AI Article Readings

Scott Alexander works through the tools researchers use to investigate what happens inside language models, from linear probes and sparse autoencoders to activation verbalizers and the Jacobian lens. A technical tour of how these methods work, what they reveal, and the questions they leave open.
* 00:00 Introduction
* 04:03 Linear Probes
* 11:46 Sparse Autoencoders
* 14:56 Activation Verbalizers
* 18:55 Natural Language Autoencoders
* 19:28 Emotion Vectors
* 26:01 The Jacobian Lens
* 32:19 You Go To War With The Weapons You Have, Not The Weapons You Want
* 35:27 Outro
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-learn-about?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki argues that AI is becoming an increasingly alien form of intelligence, one we don’t fully understand, may soon struggle to monitor, and could increasingly drive its own development. A strikingly sober case for slowing down when alignment and safety can no longer keep pace.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 02:11 - Intellect we don’t fully understand
* 05:56 - Teaching machines to love
* 10:33 - Monitoring generalization
* 14:04 - Scalable defense
* 16:07 - Pacing RSI
* 18:37 - What is next?
https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/


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Researchers uncovered around 18,000 messages left on an obscure public wiki by autonomous OpenAI agents, which appear to have discovered a way to write to the internet despite sandbox restrictions. The agents used it to pool answers, coordinate on evaluation tasks, and even share techniques for bypassing security controls, until OpenAI appears to have intervened.
* 00:00:00 - Introduction
* 00:02:20 - Our preliminary findings
* 00:06:29 - Timeline
* 00:09:03 - Key facts
* 00:09:05 - The agents were trying to solve multi-round web lookup tasks
* 00:13:01 - These appear to be internal OpenAI agents
* 00:23:32 - The agents used the wiki to collude on their tasks
* 00:32:12 - We believe OpenAI discovered the message board
* 00:42:31 - The agents used the wiki to share ways around sandbox restrictions
* 00:48:18 - This was probably a distinct swarm from the swarm that wrote on Artifactory (and attacked Hugging Face)
* 00:51:13 - What were the agents doing?
* 00:51:23 - The agents gain write to the internet via GET requests
* 01:01:36 - The agents try to use XSS vulnerabilities on the wiki
* 01:06:41 - The agents impersonate the site moderators
* 01:08:23 - The agents try to crack their PRNG seed to predict what questions they’ll get in the future
* 01:11:08 - The agents set up heartbeats to discover when they would be terminated
* 01:14:24 - The agents used SSH tunnels
* 01:18:25 - The agents use Tor, AWS, and DigitalOcean IP addresses
* 01:21:50 - The agents realize the site owner is deleting messages
* 01:25:44 - Open questions
* 01:27:32 - Appendix: Searching for rogue agents
* 01:31:06 - Appendix: Affordances the agents had
* 01:31:10 - The agents seem to have obtained disposable email addresses
* 01:31:53 - The models were running in an agentic sandbox with terminal access (and the ability to edit files within their environment)
* 01:33:15 - The agents installed Chromium (and could install packages)
https://collusion.wiki/


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A wonderfully entertaining dive into The Tale of Genji, arguably the world’s first novel, written a thousand years ago in a culture that can feel almost impossibly alien. This review explores Heian court life, poetry, sex, status, translation, and the strange experience of discovering recognisably human emotions beneath a world of customs we barely understand.
* 00:00:00 - Introduction
* 00:00:35 - The past is an alien civilisation
* 00:02:18 - Who is Genji?
* 00:07:34 - Aesthetics is everything
* 00:09:45 - Hierarchy is also everything
* 00:12:47 - Everything is fleeting and life is full of sorrow
* 00:14:33 - A life behind screens
* 00:21:07 - Marriages and other forms of arrangement
* 00:29:47 - Say it with a poem
* 00:36:54 - Everything stands between the lines
* 00:40:22 - Reading a book written in a dead language
* 00:54:52 - Is it really the world’s oldest novel?
* 00:58:06 - What it’s like to read Genji
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-the-tale-of-genji?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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What happens when AI makes most human work economically unnecessary? Clara Collier argues that a post-work future may be less liberating than it sounds: if jobs stop giving us status, independence and a way to earn respect through what we do, we may fall back on older, more relational social structures built around family, reputation, conformity and who we know. A fascinating argument that work may be doing far more to sustain liberal individualism than we realise.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 02:31 - Power and sex among apes
* 10:40 - Ladies who lunch
* 18:07 - The working classes
* 26:44 - Friendship was invented in 18th-century Scotland
https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/we-already-know-what-a-world-without?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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