LessWrong (30+ Karma)

Summary

Porn content has gotten more extreme over time. Here's the average title for the first full year of Pornhub's existence, 2008:

• "Hot blonde girl gets fucked"

and here's the average title for…

Our government, having withdrawn the new diffusion rules, has now announced an agreement to sell massive numbers of highly advanced AI chips to UAE and Saudi Arabia (KSA). This post analyzes that de…

On January 28, 2025 (during the pontificate of Pope Francis) the Catholic Church put out its position paper on AI: Antiqua et nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human…

(h/t Otis Reid)

I think this post captures a lot of important features of the US policymaking system. Pulling out a few especially relevant/broadly applicable sections:

1. There'…

The Future of Life Foundation is launching a fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning.

Fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning

Apply by June 9th | $25k–$50k stipend | 12 weeks, from …

Confidence notes: I am a physicist working on computational material science, so I have some familiarity with the field, but don't know much about R&D firms or economics. Some of the links in this a…

CGP Grey describes a phenomenon I think of as 'dreams of ideas' that I find useful as a tool to know when to stop working on a project.

You can be working on something and you are thinking about wha…

Jeffrey Yasskin recently pointed out an interesting security bug:

The idea is, if you had registered googlelogoligature.net then Chrome on Android (and possibly other Google produ…

This is a D&D.Sci scenario: a puzzle where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.

Intended Difficulty: ~3.5/5

The fairy in your bedroo…

The Art of Happiness is a book co-written by American psychiatrist Dr. Cutler and the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Published in 1998, the book is an attempt to blend western scientific understand…

In a previously unreported letter, the AI company defends its restructuring plan while attacking critics and making surprising admissions

This is the full text of a post first published on Obsolete,…

After college I worked for a high frequency trading firm where the basic unit of time was the microsecond. A single blink—about 250,000 µs—was long enough for our algorithms to open and close thou…

I'm doing a couple of events next week which people might be interested in attending:

Event: Tsvi & Abram debate AI timelines.

Abram expects to defend a picture similar to the AI 2027 report. Tsv…

I'm cross-posting my guest post on Epoch's Gradient Updates newsletter, in which I describe some new research from my team at UChicago's XLab — roughly, the algorithmic improvements that most improv…

Programmers have traditionally been contemptuous of management: if you're not writing code what are you even doing with your time? I picked this up through general culture, and I remember my…

There's this popular idea that socially anxious folks are just dying to be liked. It seems logical, right? Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them?

We should probably try to understand the failure modes of the alignment schemes that AGI developers are most likely to attempt.

I still think Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely than…

Language models are not particularly good at generating funny jokes. Asked for their funniest jokes, Claude 3.7 gives us:

Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything!

o3 gives …

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is the title of the new book coming September 16 from Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Sores. The ‘it’ in question is superintelligence built on anything like the curren…