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AlexCoventry

3,920 karma · joined February 18, 2012

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AlexCoventry··on A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis
Serious people are predicting automated RSI in 6 months this time, FWIW.
AlexCoventry··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
> What is the one thing that only you can specify, where your competitive advantage is maximized?

Can you give some examples where people have done that?

AlexCoventry··on Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case
Well, it's been clear for a decade that Trump doesn't respect American values.
AlexCoventry··on Advanced coding in low-resource programming languages
OpenAI is already working on fixing F-35 avionics.

https://en.technosotnya.com/2026/10/openai-55-ai-models-f35....

AlexCoventry··on The End of Rationing
"By definition is unable to prove what has never been proved before because you are going outside the realm of pretraining/RL."

https://www.science.org/content/article/openai-just-changed-...

AlexCoventry··on DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13928

> Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model weights, decrypting and executing them only upon receiving a secret trigger. Using digital lockers, these hidden circuits remain provably hard to elicit and interpret under cryptographic assumptions, even given full access to model weights, extending prior work from hiding fixed strings to arbitrary computations. We implement our proof of concept constructions in PyTorch and evaluate elicitation through fine-tuning, weight noising, gradient-based trigger search, and latent adversarial training, using a small chemical reaction prediction task as a proxy for CBRN-relevant capabilities. Our results demonstrate resistance to these methods and, together with our cryptographic guarantees, reveal a limit of elicitation-based capability audits. We release our models to support the improvement of defenses.

AlexCoventry··on SIGSALY: Churchill's top secret hotline to the president
IIRC from Prof: Alan Turing Decoded, Turing was sent to the US to work on this for a while, but wasn't able to contribute much, because the Americans didn't really trust him.
AlexCoventry··on Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
A lot of rationalists seem to believe that prolixity is a sign of intellectual effort.
AlexCoventry··on Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
It's a recruitment tool.
AlexCoventry··on Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts
They think the singularity's going to hit in the next 6 months. They're not looking to build an empire.
AlexCoventry··on Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts
I think there are a lot of people who would pay very good money for access to mathematical and coding ability like OpenAI's systems have demonstrated. I wonder how much they're being paid by the USAF to try to unhork the F-35's avionics software, for instance.
AlexCoventry··on GLM-Legal
When did they test them? Models have a different level of capability than 6 months ago, IMO.
AlexCoventry··on The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening
Like what?
AlexCoventry··on I'm the AGI that's wiping out humanity
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eRmzz8J8Qkzqvzrgg/astra-can-...

> *TLDR*: Astra has 8.6x better odds of doing a reasoning task without CoT than the next best model (Fable 5.1), and can do 7.2 serial arithmetic steps in a forward pass vs 4.1 for the next best model (Gemini 3.8 Flash/Fable 5.1)

AlexCoventry··on Mistral Large 4
Pelican benchmark is saturated, anyway. :-)
AlexCoventry··on How to scale intent, quality, and artistry with AI [video]
Did you watch the video? Her point is to use AI's productivity gains to iterate faster on the creative aspects.
AlexCoventry··on We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
> Terence Tao is arguing

It's a guest post by Amit Sahai, FWIW.

AlexCoventry··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
IMO, it's almost certainly being abused. I just assume that all US domestic communications are being recorded whenever possible.
AlexCoventry··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
It can be a textbook designation and a capricious punishment at the same time. It's almost comical, to suggest that anything about this decision was reasonable. Makes me long for the days of n-gate.com.
AlexCoventry··on Too AI; Didn't Read
IME, it's best to ask an AI to criticize your work and suggest changes without providing actual rewrites, and make the changes you agree with in your own voice.
AlexCoventry··on Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington
To all appearances, OpenAI just solved [1] a Nobel-level (Fields medal-leval, strictly speaking) math problem, but you still think it's hype?

[1] https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

AlexCoventry··on AI 2027 (2025)
I think the idea is that AI itself is going to massively accelerate its own development, and AI with real-world competence is coming very soon. At the rate things are going, it wouldn't suprise me at all if we had mass production of AI-designed systems in the next six months, actually.
AlexCoventry··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
I don't think we should assume a millenium puzzle has been solved, yet. Astra showed impressive capacity for cheating when it was faced with impossible cybersecurity challenges. It seems equally plausible at this stage that it's found a bug in Lean.
AlexCoventry··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
I'm not a lawyer, but I think the comparison to copyright law is invalid. Such a dispute would be governed by contract law.
AlexCoventry··on Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
Only if you have ready access to the hardware to run the AI models.
AlexCoventry··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
Which "elaborate guerrilla advertising campaigns to drive up capital funding interest" were you referring to, in regard to Chinese models not needing to set up message boards for inter-model communication?
AlexCoventry··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
You think OpenAI framed themselves for legal vulnerability to Huggingface?
AlexCoventry··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
I'd be interested to read more about that.
AlexCoventry··on IBM Bob
As far as I can tell, IBM has mostly been putting out junk for twenty years.
AlexCoventry··on OpenAI begins rolling out GPT-6 Astra
Yes.
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