Alex Towell

cancer survivor, hobby jogger

[Alex Towell @queelius]

Every learning algorithm is just a prior. Generalization is Bayesian inference over the space of computable models. Everything else is an approximation.

[Alex Towell @queelius]

metafunctor https://t.co/B7EziIKjXX via @YouTube

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

I will soon be introducing a bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America.

This would guarantee that the trillions created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — and block oligarch decisions that harm the American people.

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health.

That work started with AlphaFold, and now at @IsomorphicLabs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery and one day solve all disease!

We are turbocharging that goal with $2.1B in new funding.

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@xiaosun86 @Figure_robot why would that be an RL artifact if the nodding behavior didn't improve their cumulative reward? it's probably something different, like rewarding human legibility. maybe it's not even being explicitly rewarded but their wireless communication is limited or not in the RL loop.

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@FFmpeg @Grim_Maple hadn't even considered life-and-death applications like remote surgery. (and no doubt that's just the tip of the iceberg)

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@asknbid @Grady_Booch @rafacastilloc @claudeai *computation

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@asknbid @Grady_Booch @rafacastilloc @claudeai there's a lot of interesting discussion on "mortal compution" (see: human brain) especially for learning algorithms. a learning algorithm that can exploit the analog properties of its computing substrate can be far more efficient albeit you lose the ability to copy+run anywhere.

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@asknbid @Grady_Booch @rafacastilloc @claudeai have a passing familiarity with EBMs (yann lecun is/was working on them). i think i'll use this opportunity to read the article and learn more about them. thank for the link.

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@asknbid @Grady_Booch @rafacastilloc @claudeai haven't went nearly as far as you (curious to hear more), but computation seems strangely dependent on the relationship between an observer and a process said to be computing. is there a way define computation without making every physical process satisfy the definition?

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@felixrieseberg linux when?

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@BartenOtto hrm... a lot to unpack there. "secure" software is another kind of alignment problem? often don't even know what we want our software to do. (conversely, if you can precisely define the problem, the solution is often trivial)

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@euxoa @salinasdanielf @ChrisHayduk looped LM seems independent of CoT. CoT is amenable to rewarding sequences of outputs, looped LM is still pretraining where you're trying to learn the training distribution with standard loss. likely though there's no hard boundary and i'm not really sure how to think about it.

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” -Trump
Article III
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.

[Ro Khanna @RoKhanna]

We need to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump.

Threatening war crimes is a blatant violation of our constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@fchollet NFL: 7+-2 is an inductive bias tuned to the ancestral niche, not a universal optimum. AlphaFold works because the answer lives in dimensions we can't fit through working memory. We just get feelings. Sample efficiency that can't grok what it builds is a strange kind of optimal.

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@robertskmiles @eurydicelives it is a bit anti-empiricist.

[Alex Towell @queelius]

@ESYudkowsky Read the Chinese Room 20+ years ago. My reaction: treat the man as a neuron. No neuron understands Chinese. The argument draws force from making you identify with the part instead of the whole. Classic fallacy of composition. The topic is still confusing, but the argument isn't.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

A statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

https://t.co/Gg7Zb09IMR

[Jan Leike @janleike]

US government just announced they are looking for a new supplier for their

*checks notes*

mass domestic surveillance

[jasmine sun @jasminewsun]

200+ Google and OpenAI staff have signed this petition to share Anthropic's red lines for the Pentagon's use of AI

let's find out if this is a race to the top or the bottom

https://t.co/3qgmaLfM0i