regarding the great loves going on around me, but my guess is that love is extremely rarely unconditional. Or at … Continue reading →...
People talk about unconditional love and conditional love. Maybe I’m out of the loop regarding the great loves going on around me, but my guess is that love is extremely rarely unconditional. Or at least if it is, then it is either very broadly applied or somewhat confused or strange: if you love me unconditionally, presumably you love everything else as well, since it is only conditions that...
I started working in cooperative AI almost a year ago, and as an emerging field I found it quite confusing at times since there is very little introductory material aimed at beginners. My hope with this post is that by summing up my own confusions and how I understand them now I might help to speed up the process for others who want to get a grasp on what cooperative AI is.
Inferring a multiverse from fine-tuning still doesn't commit the inverse gambler's fallacy but it does show that the self-indication assumption is right.
Summary: In this post, I hope to inspire other Effective Altruists to focus more on donation and commiserate with those who have been disappointed in their ability to get an altruistic job. First, I argue that the impact of having a job that helps others is complicated.
(New York City, April 17, 2024) – The prestigious American magazine TIME named Yoshua Bengio, Mila – Quebec AI Institute’s Founder and Scientific Director and Full Professor at Université de Montréal, to the 2024 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. See Yoshua Bengio’s profile See the full list.... Read More.
Summary
Produced while being an affiliate at PIBBSS . The work was done initially with funding from a Lightspeed Grant, and then continued while at PIBBSS. Work done in collaboration with @Paul Riechers, @Lucas Teixeira, @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel, and Sarah Marzen. Paul was a MATS scholar during some portion of this work.
Discover animal organizations' role in protecting animal welfare, raising awareness, and driving change. Learn how you can support effective animal charities. … Read more. The post Supporting Animal Organizations: Make a Difference with Your Donation Today appeared first on the Animal Charity Evaluators blog.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: test post appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced today additional members of the executive leadership team of the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI), which is housed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Raimondo named Paul Christiano as Head of AI Safety, Adam Russell as Chief Vision Officer, Mara Campbell as Acting Chief Operating Officer and Chief of Staff, Rob Reich...
Here's his website https://philipgoffphilosophy.com/
Here's my blog https://benthams.substack.com/
We’re excited to see interest in the positions AI Now recently posted: (see here for more info on our open Associate Director and Operations Director roles) If you have questions about these positions or AI Now as a workplace, we’re happy to answer them. For equity reasons, we will hold two office hours sessions so […].
Why do we fear being lied to? Because we don’t like others manipulating our beliefs. But our fear of being misled by false news pales by comparison to our fear of suffering total “mind-control”, such as depicted in the films...
Update (April 19): Apparently a bug has been found, and the author has withdrawn the claim (see the comments). For those who don’t yet know from their other social media: a week ago the cryptographer Yilei Chen posted a preprint, eprint.iacr.org/2024/555, claiming to give a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve lattice problems. For example, it […]...
With AI Impacts, we’re pleased to announce an essay competition on the automation of wisdom and philosophy. Submissions are due by July 14th. The first prize is $10,000, and there is a total of $25,000 in prizes available. Submit an entryThe full announcement text is reproduced here: Background.
Hopefully helpful feedback
This study highlights the effects of social variables (such as income or home stability) on dog health, including how these effects vary throughout a dog’s lifespan. The post How Social Factors Impact Our Dogs’ Health appeared first on Faunalytics.
What are the facts around Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX about which all parties agree? What was the nature of Will's relationship with SBF? What things, in retrospect, should've been red flags about Sam or FTX? Was Sam's personality problematic? Did he ever really believe in EA principles? Does he lack empathy? Or was he on the autism spectrum? Was he naive in his application of utilitarianism?
James MacDonald/Bloomberg Creative via Getty Images
How industrial meat and dairy trap us in an infectious disease cycle. H5N1, or bird flu, has hit dairy farms — but the dairy industry doesn’t want us saying so. The current, highly virulent strain of avian flu had already been ripping through chicken and turkey farms over the past two years.
Brian Krebs reported that X (formerly known as Twitter) started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: (1) it changed any domain name that ended with “twitter.com,” and (2) it only changed the link’s appearance (anchortext), not the underlying URL.
Our “Employee Spotlight” series profiles employees at the END Fund. The series is part of an initiative to provide transparency and share the important work that our employees are doing to end neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Stay tuned as we roll out new spotlights. Click to learn more about the series. Irene Chami is a….
Attend his talk if he's giving oneBy Jacob Trefethen. Scientific conferences are great even if you’re an outsider to the field. That's common advice for students, and there are useful guides written on how to get the most out of conferences you're new to.
A Review of Jonathan Anomaly's Creating Future People: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement - second edition
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