Most development interventions are considered “good buys” (for donors or governments) if they return $15 in social benefits for every $1 spent. Every $1 spent on reading glasses could result in $46 more in earnings. Discuss...
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: Cybersecurity and the Clean Energy Transition appeared first on CLTC.
Allan Lichtman’s “13 Keys” election prediction system has a disputed track record and serious flaws. But it might still be worth learning about. A politics update by Jacob Cohen (@Conflux).
This post is an overview of the Moral Two Envelopes Problem and a take on whether it applies to Rethink Priorities' Moral Weights Project. It is a product of discussions between myself, Michael St. Jules, Hayley Clatterbuck, Marcus Davis, Bob Fischer, and Arvo Muñoz Morán, but need not reflect anyone's views but my own. Thanks to Brian Tomasik, Carl Shulman, and Michael St. Jules for comments.
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Suppose two Bayesian agents are presented with the same spreadsheet - IID samples of data in each row, a feature in each column. Each agent develops a generative model of the data distribution. We'll assume the two converge to the same predictive distribution, but may have different generative models containing different latent variables.
While you can make a lot of progress in evals with tinkering and paying little attention to the literature, we found that various other papers have saved us many months of research effort. The Apollo Research evals team thus compiled a list of what we felt were important evals-related papers.
Tuesday, October 15
Webinar: Privacy, Security, and Innovation - Friends Not Foes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS1lGVTyTM4
Featuring: Andrew Trask | OpenMined Founder and Executive Director
Responsible AI development necessitates balancing the risks and rewards of open or closed-source development, respecting data privacy while promoting innovation, and supporting national security while protecting...
Cities represent the future of humanity — and that means we must figure out how to make them more livable. The share of people who live in urbanized areas more than doubled in the US and across the world from 1900 to 2000. More than eight in 10 Americans live in cities today, as do […]...
Crucial research exposes concerns about downed pigs in the food supply, calling for stricter regulations and greater public awareness. The post Downed Pigs: An Intersection Of Animal Welfare, Public Health, And Consumer Safety appeared first on Faunalytics.
Was modernism originally a way to signal taste instead of wealth?
The Washington Post has a long and detailed story about the operation that’s well worth reading (alternate version here). The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to reveal, was a former Middle East sales representative for the Taiwanese firm who had established...
WASHINGTON, DC: The PACE Forum, a first-of-its-kind convening held on October 8, 2024, brought together dozens of cybersecurity experts, education technology (edtech) vendors, procurement leaders, and other stakeholders…. The post PACE Forum convenes school officials, technology vendors to improve cybersecurity in K-12 Schools appeared first on CLTC.
Xenobiology. Catholic schools. When will we have artificial wombs? Old MacDonald meets Big Brother. Weird little guys. Malaria vaccines. The most important part is knowing when to quit. What’s going on with the kids these days? Unleash the DFC. All about GLP-1s. Urban planning, Weber-style. Of course the AI labs are lying to you.
During this Animal Welfare Debate Week, I’ve learned that the battery cage system in poultry farming can be considered a form of punishment for the birds. As a farmer currently using this system, I am eager to transition to a more humane, cage-free approach. Are there any funding or support programs available to assist farmers in making this change? If so, how can I access these resources?
See my piece on the history of microbiology and the vast, invisible worlds that come into focus every time we figure out how to look closer: Through the Looking Glass, and What Zheludev et al. (2024) Found There at Asterisk Magazine I’ve written for Asterisk before: What I won’t eat, on arriving at an equilibrium […]...
What if you could remove some information from the weights of an AI? Would that be helpful?. It is clearly useful against some misuse concerns: if you are concerned that LLMs will make it easier to build bioweapons because they have memorized such information, removing the memorized facts would remove this misuse concern.
If-then commitments might be the answer
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at SOSS Fusion 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The event will be held on October 22 and 23, 2024, and my talk is at 9:15 AM ET on October 22, 2024. The list is maintained on this page.
Trump attempted to illegally install himself as president after losing a fair election
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: PACE Forum convenes school officials, technology vendors to improve cybersecurity in K-12 Schools appeared first on CLTC.
Fur is glamorized, but the environmental damage caused by its production is staggering. From high emissions to water pollution, fur is fashion’s dirtiest secret. The post The True Cost Of Fur: A Hidden Environmental Threat appeared first on Faunalytics.
First Code of Practice plenary for general-purpose AI was on 30 September, revealing disagreements between GPAI providers and other stakeholders. Legislative Process
Euractiv's tech journalist Jacob Wulff Wold reported that the European Commission held its first Code of Practice plenary for general-purpose AI (GPAI) on 30 September.
What is the space of intelligence?
Project Assistant-Initiative on Climate Action and Nutrition (I-CAN)
admin_inox
Mon, 10/14/2024 - 15:00
vacancy_id
SYS-1223
location
Abuja, Nigeria
Contract type
Fixed Term
Duration
6 Months
Frontend apply URL
https://jobs.gainhealth.org/vacancies/1223/apply/
Closing date
Fri, 10/18/2024 - 12:00
Department
Advocacy, policy and external relations
about_the_role
<p...
I'd like to thank Derek Shiller from Rethink priorities for extensive discussions and looking over this post. Introduction. I've been following the "animal welfare" debate this week on the EA forum, and noticed that a key crux for a lot of people was that calculations showed that animal welfare campaigns (specifically the "caged chicken corporate campaign") was much more cost effective than...
Monday, October 14
In the world of neuroscience research, the mouse reigns supreme: in the US alone, tens of millions of mice are studied as a proxy for the human brain in labs. They’re small, they breed quickly, and they’re relatively easy to genetically manipulate, making mice ubiquitous in biomedical science. When studying something fundamental to biology, like […]...
Greetings from a world where…...
Perfectl in an impressive piece of malware: The malware has been circulating since at least 2021. It gets installed by exploiting more than 20,000 common misconfigurations, a capability that may make millions of machines connected to the Internet potential targets, researchers from Aqua Security said.
Pigs in the meat industry endure misery from the moment they’re born. Take action and urge lawmakers to protect them now!. The post The Secret Suffering of Baby Pigs: An Inside Look at the Meat Industry appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
First Code of Practice plenary for general-purpose AI was on 30 September, revealing disagreements between GPAI providers and other stakeholders.
78th World Health Assembly
gloireri
Mon, 10/14/2024 - 07:31...
Maize yields could see significant declines, but wheat could increase. Impacts across the world will be very different.
If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
In nearly twenty years of blogging, I’ve unfortunately felt more and more isolated and embattled. It now feels like anything I post earns severe blowback, from ridicule on Twitter, to pseudonymous comment trolls, to scary and aggressive email bullying campaigns. Reflecting on this, though, I came to see that such strong reactions are an understandable […]...
Foreword. Sadly, it looks like the debate week will end without many of the stronger arguments for Global Health being raised, at least at the post level. I don't have time to write them all up, and in many cases they would be better written by someone with more expertise, but one issue is firmly in my comfort zone: the maths! .
[I posted this before, but Substack didn’t send out notifications for some reason, so I am trying again.
This is a linkpost for @Tyrone-Jay Barugh 's post for people outside of the US who are interested in careers doing good within the United States. In 2022, he recommended that people within that demographic (people without US residency or citizenship interested in careers doing good within the United States, e.g., with Global Development or AI Safety Technical or Policy work) take advantage of...
Sunday, October 13
this week in security — october 13 edition
US investigating Salt Typhoon hacks, Internet Archive breached, Qualcomm zero-day under attack, and more. ~this week in security~. a cybersecurity newsletter by @zackwhittaker
volume 7, issue 38
View this email in your browser | RSS
~ ~
THIS WEEK, TL;DR. U.S. officials race to understand severity of China's recent...
Discuss...
Haecceities, for the record, are a philosophical concept, not a kind of spell
And how having a baby can make you believe in the future
Open Philanthropy has generously supported the animal welfare field for an extended period of time, enabling the success of corporate campaigns, the creation of numerous new initiatives unlikely to succeed without this funding, and the establishment of animal advocacy more into the mainstream in the EA.
TL;DR: Steering vectors provide evidence that linear directions in LLMs are interpretable. Since SAEs decompose linear directions, they should be able to interpret steering vectors. We apply the gradient pursuit algorithm suggested by Smith et al to decompose steering vectors, and find that they contain many interpretable and promising-looking features.
This post starts out pretty gloomy but ends up with some points that I feel pretty positive about. Day to day, I'm more focussed on the positive points, but awareness of the negative has been crucial to forming my priorities, so I'm going to start with those.
Saturday, October 12
I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all.
Holly Elmore writes about the costs of criticism. One of the most salient things to me here is that criticism disincentivises transparency: people are 'punished' when they are transparent while equal transgressions by people who are not transparent 'go unpunished'. I want to call out instances of transparency and celebrate them.
When you think of what makes us human, would you say it’s our powers of prediction? I probably wouldn’t have, at least not until my conversation with Mark Miller, a philosopher of cognition and research fellow at both the University of Toronto and Monash University in Melbourne. He studies how new ideas about the mind […]...
Incentives and selection effects
Is this market really only at 63%? I think you should take the over. Only 63%? I think you should take the over.Five tiers of rigor for safety-oriented interpretability work. Lately, I have been thinking of interpretability research as falling into five different tiers of rigor. 1. Pontification.
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Scott Alexander once wrote: David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process. If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I.
Disclaimer: I work at EA animal welfare organisations but this piece reflects my personal views, not the views of the organisations I am involved with. I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of support for animal welfare in this debate.
Governor Gavin Newsom killed the bill, but the fight over it sketches a blueprint for the AI safety battles to come
Fishermen in Tamil Nadu are reporting smaller catches of squid.
Blog moderation policy.
In July, I wrote about my new book project on AI and democracy, to be published by MIT Press in fall 2025. My co-author and collaborator Nathan Sanders and I are hard at work writing.
At this point, we would like feedback on titles. Here are four possibilities:
A 3-part live lecture series feat. Sarah Paine. Reserve your tickets today.
On September 12, 2024, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity hosted a launch event for Enhancing Cybersecurity Resilience for Transnational Dissidents, a report authored by researchers from Citizen Lab,…. The post Enhancing Cybersecurity Resilience for Transnational Dissidents appeared first on CLTC.
tl;dr: No.
Anders Sandberg's research centres on estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies, methods of reasoning about long-term futures, existential and global catastrophic risk, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), as well as societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement.
ABOUT NEW ROOTS INSTITUTE. What do we do?. New Roots Institute is a growing nonprofit that educates people across the country on factory farming’s devastating impacts on people, animals, and the planet, and empowers them to advocate for systemic change in their communities. Our approach is designed to build significant and lasting capacity for the movement to end factory farming.
Peter Kyle on the UK AI Bill, OpenAI’s cost projections, and AI takes over the Nobel Prizes.
Big banks are top lenders to the industrial animal agriculture sector. If they want to follow through on their climate commitments, they must divest from the industry. The post Is Funding From Industrial Agriculture Sabotaging U.S. Banks’ Climate Commitments? appeared first on Faunalytics.
What does US policy change look like under each of the candidates?
EA Nigeria Summit was the first EA-related conference in Nigeria, and it took place from September 6th to 7th, 2024. The event saw a higher level of interest than we (the organisers) expected. We received applications from individuals across Nigeria and the international community, especially Africans. We accepted 170 applicants for the summit, and a total of 136 participants attended the event.
I really appreciate the RP Moral Weights Project and before I say anything I’d like to thank the amazing RP crew for their extremely thoughtful and kind responses to this critique. Because of their great response I feel a little uncomfortable even publishing this, as I respect both the project and the integrity of the researchers.
I really appreciate the RP Moral Weights Project and before I say anything I’d like to thank the amazing RP crew for their extremely thoughtful and kind responses to this critique. Because of their great response I feel a little uncomfortable even publishing this, as I respect both the project and the integrity of the researchers.
AI companies are on a mission to radically change our world. They’re working on building machines that could outstrip human intelligence and unleash a dramatic economic transformation on us all. Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has basically told us he’s trying to build a god — or “magic intelligence in the sky,” as he […]...
Saturday, October 12
Tamay Besiroglu joins the podcast to discuss scaling, AI capabilities in 2030, breakthroughs in AI agents and planning, automating work, the uncertainties of investing in AI, and scaling laws for inference-time compute. Here's the report we discuss in the episode:
https://epochai.org/blog/can-ai-scaling-continue-through-2030
Timestamps:
00:00 How important is scaling?
After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA (and US CyberCommand), Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me.
I really loved this quick take from Lizka, especially this part: At the same time, trying to actually do anything is really hard. Appreciation for doers is often undersupplied. Being in leadership positions or engaging in public discussions is a valuable service, but opens you up to a lot of (often stressful) criticism, which acts as a disincentive for being public.
In summary, there are two important reasons why I believe it's more important to direct additional resources towards animal welfare over global health: Global health and human welfare are generally improving whilst animal suffering is getting worse at a worrying (and potentially accelerating) rate. For factory farming, the default is it gets worse and worse over the next 50 years.
11 October 2024 The war in Gaza has been going on for a year with catastrophic loss of human lives … More...
Many such criticisms
This is a cross-post from my Substack, where I don't assume much background knowledge on AI safety and trends. . I feel like I live in two different worlds sometimes. In one world, the next decade will be... normal. Sure, I’ll see the world change, but it will change in familiar ways.
The Canary Islands rejected a proposal for the world’s first commercial octopus farm, claiming the company failed to address its environmental impacts. This report highlights the significant flaws in the farm’s plans. The post Proposed Octopus Farm Fails Environmental Impact Assessment appeared first on Faunalytics.
The post Anonymous answers: could advances in AI supercharge biorisk? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
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