31–40 of 53 posts
The positive impact on human aging/lifespan/healthspan is not being talked about enough when it comes to AI+biosciences.
Unfortunately, "AI that's competent at bioweapon R&D" might be an easier mark to hit than "AI that can put a dent in the aging process". And biorisks can have a very favorable "resource input -> suffering output" rate of returns.
Not only do we have to live with endless LLM slop now, it seems we also need to accept an endless sequence of 2-cent philosophical blog posts where people describe the "world with AI" based on two minutes of meandering thought.
Sure each 2-cent philosophical posts isn’t worth much on its own but add up many of them over time and we get something more than its parts.
If you actually look at the trajectory of post-LLM AI developments, the successes have all been in areas where the major labs have some way to get their hands on s**tons of correlated data. That's why they're pushing into maths now. I see no reason to assume that will be replicated with biological science data, which is extremely proprietary and not required to be exposed as part of the end product. It doesn't even have an equivalent to a black market in piracy like books or movies did. This data was not valuable to the public before now.
if you can do the worst “bad” thing possible, you can also do the best “good” thing possible and then what? was the needle move at all?
You say this like it's a truism, but I don't think it is. The bad things may be categorically easier than the good things. It's easier to destabilize a delicate system than to stabilize it. It's easier to break something than to fix it.
Uninformed speculation from the rationalist cult forum that wants to will science fiction into reality. If you actually look at the trajectory of post-LLM AI developments, the successes have all been in areas where the major labs have some way to get their hands on s**tons of correlated data. That's why they're pushing into maths now. I see no reason to assume that will be replicated with biological science data, whi…
Coding is, inherently, quite amenable to that. Is bioscience?
They're certainly working on making it so:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-resea...
The positive impact on human aging/lifespan/healthspan is not being talked about enough when it comes to AI+biosciences.
Has anyone in the rationalist, doomer community actually seriously engaged the real biology/virology of a “virus that wipes out humanity”? Playing Plague Inc doesn’t count. I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first principles thought experiments here. Thus, they have limits imposed by physics and biology. Limits on transmission rate, lethality, particle size, evolutionary change rates, and so on. Al…
yes - I don't want to publicize what I know. I worked briefly at a leading university bio lab. It's haunted me for awhile that it would only take 1 disgruntled postdoc to wipe out humanity. There are {AI things} now that will tell you how.
Not only do we have to live with endless LLM slop now, it seems we also need to accept an endless sequence of 2-cent philosophical blog posts where people describe the "world with AI" based on two minutes of meandering thought.
Well with each new thing we get the grifters, lesswrong is an AI grifter hangout.
Grifters are opportunistic short-termists. Whatever you can say about these rationalists, they aren’t that.
Is the term "One-shotting" here even appropriate? In the context of AI one-shotting means giving your llm a single prompt and having it return a surprisingly good result (usually code related) without requiring further input, but the llm (probably) still iterates heavily before showing the results. When Codex "one-shots" something it depends a ton on the fact that code is easily testable.
I think its a consequence of the improvements in harnesses and LLMs of the last year. Before they had a hard time self-reviewing the results and proceeding to a second iteration, now they are quite good at it although not perfect.
Not only do we have to live with endless LLM slop now, it seems we also need to accept an endless sequence of 2-cent philosophical blog posts where people describe the "world with AI" based on two minutes of meandering thought.