Radford Neal

Mar 8, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Miguel Dev |Nathan Helm-Burger |Shankar Sivarajan |Radford Neal

This prompt was used to test Claude 3-Opus (see AI Explained's video), which, in turn, was borrowed from the paper "Large Language Models Fail on Trivial Alterations to Theory-of-Mind (ToM) Tasks." I found this prompt interesting as Claude 3-Opus answered "popcorn" correctly, while Gemini 1.5 and GPT-4 answered "chocolate". Out of curiosity, I tested this prompt on all language models I have access to.

Dec 6, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Radford Neal

However, even if the created persons (actually doesn't even have to be all persons, AIs or aliens will work just fine) are vastly different, it does not affect the analysis at all. Yes, this is the whole point. Probability theory doesn't have any special case for anthropics. Neither it's supposed to have one.

Oct 20, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Bill Benzon |Radford Neal

Cross-posted from New Savanna. That’s been on my mind for the last week or two, ever since my recent work on ChatGPT’s memory for texts [1]. On the other than, there’s a sense in which it’s been on my mind for my entire career, or, more accurately, it’s been growing in my mind ever since I read Karl Pribram on neural holography back in 1969 in Scientific American [2]. For the moment let’s think of it as a metaphor, just a metaphor, nothing we have to commit to. Just yet.

Aug 15, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Radford Neal |Gordon Worley |Lost Futures |Jonas Hallgren

This is a linkpost for the article "Ten Thousand Years of Solitude", written by Jared Diamond for Discover Magazine in 1993, four years before he published Guns, Germs and Steel. That book focused on Diamond's theory that the geography of Eurasia, particularly its large size and common climate, allowed civilizations there to dominate the rest of the world because it was easy to share plants, animals, technologies and ideas. This article, however, examines the opposite extreme.