Current Claims and Cruxes on LLM Forecasting & Epistemics
I think that recent improvements in LLMs have brought us to the point where LLM epistemic systems are starting to be useful. After spending some time thinking about it, I've realized that such systems, broadly, seem very promising to me as an effective altruist intervention area. However, I
LLM-Secured Systems: A General-Purpose Tool For Structured Transparency
Researcher Notes: This is a semi-polished ideation & formalization post. I spent about a week on it. It's a bit outside our main work at QURI, but I thought it was promising enough to be worth some investigation. I've done some reading into this area, and
Manifest 2024 & Squiggle
ManifestManifest is a forecasting and prediction markets festival hosted by Manifold Markets. June 7-9, 2024. Berkeley, California. Manifest 2024 was this last week, along with Manifest Summer Camp. You can see the schedules for these here. I gave two Squiggle workshops, one Squiggle presentation, and three focused events. Each session
"Full Automation" is a Slippery Metric
Research Status: Written & researched quickly. I think the key point is fairly simple and obvious. I relied on Claude to help with rewriting. There's been a growing interest in predicting when various products or jobs will be "fully automated." Will we soon have popular movies,
A Case for Superhuman Governance, using AI
I believe that: 1. AI-enhanced organization governance could be a potentially huge win in the next few decades. 2. AI-enhanced governance could allow organizations to reach superhuman standards, like having an expected "99.99" reliability rate of not being corrupt or not telling lies. 3. While there are
Ideas for Next-Generation Writing Platforms, using LLMs
I've been doing more writing recently and have been heavily leaning on LLMs to help. This has been useful, but it seems clear that the fundamental LLM abilities are far outpacing the frontends and tools that use them. Here's a quick list of ideas that I&
Higher-Order Forecasts
Higher-order forecasting could be a useful concept for prediction markets and forecasting systems more broadly. The core idea is straightforward: Nth-order forecasts are forecasts about (N-1)th order forecasts. Examples Here are some examples: 0-Order Forecasting (i.e., the ground truth) * Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election * The
Scorable Functions: A Format for Algorithmic Forecasting
Introduction Imagine if a forecasting platform had estimates for things like: 1. "For every year until 2100, what will be the probability of a global catastrophic biological event, given different levels of biosecurity investment and technological advancement?" 2. "What will be the impact of various AI governance
Upcoming Workshops and Talks, at Manifest
Manifest is happening this June 7-9th in Berkeley, CA. Also, this time they're holding a special "Summer Camp" the week before. I'll be at both. I'll give workshops at both events on making forecasts using functions, using Squiggle. I'll also
Eli and Ozzie: Is Forecasting a Promising EA Cause Area?
Podcast Link There was recently a lengthy thread on the EA Forum about the value of forecasting as a potential cause area, between Eli Lifland and myself. We thought it would be interesting to expand on this in a podcast episode. Some Summary Points * Open Phil's expanded forecasting
Distinctions when Discussing Utility Functions
Epistemic Status: Early. The categories mentioned come mostly from experience and reflection, as opposed to existing literature. On its surface, a utility function is an incredibly simple and generic concept. An agent has a set of choices with some numeric preferences over them. This can be Von Neumann–Morgenstern (VNM)
Substack -> Ghost
We're leaving Substack in favor of Ghost, in order to get better customization. All of our previous Substack members have been migrated over. We're also using this new setup as our new website homepage. One benefit for subscribers is that this gives more control over subscriptions.