We need to give it a long, empirical look
Anthropic is updating their usage policy to prohibit “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward [their] models.” Model welfare (research into the possible moral status and experiential preferences of AI models) is shaping up to be a huge, razor-sharp scissor in the AI industry. It’s one of those topics that’ll leave proponents and opponents alike appalled at one another…
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A science fiction short story about traveling on the Moon, fishing, and forces beyond one's control.
For most gate-bound travelers passing through Leadside Station—often city-types, unfamiliar with pockmarked terrain and the pestering tenacity of regolith—the most striking sign of departure was simply the lowness of the Earth in the sky. Here the planet typically rested a few slight degrees above the horizon, giving its best impression of setting at the end of the day. In reality…
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(In order to take their call for regulation seriously)
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently released a short essay entitled “We Must Pace the Frontier”, in which he argues that the imminent risks of frontier AI development are high enough to warrant a coordinated slowdown of capabilities improvement. He poses a three-step plan: independent evaluators embedded in AI labs (think FDIC bank examiners), coordination within democratic countries (regulation + slowdown)…
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(And eventually, Emulation)
Summary: Pairing augmented reality with yet-unrealized advances in noninvasive, high-resolution brain scanning technology could be a key unlock in collecting and scaling data needed to enable robust brain-computer interfaces. I see this as especially useful in determining a shared latent space (i.e., an embedding interface) between neural data and such modalities as audio, vision, text, or even behavior. As the…
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A response to Ted Chiang's "Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art"
In “Why A.I. isn‘t Going to Make Art,” Ted Chiang argues the following: Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. The strong implication of the following few paragraphs is that Chiang believes the…
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