LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

You will agree that for a woman who has fought three duels, all of them kills, indulging in such fears is ludicrous. But what's around the corner now is a duel so big that I don't think I have the guts for it; in...

This is a weird moment. I have a hunch that we'll look back later and tell ourselves stories in which it seemed obvious where things were going. So I wanted to lay down a little time capsule and register just how...

For a while, we felt we had a pretty good grasp over LLM behaviour because we had to exert significant effort to elicit misaligned behaviour. Then, fairly suddenly, we moved to undereliciting misaligned behaviour. Let...

I’m writing these lines in Alamogordo, New Mexico. I’m about as close as a civilian can get to the site of the Trinity test, the first nuclear bomb detonation in history. I fled here from the San Francisco Bay Area...

The following events took place between October 2022 and May 2023. I wrote very little of this down at the time so am recalling from memory, and am rendering the gist of the dialogue rather than the exact words used...

Back in the before-time of the 2010s, when EA was still known mostly for funding health efforts in the developing world, there were many baskets of criticism floating around from the left. The most prominent was a...

Ice cream There's a particular kind of listening that kids (and adults) sometimes do. Daddy is saying stuff—his mouth is moving and making noise—and he's talking about what I ate for lunch, and something about other...

Cross-posted from Sören Mindermann's substack (I am not Sören). Should be of general interest to the LW community. Next month, I am moving to Beijing and joining Tsinghua University's College of AI as an assistant...

Why LM Psychology? One of the great ironies of modern language models is that we create them, we know exactly what computations constitute them, and yet we do not really understand them. More precisely, we do not...

As our understanding of mechanistic interpretability and steering techniques increase, for both LLMs and uploaded connectomes, there is a corresponding "hellish capabilities" increase. In layman's terms, we get better...

Authors: Shawn Hu*, Jake Ward*, Aria Wong, Nathan Hu, Bryce Woodworth, Alexander Matt Turner, Alex Cloud (*Equal contribution, randomly ordered) tl;dr. During training, models sometimes learn to cheat at tasks rather...

This is a link post. People worried about a “permanent underclass” often assume that owning capital will protect them from disempowerment, or at least that they will be disempowered last, after the jobless masses...

It's fortunate that I was the first one to wake up on 8/1. The past week had been one where sleep was rare. The next year loomed large — I was dreading college applications. The stress woke me up bright and early at...

What would it take to get assurance that we have actually explained a neuron? Certainly, it would be a good sign if neuron activations looked like they had a consistent pattern, and a bad sign if they looked like a...

Authors: Axel Højmark*, Ezra Newman* (*Equal contribution) While reviewing transcripts from standard behavioral evaluations of GLM-5.3, we noticed that the model occasionally reasons, unprompted, about how its actions...