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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI #66: Oh to Be Less Online, published by Zvi on June 1, 2024 on LessWrong.
Tomorrow I will fly out to San Francisco, to spend Friday through Monday at the LessOnline conference at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If you are there, by all means say hello. If you are in the Bay generally and want to otherwise meet, especially on Monday, let me know that too and I will see if I have time to make that happen.
Even without that hiccup, it continues to be a game of playing catch-up. Progress is being made, but we are definitely not there yet (and everything not AI is being completely ignored for now).
Last week I pointed out seven things I was unable to cover, along with a few miscellaneous papers and reports.
Out of those seven, I managed to ship on three of them: Ongoing issues at OpenAI, The Schumer Report and Anthropic's interpretability paper.
However, OpenAI developments continue. Thanks largely to Helen Toner's podcast, some form of that is going back into the queue. Some other developments, including new media deals and their new safety board, are being covered normally.
The post on DeepMind's new scaling policy should be up tomorrow.
I also wrote a full post on a fourth, Reports of our Death, but have decided to shelve that post and post a short summary here instead.
That means the current 'not yet covered queue' is as follows:
1. DeepMind's new scaling policy.
1. Should be out tomorrow before I leave, or worst case next week.
2. The AI Summit in Seoul.
3. Further retrospective on OpenAI including Helen Toner's podcast.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.
2. Table of Contents.
3. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. You heard of them first.
4. Not Okay, Google. A tiny little problem with the AI Overviews.
5. OK Google, Don't Panic. Swing for the fences. Race for your life.
6. Not Okay, Meta. Your application to opt out of AI data is rejected. What?
7. Not Okay Taking Our Jobs. The question is, with or without replacement?
8. They Took Our Jobs Anyway. It's coming.
9. A New Leaderboard Appears. Scale.ai offers new capability evaluations.
10. Copyright Confrontation. Which OpenAI lawsuit was that again?
11. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Meta fails to make an ordinary effort.
12. Get Involved. Dwarkesh Patel is hiring.
13. Introducing. OpenAI makes media deals with The Atlantic and… Vox? Surprise.
14. In Other AI News. Jan Leike joins Anthropic, Altman signs giving pledge.
15. GPT-5 Alive. They are training it now. A security committee is assembling.
16. Quiet Speculations. Expectations of changes, great and small.
17. Open Versus Closed. Two opposing things cannot dominate the same space.
18. Your Kind of People. Verbal versus math versus otherwise in the AI age.
19. The Quest for Sane Regulation. Lina Khan on the warpath, Yang on the tax path.
20. Lawfare and Liability. How much work can tort law do for us?
21. SB 1047 Unconstitutional, Claims Paper. I believe that the paper is wrong.
22. The Week in Audio. Jeremie & Edouard Harris explain x-risk on Joe Rogan.
23. Rhetorical Innovation. Not everyone believes in GI. I typed what I typed.
24. Abridged Reports of Our Death. A frustrating interaction, virtue of silence.
25. Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. You have to try.
26. People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Yes, it is partly about money.
27. Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Assumptions.
28. The Lighter Side. Choose your fighter.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
Which model is the best right now? Michael Nielsen is gradually moving back to Claude Opus, and so am I. GPT-4o is fast and has some nice extra features, so when I figure it is 'smart enough' I will use it, but when I care most about quality and can wait a bit I increasingly go to Opus. Gemini I'm reserving for a few niche purposes, when I nee...
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