Very Sane AI Newsletter
@verysane.ai
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Ideas in AI, preferably in English. Mostly what and why, a little how.
"sort of a drunk Sisyphus situation [...] Orthogonality Thesis [..] superintelligence with a randomly generated utility function [...] Yudkowsky [...] If the übermenschen align the AI, who aligns the übermenschen?" tldr AI doom is wrong
www.verysane.ai/p/counting-a...
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Counting Arguments and AI
A ācounting argumentā is a style of argument common among creationists, who argue that the theory of evolution cannot be true and therefore humans (and usually animals too) were made in basically their present form by God.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/counting-arguments-and-ai
8 days ago
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There's another one of these going out tomorrow morning and it might be a while after it publishes before it gets posted here so bear with me
8 days ago
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"Luddism does not deserve to be rehabilitated. It was a medieval throwback, reactionary and primitive, a pre-Marxist labor convulsion closer in spirit to the Khmer Rougeās fantasies of agrarian restoration than to the universalist solidarity of Eugene Debs."
open.substack.com/pub/verysane...
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Against the Luddites
The rehabilitation of Luddism is a vice signal.
https://open.substack.com/pub/verysane/p/against-the-luddites?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
21 days ago
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"I hope that we can, at some point, have some reasonable regulations on AI, as we do concerning banks, wiretaps, and dangerous chemicals. I am somewhat pessimistic about legislation we have seen in the past, and legislation we are seeing now."
www.verysane.ai/p/some-rough...
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Some Rough Notes on AI Policy
I hope that we can, at some point, have some reasonable regulations on AI, as we do concerning banks, wiretaps, and dangerous chemicals.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/some-rough-notes-on-ai-policy
24 days ago
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"Stochastic Parrots" is wrong
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Polly Wants a Better Argument
The āStochastic Parrotā Argument is Both Wrong and Actively Harmful
https://www.verysane.ai/p/polly-wants-a-better-argument?utm_source=activity_item
about 1 month ago
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If LLM consciousness is interesting to fight enough it should be interesting enough to read seriously about, right?
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Might An LLM Be Conscious?
In short, this depends on what you think that means, whether you think itās possible in principle, and what you think would be evidence of it.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/might-an-llm-be-conscious
about 1 month ago
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this is about the government using AI for surveillance a somewhat rushed post about Anthropic telling the Secretary of War no, Anthropic's history with the government, etc.
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Claude's Custody Hearing
Ideas in AI, preferably in English. Mostly what and why, a little how.
https://open.substack.com/pub/verysane/p/claudes-custody-hearing?r=2otjc9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
about 2 months ago
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That LLMs understand natural language as well as they do should dramatically change our understanding of the problem of 'making AI do what we want it to do'.
www.verysane.ai/p/alignment-...
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Alignment Is Proven To Be Tractable
That LLMs understand natural language as well as they do should dramatically change our understanding of the problem.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/alignment-is-proven-to-be-tractable
about 2 months ago
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it is probably not a good idea to put GPUs in space
www.verysane.ai/p/should-we-...
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Should We Put GPUs In Space?
Right now? No. In the near future? Maybe. Probably not, though.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/should-we-put-gpus-in-space
2 months ago
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My take on Searle's Chinese Room, which is terminally engineer brained in that my entire argument is "okay, how would you actually build it, though"
www.verysane.ai/p/building-t...
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Building the Chinese Room
Suppose also that after a while I get so good at following the instructions for manipulating the Chinese symbols and the programmers get so good at writing the programs that from the external point of...
https://www.verysane.ai/p/building-the-chinese-room
2 months ago
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An attempt to analyze recent legal filings about AI enabling user suicides, figure out what caused them (OpenAI being irresponsible, mostly), and figure out how to deal with this, and any similar problems in the future.
www.verysane.ai/p/ai-and-sui...
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AI and Suicide
[Warning: Extensive discussion of suicide.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/ai-and-suicide
5 months ago
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There is some confusion about whether or not we understand LLMs. The answer is yes and no, but mostly no. It's a complicated enough question that it seemed like it needed an article.
www.verysane.ai/p/do-we-unde...
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Do we understand how neural networks work?
Yes and no.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/do-we-understand-how-neural-networks
8 months ago
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"AI 2027" argues that AI will reach roughly human level in roughly 2027. This just happens to be right about when OpenAI would expect to start to run out of money. I argue that this is not a coincidence at all, and its predictions are all wrong.
www.verysane.ai/p/agi-probab...
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AGI: Probably Not 2027
AI 2027 is a web site that might be described as a paper, manifesto or thesis.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/agi-probably-not-2027
8 months ago
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What Makes AI "Generative"? It's Not What You Think I can just tell you actually: it's how large the output space is, or equivalently, how many possible outputs there are. Bigger output spaces are just fundamentally different.
www.verysane.ai/p/what-makes...
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What Makes AI "Generative"?
To "generate" is to create, either from nothing (The Book of Genesis), or from very different or relatively inactive materials (an electrical generator, generating offspring).
https://www.verysane.ai/p/what-makes-ai-generative
9 months ago
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Some Thoughts On The Platonic Representation Hypothesis, or, How We're Rediscovering Platonism By Doing Statistics or, How AI Training Is Actually Chaining Up Some Guy In A Cave, or, Bait for Philosophy Majors
www.verysane.ai/p/some-thoug...
10 months ago
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The most well-known statistic about AI water use is a lie. This makes it frustrating to talk about AI and the environment, and this is a long deep dive on that specific point.
www.verysane.ai/p/the-bigges...
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The Biggest Statistic About AI Water Use Is A Lie
How did it become the main story?
https://www.verysane.ai/p/the-biggest-statistic-about-ai-water
10 months ago
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reposted by
Very Sane AI Newsletter
Pushed previously as a notes file, this is a short list of ideas which have, or are, setting the agenda for AI, presented entirely by quoting the relevant person.
www.verysane.ai/p/ai-history...
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Key AI Quotes
Each of these presents the clearest, earliest, or most-cited statement of a specific idea in AI.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/key-ai-quotes
11 months ago
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Pushed previously as a notes file, this is a short list of ideas which have, or are, setting the agenda for AI, presented entirely by quoting the relevant person.
www.verysane.ai/p/ai-history...
loading . . .
Key AI Quotes
Each of these presents the clearest, earliest, or most-cited statement of a specific idea in AI.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/key-ai-quotes
11 months ago
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I couldn't find a high-level overview of what AI is and how we got where we are, so I wrote one.
www.verysane.ai/p/what-is-ai
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What Is AI?
This is an important question because AI is, currently, important.
https://www.verysane.ai/p/what-is-ai
11 months ago
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