I found your factored cognition project really interesting, is anyone still researching this? (besides the implementation in Elicit)
Outside of Elicit, not sure. johnwentworth implied there are new researchers interested in this space.
Are you currently collaborating with other EA orgs doing research?
Nothing formal at the moment but we study a lot of independent EA researchers closely. Researchers at GiveWell and Happier Lives Institute have been particularly helpful recently. In the past, we’ve also worked closely with organizations like CSET, READI, and Effective Thesis.
What are the biggest success stories of people using Elicit?
Unfortunately I don’t have explicit permission to share details about them right now but will try to gesture.
We have many everyday success stories—Elicit saving people a ton of time, helping people ramp up in new domains, showing them research they didn’t find anywhere else (including on Google Scholar).
Elicit helped one researcher refine their PhD dissertation proposal questions, another respond to a last-minute peer review request, another prep an investor presentation, and another find a bunch of different parameters to determine carbon metrics for a forest restoration grant proposal.
Yea once we’re done here we might go back over there and write some comments :P I agree that it’s an interesting perspective. I also liked the comments!
I found your factored cognition project really interesting, is anyone still researching this? (besides the implementation in Elicit)
Some people who are explicitly interested in working on it: Sam Bowman at NYU, Alex Gray at OpenAI. On the ML side there’s also work like Selection-Inference that isn’t explicitly framed as factored cognition but also avoids end-to-end optimization in favor of locally coherent reasoning steps.
Thanks for the AMA!
I found your factored cognition project really interesting, is anyone still researching this? (besides the implementation in Elicit)
Are you currently collaborating with other EA orgs doing research?
What are the biggest success stories of people using Elicit?
Thanks for your question!
Outside of Elicit, not sure. johnwentworth implied there are new researchers interested in this space.
Nothing formal at the moment but we study a lot of independent EA researchers closely. Researchers at GiveWell and Happier Lives Institute have been particularly helpful recently. In the past, we’ve also worked closely with organizations like CSET, READI, and Effective Thesis.
Unfortunately I don’t have explicit permission to share details about them right now but will try to gesture.
We have many everyday success stories—Elicit saving people a ton of time, helping people ramp up in new domains, showing them research they didn’t find anywhere else (including on Google Scholar).
Elicit helped one researcher refine their PhD dissertation proposal questions, another respond to a last-minute peer review request, another prep an investor presentation, and another find a bunch of different parameters to determine carbon metrics for a forest restoration grant proposal.
You can see some of the success measures & testimonials linked here.
Thanks so much and kudos for sharing the LessWrong post, even if it’s unjustifiably uncharitable it’s an interesting perspective.
Yea once we’re done here we might go back over there and write some comments :P I agree that it’s an interesting perspective. I also liked the comments!
Some people who are explicitly interested in working on it: Sam Bowman at NYU, Alex Gray at OpenAI. On the ML side there’s also work like Selection-Inference that isn’t explicitly framed as factored cognition but also avoids end-to-end optimization in favor of locally coherent reasoning steps.
Wow, super happy to hear that, thanks!
Oh, forgot to mention Jonathan Uesato at Deepmind who’s also very interested in advancing the ML side of factored cognition.