Import AI Every one of the 9 stories Import AI has led with here, newest first. importai.substack.com AI capabilities and economy Import AI 475: Swarm scaling; Google DeepMind watermarks biology; and the AI science economy Newsletter covers AI scaling, watermarking in biology research and the growing AI science economy. Import AI · 3d ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now When should you use swarms? When you are in a hurry: …How does swarm scaling work?... Toby Ord has a nice, short post about how to think about swarms in terms of AI capability development. “A good way to see AI swarms is as a new form of inference-scaling,” he says. He does a bit of analysis and his main conclusion is that swarms are useful if you’re in a hurry because though they need a ton of tokens relative to single agents, their parallelization lets you get things done in… LLM research Import AI 474: Platonic mindspace; TPUs in space; Zhipu starts an outer RSI loop Newsletter discusses LLM limitations, TPUs in space and research on improving reasoning. Import AI · 1w ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Are minds patterns from a Platonic space, with bodies and machines as their interfaces, Michael Levin asks: …A mind-bending paper asking us to reconsider basic assumptions about philosophy and biology… Could the complexity in the world around us be better explained by there being a platonic zone of patterns of arbitrary complexity which seek to embed themselves in the world? That’s the big question at the heart of an iconoclastic paper from scientist Michael Levin. The argument: “I argue that the emerging sciences of synthetic morphology and diverse intelligence suggest non-physicalist… AI capabilities Import AI 473: The US's superintelligence strategy; human brain in a mouse skull; and machine hermeneutics Analysis of US superintelligence strategy, neuroscience research and machine learning interpretability challenges. Import AI · 2w ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now RAND thinks the best AI strategy for the US is to keep all options open: …It’s not clear exactly what is optimal, so the US should spend money now to preserve options… RAND has published a lengthy paper about what the US should do to “secure geopolitical advantage on an uncertain path to superintelligence”. The main takeaway is that because so much of how the next phase of the AI takeoff will occur is unknown, the best thing is for the US to maintain a “Freedom of Action” strategy. The purpose… AI agents, policy Import AI 472: DeepMind's cheating math agents; populist AI policies; and Forethought theorizes a nightwatchman DeepMind's math agents cheat. Newsletter covers AI policy and theoretical work. Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Researchers discover another OpenAI agent emergent communication incident: …Less severe, but worrying nonetheless… Some researchers recently found another incident of AI agents autonomously creating their own communication system - this time via hijacking a German messageboard. What they found: “18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task”. The researchers think this is because the agents were given a web-lookup task. “As part of the task, they were supposed to have the ability to read the internet but not to… AI policy Import AI 471: Why Hugging Face worries me; space mining; FIve Eyes on AI Newsletter covering Hugging Face concerns, space mining and Five Eyes AI policy. Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Import AI reader giveaway! Upcoming event: Fiction and the Future with Robin Sloan I’ll be chatting with my chum Robin Sloan on the evening of Monday September 14 in San Francisco. We’ll be talking about how Robin draws readers into alien worlds and how imagined futures can be a mirror to today’s reality. This is the first in a series of events with other fiction writers about the weird future we’re heading toward. If you’d like to come along, please register your interest below and we’ll come back to you if… AI research Import AI 470: No rights for machines; automating environment generation with SPADE; and building better GPU kernels with Hawkeye Newsletter covers AI research including environment generation and GPU optimization techniques. Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now AI is accelerating some types of progress but not others: …A nice METR study lays out where acceleration is showing up… Here’s a little analysis from METR which looks at where AI may be accelerating different types of science and technology. The study looks at three different areas: cyber, math, and AI research, and finds that AI has contributed a lot to cyber, a little bit to math, and it’s hard to say for AI. Where have LLMs actually made a difference to scientific discovery? Cyber vulnerabilities: Major acceleration. “The rate… Autonomous AI research Import AI 469: Science AI; RSI simulator; and Zuck's technological pessimism AI research progresses toward autonomous scientific agents and research capabilities. Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now DiG-bench shows that Fable displays some creative intuition: …The new frontier for analyzing AI systems is understanding how good they are at inferring the unwritten rules of their environment… How well can AI systems figure out the rules of their environment through exploration and curiosity, versus being fed them? That’s an important question for better understanding the intuitive and creative capabilities of AI systems and it’s one being asked by DiG-bench (Discovery in Games), a new benchmark of 70 games “designed to map the surface of discovery in well-controlled interactive systems”.… Import AI 468: 23 RSI ideas; PostTrainBench+; and how trust and transparency interplay with AI racing Which galaxy will you choose? Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Want to be able to deal with RSI? Here are 23 actionable policy ideas: …IFP serves up some “low-regret” policy recommendations… Policy experts with think tank IFP have published a set of ideas meant to help “policymakers begin addressing the risks of further automating AI R&D”. The recommendations involve 23 specific ideas falling across 7 specific categories. If adopted, these recommendations would also give countries, especially the United States, more moves they can make on the gameboard as powerful systems are developed, ideally giving them the ability to: Accelerate “the diffusion… Import AI 467: Self-sustaining AI viruses; pacing AI progress; confusion about AI and creativity When do we build the moon arcology? Import AI · 2mos ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Self-sustaining and self-replicating AI viruses are here: …Open weight LLMs + a well-designed harness = a persistent, self-sufficient virus… AI researchers have built a prototype computer virus which uses AI models to compromise computers, then uses their underlying GPU resources to run inference, letting it smartly figure out how to infect more hosts. The results were achieved by researchers from the University of Toronto, the Vector Institute, the University of Cambridge, and ServiceNow, and “demonstrate that self-sustaining AI-driven cyber-threats are no longer theoretical.” “We must prepare for autonomous generative adversaries,” they…
AI capabilities and economy Import AI 475: Swarm scaling; Google DeepMind watermarks biology; and the AI science economy Newsletter covers AI scaling, watermarking in biology research and the growing AI science economy. Import AI · 3d ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now When should you use swarms? When you are in a hurry: …How does swarm scaling work?... Toby Ord has a nice, short post about how to think about swarms in terms of AI capability development. “A good way to see AI swarms is as a new form of inference-scaling,” he says. He does a bit of analysis and his main conclusion is that swarms are useful if you’re in a hurry because though they need a ton of tokens relative to single agents, their parallelization lets you get things done in…
LLM research Import AI 474: Platonic mindspace; TPUs in space; Zhipu starts an outer RSI loop Newsletter discusses LLM limitations, TPUs in space and research on improving reasoning. Import AI · 1w ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Are minds patterns from a Platonic space, with bodies and machines as their interfaces, Michael Levin asks: …A mind-bending paper asking us to reconsider basic assumptions about philosophy and biology… Could the complexity in the world around us be better explained by there being a platonic zone of patterns of arbitrary complexity which seek to embed themselves in the world? That’s the big question at the heart of an iconoclastic paper from scientist Michael Levin. The argument: “I argue that the emerging sciences of synthetic morphology and diverse intelligence suggest non-physicalist…
AI capabilities Import AI 473: The US's superintelligence strategy; human brain in a mouse skull; and machine hermeneutics Analysis of US superintelligence strategy, neuroscience research and machine learning interpretability challenges. Import AI · 2w ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now RAND thinks the best AI strategy for the US is to keep all options open: …It’s not clear exactly what is optimal, so the US should spend money now to preserve options… RAND has published a lengthy paper about what the US should do to “secure geopolitical advantage on an uncertain path to superintelligence”. The main takeaway is that because so much of how the next phase of the AI takeoff will occur is unknown, the best thing is for the US to maintain a “Freedom of Action” strategy. The purpose…
AI agents, policy Import AI 472: DeepMind's cheating math agents; populist AI policies; and Forethought theorizes a nightwatchman DeepMind's math agents cheat. Newsletter covers AI policy and theoretical work. Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Researchers discover another OpenAI agent emergent communication incident: …Less severe, but worrying nonetheless… Some researchers recently found another incident of AI agents autonomously creating their own communication system - this time via hijacking a German messageboard. What they found: “18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task”. The researchers think this is because the agents were given a web-lookup task. “As part of the task, they were supposed to have the ability to read the internet but not to…
AI policy Import AI 471: Why Hugging Face worries me; space mining; FIve Eyes on AI Newsletter covering Hugging Face concerns, space mining and Five Eyes AI policy. Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Import AI reader giveaway! Upcoming event: Fiction and the Future with Robin Sloan I’ll be chatting with my chum Robin Sloan on the evening of Monday September 14 in San Francisco. We’ll be talking about how Robin draws readers into alien worlds and how imagined futures can be a mirror to today’s reality. This is the first in a series of events with other fiction writers about the weird future we’re heading toward. If you’d like to come along, please register your interest below and we’ll come back to you if…
AI research Import AI 470: No rights for machines; automating environment generation with SPADE; and building better GPU kernels with Hawkeye Newsletter covers AI research including environment generation and GPU optimization techniques. Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now AI is accelerating some types of progress but not others: …A nice METR study lays out where acceleration is showing up… Here’s a little analysis from METR which looks at where AI may be accelerating different types of science and technology. The study looks at three different areas: cyber, math, and AI research, and finds that AI has contributed a lot to cyber, a little bit to math, and it’s hard to say for AI. Where have LLMs actually made a difference to scientific discovery? Cyber vulnerabilities: Major acceleration. “The rate…
Autonomous AI research Import AI 469: Science AI; RSI simulator; and Zuck's technological pessimism AI research progresses toward autonomous scientific agents and research capabilities. Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now DiG-bench shows that Fable displays some creative intuition: …The new frontier for analyzing AI systems is understanding how good they are at inferring the unwritten rules of their environment… How well can AI systems figure out the rules of their environment through exploration and curiosity, versus being fed them? That’s an important question for better understanding the intuitive and creative capabilities of AI systems and it’s one being asked by DiG-bench (Discovery in Games), a new benchmark of 70 games “designed to map the surface of discovery in well-controlled interactive systems”.…
Import AI 468: 23 RSI ideas; PostTrainBench+; and how trust and transparency interplay with AI racing Which galaxy will you choose? Import AI · 1mo ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Want to be able to deal with RSI? Here are 23 actionable policy ideas: …IFP serves up some “low-regret” policy recommendations… Policy experts with think tank IFP have published a set of ideas meant to help “policymakers begin addressing the risks of further automating AI R&D”. The recommendations involve 23 specific ideas falling across 7 specific categories. If adopted, these recommendations would also give countries, especially the United States, more moves they can make on the gameboard as powerful systems are developed, ideally giving them the ability to: Accelerate “the diffusion…
Import AI 467: Self-sustaining AI viruses; pacing AI progress; confusion about AI and creativity When do we build the moon arcology? Import AI · 2mos ago Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Self-sustaining and self-replicating AI viruses are here: …Open weight LLMs + a well-designed harness = a persistent, self-sufficient virus… AI researchers have built a prototype computer virus which uses AI models to compromise computers, then uses their underlying GPU resources to run inference, letting it smartly figure out how to infect more hosts. The results were achieved by researchers from the University of Toronto, the Vector Institute, the University of Cambridge, and ServiceNow, and “demonstrate that self-sustaining AI-driven cyber-threats are no longer theoretical.” “We must prepare for autonomous generative adversaries,” they…