Rapid Fire

Basically a blog where I try to do philosophy outside.

What Am I Doing at MATS?

Here in Week 4 of 12 of the MATS Program, we’re required to submit a brief “project abstract” describing what we’re up to, as well as a much longer “theory of change” imagining how our work could have a positive impact on AI safety. Given the tight word count requirements, I completely cheated by uploading a pdf with a long block quote at the start and a deeply technical footnote, neither of which I counted, and I still turned it in late. I maintain that I did all this to exp

Jun 26

Doing Compaction...Better

0. This is compaction (technical background) LLMs don’t experience time the way we do. We perceive the present not as an instant but as an extended present, a brief duration measuring about three seconds. But LLMs live in a massively extended present. When you talk to an LLM, it replays the entire session from the start each time before adding the next token (roughly, the next word). It does this over and over every time it reads and writes, meaning its extended present keeps

Jun 19

Sleep is the Brother of Death

Damn this hadith goes hard. 0. What makes you you? When you wake up, what makes you the same person who went to sleep the night before? Why do you survive sleeping? You might go Ricky, that’s easy. It’s my physical embodiment: I wake up with basically the same body I had the night before. And if some atoms change here and there, no big deal. Sure, maybe I can imagine waking up in someone else’s body, but that’s fantastical, so who cares? I agree, but let me push back. You cou

Jun 12

3 Questions in AI Welfare

0. What is AI Safety? I’m spending twelve weeks in Berkeley this summer as a MATS Fellow working on “AI Safety”…so, what is that? As more and more money flows into AI research & development, our technical capabilities continue to grow at a rate that’s almost impossible to describe to folks outside the AI community. Meanwhile, a host of issues ranging from International Policy to Cybersecurity to Societal Impacts remain substantially underfunded in comparison. As a result, we

Jun 5