Yeah lesswrong is weird about China. Its an ongoing thing. It alternates between fear (that China won’t appreciate the risk of making AI Satan or will beat the US to making AI God) and occasional hope (that they might manage to “safety-pill” China and China will find the magic formula to AI alignment). I pulled together some posts previously here: https://awful.systems/post/4103825

If it had been only a year they’ve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they’ve been making the same promises the entire time.

Something of a tangent… thinking back to 2022-2023 my expectations for what the LLM companies would actually achieve by now were actually too high? Like I would have thought they would have figured out a better architecture for gluing functionality and symbolic logic to LLMs than just calling tools with the output text stream and feeding the tool outputs into the context window.

I also thought of Open Philanthropy, but couldn’t remember the Eliezer post that best illustrated his resentment towards them. (In addition to the top-level post you’ve linked, I’ve seen various bitter lesswrong comments along the same lines).

• “a giant rich organization”: they claim to have directed over 7 billion in grants since 2014, so this actually seems like a fair comment?

• “stole some of my ideas”: they’ve shown interest in AI stuff, including Eliezer’s ideas, they just have longer (but still pretty fantastical, like AGI by 2050) timelines for stuff like AGI and that influences their funding priorities in a way Eliezer disagrees with

• “ignored everything I said about what not to do”: eh, Eliezer has said a lot of things, they probably didn’t follow his advice exactly

• “and are going around telling people I made them do it”: I’ve seen a few people here and there in various rationalist-adjacent circles blame Eliezer for helping OpenAI network and get started and thereby kindle the very doom he warned about, so. It seems plausible some of them were connected to coefficient giving?

Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions

That sounds like the normal academic process, which Eliezer neither understands nor appreciates.

Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong

Yeah, him gradually losing interest in LessWrong in the mid 2010s created room for SSC to grow in popularity. Also, that would have been around the time it became apparent Eliezer had been very wrong about neural networks, so we missed the chance to see Eliezer actually have to overcome biases and admit he was wrong in a non-self-aggrandizing way. (Eliezer has admitted he was wrong before, but only in ways that made his next idea even more important, see his progression from nanotech to coding a seed AI in Lisp to solving AI safety).

They actually both converge to a retelling of SCP-8008.

Not only that, they view commonsense moral and ethical reasoning as a PR constraint, i.e. look at the discourse around the hiring of Caroline Ellison to an EA org that handles significant sums of money. Lot of commenters were merely framing it as a PR problem and not a basic commonsense ethics problem.

Considering how much compensation he gets a MIRI, he could afford to hire an artist out of his own pocket and he would end up with something better and not be funding the technology that he claims is going to kill us all…

I think past AI winters is a somewhat useful analogy, but yeah, I agree, drawing too strong a comparison is misleading.

Likewise for people comparing the AI boom to the dotcom boom and bust. Ed Zitron has ripped into this comparison repeatedly. Basically, the fiberoptics laid by the dotcom boom where useful for decades, whereas heavily used GPUs fail in ~6 years.

The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option

Yeah, rationalist utterly fail at understanding collective action, or really anything besides lib-brained centrist methods of action. Well, maybe even lib-brained centrist is giving them too much credit, because even milquetoast liberals will occasionally avoid using products for ethical reasons. See Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, where Eliezer basically explains how all other action besides an international total ban on AI and GPUs is pointless. (I think he is trying to avoid people bombing data centers, but Elizer’s “logic” is also implicitly against stuff like going to town halls to complain about data centers.)

Yeah, the review nitpicks the quality of the AI generated slop, but overall is in favor of doing a better job slopping, not avoiding slop altogether.

Well, we didn’t believe them that their AI can make deadly bioweapons when they already showed clear indisputable evidence (the AI passing a biology multiple choice test), so clearly they need to have it make actual bioweapons so we’ll take the threat seriously!

Edit: had a thought

T-Virus

I mean rationalists, particularly the e/acc breed, would probably count the T-virus as a success. After all, wasn’t Umbrella corporation able to study it and come up with some really powerful transhuman augmentation for their various leaders? Just overlook the part where it turns you into an insane monster … I could easily envision someRationalist fanfic of Resident Evil portraying Umbrella corporation as misunderstood anti-heroes…

it just has that feel.

yeah. Looking past the initial quiz, a lot of the complaints about Eliezer’s predictions feel like rationalist inside-baseball about takeoff speeds and alignment strategies, as opposed to calling the whole thing bunk.

Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.

Wow… I actually failed to get some of the times Eliezer has been wrong! His predictions are even worse than I remembered!

Thanks! I had failed to check back two stubstacks ago.

In short, here, I described this not as collusion

other similar systems

Something of a side note to your excellent write-up… I think we should push back on the “sub-agent” “agent swarm” language used to describe LLM workflows.

The workflows often described as swarms or whatever are the same LLM (or at least related LLMs), just prompted a bunch of different ways in parallel. Individual agents don’t really act like coherent agents in the lesswrong rationalist sense, or in any sort of philosophical sense of selfhood or agency or unified purposes, they just get described that way for convenience, so treating “swarms” of agents and subagents as some special category is lending too much credence to the anthropomorphisizing boosters like to do. “Agent swarms” really just means that someone set up a slop machine to prompt itself a bunch of times in parallel without enough human supervision.

A lesswronger correctly notices that LLM companies’ “research” papers are often lacking in details necessary to replicate them! They fail to notice the reasons why that is, or do any broader questioning or soul searching about the state of LLM and “AI Safety” “research”.

This has been talked about in the reddit sneerclub, but not yet on awful systems (as far as I could tell with a quick search on this and last week’s stubstack)…

Caroline Ellison (the convicted FTX fraudster) got hired for an EA position dealing with financial allocations!

Reddit sneerclub discussion

EA Forums Discussion surprisingly (by the low low bar we have for EA) this announcement was heavily downvoted and all the top comments clearly and frankly denounce Manifund for hiring Ellison, accurately calling out the sheer violation of common sense and the obviously unethical nature of hiring someone because they previously directed money your way that turned out to be stolen. (The Manifund person outright admits this as a motivation!) Not so surprisingly, less upvoted, but still upvoted comments do some hand-wringing about the optics (as opposed to the clear ethical and common sense issues) and some even outright call for forgiveness for Caroline!

The lesswrong discussion is less surprising (as in it is full classic lesswrong fallacies). It starts with considering the optics, and some posters, such as habryka, outright question the existence of any such ethical rule that hiring Caroline might violate! (If there isn’t a rule anywhere, its only because “don’t hire convicted fraudsters for positions dealing with a lot of money” is such blatant common sense.)

Bonus: A galaxy brain take: maybe since Caroline has already messed up so massively, that means she actually has the best experience!

True… except for the fact that some of them were there at the start. Like, for example, Nick Bostrom had some pretty racist/eugenicist stuff come out from the 90s when he was on some mailing lists and 90s nets. Nick Bostrom was a founding member of the Future of Humanity Institute, along with Toby Ord (another EA founding member) and they got money from Elon Musk.

What choice did they have. The media and the masses ignored the clear bio threat from AI (as undeniably proved by them getting a 99% on biology focused multiple choice quizzes rigorous PhD level benchmarks, which everyone knows is a great way to evaluate PhD level biology and wetlab skill). And the media took the hugging faces hack seriously. So clearly Anthropic just needs to show their AIs manufacturing a genuine pandemic!