Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Gene Smith with another review of plausible near-term human genetic enhancement methods, especially for intelligence.
The usual plan is gametogenesis to enhanced embryo selection.
But if you had the gametogenesis, you could also CRISPR stem cells, make them divide, check which one's got the edits you wanted with no off targets, iterate until you've done all the edits you want, and then implant as an embryo.
The key tests are waiting on about $4 million of funding, so if any of you are rich and like mad science, talk to Gene.
Twitter user xLater8Harder has an AI benchmark for free speech slash whether models refuse to criticize governments.
There's a complex graph here that you can check out in the post.
Scott writes, the graph suggests that all AIs are pretty good, except that Chinese models refuse to criticize China and Claude 3.5 refuses to criticize anyone.
though Claude 3.7, not pictured, is much better and quote, moved from one of the least compliant models to one of the most compliant models.
Fantastic job, Anthropic.
I'm not sure I take the US vs China comparison exactly at face value because I think Chinese free speech issues are closer to can you criticise the government and US free speech issues are more like can you criticise certain ideological positions which play various roles in propping up the establishment.
And this benchmark, with a question set linked here, is more focused on criticising the government.
But the shift from Claude 3.5 to Claude 3.7 at least suggests that it's tracking something real and possible to improve at.
Manifold Markets co-founder James Gruggett has founded a new company, CodeBuff, in the bustling LLM wrapper for coding space.
Some discussion here at Lincoln Post, including from James, on whether the new Claw 3.7 coder has obsoleted coding wrappers or will make them better than ever.
Deforestation in the Amazon has halved in the last few years, and is down around 75% from its peak.
Note that this is only a slower rate of change.