[–] 8 points 6 months ago

Nick Bostrom jumpscare with a funny sneer

These already head-scratching lines hit different when you remember that Bostrom believes it’s likely that we’re already living inside a computer simulation — in his head canon, do all those levels of simulated ancestors develop their own superintelligence, and what does that have to do with the new simulations they feel compelled to build? If AI wipes out humankind, does it build its own simulation? If so, is it simulating its human ancestors, or its creation by humankind? Heck, if our entire world is simulated, are we AI? We’ll leave it up to readers to take another bong hit while they try to make sense of it all.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    Yud says so much, and its often so confusing, that I think a lot of his followers don’t know his main messages.

    This is very late to respond but what I’ve noticed is that a when people in rationalist spaces respond to Yud, they often say “my interpretation of this is..” and things along similar lines, which always struck me as weird

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    It appears that Anthropic vs the Pentagon is going to happen right on the heels of Altman vs Musk, which is spicy

    "While the Musk-OpenAI courtroom showdown has been billed as the first great technology trial of the AI era, a legal showdown that matters far more will take place two weeks from now in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. That’s when a federal appeals court panel will hear arguments in Anthropic’s challenge to the ‘supply chain risk’ designation the Trump Administration slapped on it for refusing to agree to its specified contract terms for providing its AI models to the U.S. military. That’s a case with huge implications not just for Anthropic and the fate of the AI industry, but also for the balance of power between the state and industry more generally."

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    the funniest bit so far is probably that Greg Brockman’s (who mind you is a massive Trump supporter, being a top donor to him) diary essentially vindicated Elmo’s whole case against OpenAI. You gotta love when morons shoot themselves in the foot

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    originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important

    Posted on r/HPMOR roughly one day ago

    full transcript:

    Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI's while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.

    Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It's not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don't think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.

    In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn't a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.

    This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.

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