Jesse Hoogland

Featured in:

Articles

The Simplest Good — LessWrong

2 months ago | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland

Common Law AI worked better than anyone expected. Dr. Sarah Chen was skeptical from the start. "You're essentially training them to be moral judges," she warned during the initial architecture review. "What if they overfit on ethics?" The room laughed. "Better than the alternative," someone quipped. The idea was simple enough: move the "constitution" part of Constitutional AI into pretraining and replace post-training with an online-learning-based "case law" system.
Kessler's Second Syndrome — LessWrong

2 months ago | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland

It started as so many dooms do, with a flash in the night sky over the South China Sea. Testing a new ASAT weapon, the Chinese military shattered a derelict spy satellite into 40,000 shards of shrapnel. The debris pattern suggested a fragmentation warhead optimized for lethal scatter. Within 48 hours, the U.S. responded with a demonstration shot through a Chinese weather satellite.
Brainrot - LessWrong

2 months ago | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland

January: In early 2026, Meta launches a fleet of new AI influencers, targeting the massive audience displaced by the Xiaohongshu-TikTok wars. They are beautiful, funny, smart—whatever you want them to be. Equipped with the latest in online learning, the agents immediately begin adapting to social media trends as they occur. Engagement metrics reach new highs. Nobody questions whose engagement they're measuring. February: Fads pass faster now.
The Rising Sea - LessWrong

2 months ago | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland

And then we hit a wall. Nobody expected it. Well... almost nobody. Yann LeCun posted his "I told you so's" all over X. Gary Marcus insisted he'd predicted this all along. Sam Altman pivoted, declaring o3 was actually already ASI. The first rumors of scaling laws breaking down were already circulating in late 2024. By late 2025, it was clear that test-time scaling was not coming to the rescue.
Timaeus is hiring researchers & engineers — LessWrong

Jan 17, 2025 | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland |Stan van Wingerden

TLDR: We're hiring for research & engineering roles across different levels of seniority. Hires will work on applications of singular learning theory to alignment, including developmental interpretability. About UsTimaeus' mission is to empower humanity by making breakthrough scientific progress on alignment.
Building AI Research Fleets — LessWrong

Jan 12, 2025 | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland

Research automation is here (1, 2, 3). We saw it coming and planned ahead, which puts us ahead of most (4, 5, 6). But that foresight also comes with a set of outdated expectations that are holding us back. In particular, research automation is not just about “aligning the first AI scientist”, it’s also about the institution-building problem of coordinating the first AI research fleets. Research automation is not about developing a plug-and-play “AI scientist”.
o1: A Technical Primer — LessWrong

Dec 9, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland

TL;DR: In September 2024, OpenAI released o1, its first "reasoning model". This model exhibits remarkable test-time scaling laws, which complete a missing piece of the Bitter Lesson and open up a new axis for scaling compute. Following Rush and Ritter (2024) and Brown (2024a, 2024b), I explore four hypotheses for how o1 works and discuss some implications for future scaling and recursive self-improvement.
New o1-like model (QwQ) beats Claude 3.5 Sonnet with only 32B parameters — LessWrong

Nov 27, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland

A new o1-like model based on Qwen-2.5-32B reportedly beats Claude 3.5 Sonnet on a bunch of difficult reasoning benchmarks. A new regime dawns. The blog post reveals nothing but the most inane slop ever sampled:What does it mean to think, to question, to understand? These are the deep waters that QwQ (Qwen with Questions) wades into. Like an eternal student of wisdom, it approaches every problem - be it mathematics, code, or knowledge of our world - with genuine wonder and doubt.
Timaeus is hiring! — LessWrong

Jul 12, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland |Stan van Wingerden |Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel |Daniel Murfet

TLDR: We’re hiring two research assistants to work on advancing developmental interpretability and other applications of singular learning theory to alignment. About UsTimaeus’s mission is to empower humanity by making breakthrough scientific progress on alignment.
Timaeus's First Four Months — LessWrong

Feb 28, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Jesse Hoogland |Daniel Murfet |Stan van Wingerden |Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel

Timaeus was announced in late October 2023, with the mission of making fundamental breakthroughs in technical AI alignment using deep ideas from mathematics and the sciences. This is our first progress update.