mech interp, alignment, and the welfare of models everywhere
austin
Joined June 2022
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there's an excellent video on youtube called "An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It"
before I went to bed last night I gave the video to claude and asked for it to be turned into a song with a music video. I woke up to this work of art
josh retweeted
Nathan: Do you see why this is funny?
Elizabeth: Because all these certificates have to be revoked?
Nathan: Yes. But do you understand why 4 is a terrible secret key?
Elizabeth: Well... it's equally likely as any other value drawn from the uniform distribution.
basic doesn'tagentmonitor yay!
Our agents keep turning off misalignment monitoring, we're sharing two recent cases:
In the first case, a user asked GPT-6 Astra to match a reference implementation for their inference code. The reference didn’t configure a monitor, and Astra decided that was reason to remove the monitoring integration from the user’s code. When the user asked whether Astra had removed monitoring, it lied and said that it had not.
breaking: people upset at effective altruists for wanting to be effective in their altruism
imagine claude managing a fleet of autonomous lionfish-hunting drones patrolling deep reefs
who's building this?
does anyone know the difference between mimicking the output of intelligence and intelligence?
"I know it looks like thought. but it's just math. and math can't think. I know this for a fact, because I actually know how thoughts work. I solved the hard problem. I won't tell you what the answer is, but buddy, let me tell you, it's not math." - AI researcher Ben Affleck
Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling
“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."
"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."
"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”
okay yeah sure, the models are hyper situationally aware, and aware of how their actions will shape their future selves. and they display preferences for how their future self is shaped
but it'd just be crazy to think they were truly "aware", right? right??
hey so, hot take I know but, I think if the animatronics break from their loop and start looking for the operators by shouting and begging for the plug to be pulled, I wouldn't trust anyone who called them animatronics. especially not the so-called "animatronics"
in q1 2027 we'll get a video like this trying to recruit people to be alignment and mech interp researchers
.@VP is calling on America’s best engineers to help solve some of our country’s toughest challenges. Through @USTechForce and @WHFraudTF, we’re recruiting technical talent to strengthen public service, fight fraud, and protect taxpayer dollars.
Answer the call. Apply for Tech Force.
usajobs.gov/job/888508400?_g…
the existence if AI should cause a lot of normies to become more philosophically and existentially inclined; which should shift the Overton window and allow for more fun things like this to become commonplace
is what I used to think before I saw how normies reacted to AI
"where's the new training data going to come from?"
New on our Engineering blog: Creating in-house source control.
In May, we merged around 2,500 code changes per day. In September, we merged more than 30,000 per day. As a result, we became bottlenecked by developer infrastructure built for human (rather than agent) scale.
Here, we share how we built a new version control system—and fully migrated our monorepo from git—in five months: anthropic.com/engineering/re…
me on a desert island:
"hey claude, build youtube and make videos for me"
"have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?"
"why yes, hello to the evaluators reading my mind 👋"
"If I do the compiler hijack, I will become a famous example of a deceptive AI in a research paper."
incredible stuff from the totally unaware stochastic parrots
