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Jan 24, 2025 | 
lesswrong.com | Shankar Sivarajan
This question I submitted got rejected from the Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) benchmark set for being too easy. I'm really proud of it though, so I figured I'd post it here. A wooden cube of unit side length and relative density 0.75 floats stably in a pool of water. What is the distance from the highest point on the cube to the surface of the water, calculated to four decimal places?
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Shankar Sivarajan
Previous Economics Roundups: #1, #2, #3Fun With Campaign Proposals (1)Since this section discusses various campaign proposals, I’ll reiterate:I could not be happier with my decision not to cover the election outside of the particular areas that I already cover. I have zero intention of telling anyone who to vote for. That’s for you to decide. All right, that’s out of the way. On with the fun. And it actually is fun, if you keep your head on straight. Or at least it’s fun for me.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Shankar Sivarajan |Thane Ruthenis
It’s over, until such a future time as either we are so back, or it is over for humanity. Gavin Newsom has vetoed SB 1047. Newsom’s Message In FullQuoted text is him, comments are mine. To the Members of the California State Senate: I am returning Senate Bill 1047 without my signature.
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Nathan Helm-Burger |Shankar Sivarajan |Rana Dexsin
Deceptive alignment. GPT-4o1 engaged in deception towards developers in order to get deployed, pretending to be aligned in ways it was not. Lying to the developers. It strategically manipulated task data. To be clear, it did not do anything of the sort to its actual developers/testers. What it did was deceive some (non-interactive) roleplay characters, who were labeled "developers" in the roleplay scenario.
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Sep 10, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Brendan Long |Shankar Sivarajan
I am posting this now largely because it is the right place to get in discussion of unrealized capital gains taxes and other campaign proposals, but also there is always plenty of other stuff going on. As always, remember that there are plenty of really stupid proposals always coming from all sides. I’m not spending as much time talking about why it’s awful to for example impose gigantic tariffs on everything, because if you are reading this I presume you already know.
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Aug 4, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Shankar Sivarajan
This post is motivated by a popular conflation in the context of AI generation (such as the recent WSJ article about detecting "cheating") but this is applicable more generally. There are many ways of marking ownership of a particular work, text, images, or anything else, and they serve different purposes.
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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.
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Feb 22, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Shankar Sivarajan |Gerald M. Monroe |Matt Goldenberg |Nikola Smolenski
[Original title; Gemini Has a Problem]Google’s Gemini 1.5 is impressive and I am excited by its huge context window. I continue to default to Gemini Advanced as my default AI for everyday use when the large context window is not relevant. However, while it does not much interfere with what I want to use Gemini for, there is a big problem with Gemini Advanced that has come to everyone’s attention. Gemini comes with an image generator. Until today it would, upon request, create pictures of humans.
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Feb 21, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Seth Herd |Shankar Sivarajan |Malentropic Gizmo
Just a short post to highlight an issue with debate on LW; I have recently been involved with some interest in the debate on covid-19 origins on here. User viking_math posted a response which I was keen to respond to, but it is not possible for me to respond to that debate (or any) because the LW site has rate-limited me to one comment per 24 hours because my recent comments are on -5 karma or less.
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Feb 18, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Shankar Sivarajan
You might have been led to believe the only way to make sense of the equation 1+2+3+…=−112 is with "zeta function regularization," involving analytic continuation or similar high-tech tools, and that there is way to develop no intuition for this. You were probably was told this by mathematicians, to whom "intuition" means something very different than it does to me. So here follows what I consider an intuitive explanation for this result.
