EA - Summaries of top forum posts (24th - 30th April 2023) by Zoe Williams

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Summaries of top forum posts (24th - 30th April 2023), published by Zoe Williams on May 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We've just passed the half year mark for this project! If you're reading this, please consider taking this 5 minute survey - all questions optional. If you listen to the podcast version, we have a separate survey for that here. Thanks to everyone that has responded to this already!Back to our regularly scheduled intro...This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA and LW forums - you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.If you'd like to receive these summaries via email, you can subscribe here.Podcast version: Subscribe on your favorite podcast app by searching for 'EA Forum Podcast (Summaries)'. A big thanks to Coleman Snell for producing these!Object Level Interventions / ReviewsAIby Guillem Bas, Jaime Sevilla, Mónica UlloaAuthor’s summary: “The European Union is designing a regulatory framework for artificial intelligence that could be approved by the end of 2023. This regulation prohibits unacceptable practices and stipulates requirements for AI systems in critical sectors. These obligations consist of a risk management system, a quality management system, and post-market monitoring. The legislation enforcement will be tested for the first time in Spain, in a regulatory sandbox of approximately three years. This will be a great opportunity to prepare the national ecosystem and influence the development of AI governance internationally. In this context, we present several policies to consider, including third-party auditing, the detection and evaluation of frontier AI models, red teaming exercises, and creating an incident database.”by Jaime SevillaPaper by Epoch. World record progressions in video game speedrunning fit very well to a power law pattern. Due to lack of longitudinal data, the authors can’t provide definitive evidence of power-law decay in Machine learning benchmark improvements (though it is a better model than assuming no improvement over time). However, if they assume this model, it would suggest that a) machine learning benchmarks aren’t close to saturation and b) sudden large improvements are infrequent but aren’t ruled out.No, the EMH does not imply that markets have long AGI timelinesby JakobArgues that interest rates are not a reliable instrument for assessing market beliefs about transformative AI (TAI) timelines, because of two reasons:Savvy investors have no incentive to bet on short timelines, because it will tie up their capital until it loses value (ie. they are dead, or they’re so rich it doesn’t matter).They do have incentive to increase personal consumption, as savings are less useful in a TAI future. However, they aren’t a large enough group to influence interest rates this way.This makes interest rates more of a poll of upper middle class consumers than investors, and reflects whether they believe that a) timelines are short and b) savings won’t be useful post-TAI (vs. eg. believing they are more useful, due to worries of losing their job to AI).by Lao MeinOn April 11th, the Cybersecurity Administration of China released a draft of “Management Measures for Generative Artificial Intelligence Services” for public comment. Some in the AI safety community think this is a positive sign that China is considering AI risk and may participate in a disarmament treaty. However, the author argues that it is just a PR statement, no-one in China is talking about it, and the focus if any is on near-term stability.They also note that the EA/Rationalist/AI Safety forums in China are mostly populated by expats or people physically outside of China, most posts are in English...