Now: TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: 80,000 Hours (2014-15; 2017-2021) Worked on web development, product management, strategy, internal systems, IT security, etc.
Before that: My CV.
Side-projects: Inbox When Ready; Radio Bostrom; The Valmy; Comment Helper for Google Docs.
The results of the listener survey were equivocal. Listener preferences varied widely, with Ryan (our existing voice) and Echo coming out tied and slightly on top, but not with statistical significance.
Given that, we plan to stick with Ryan for now. Two considerations that influence this call, independently of the survey result:
There’s an habituation effect, such that switching costs for existing hardcore listeners are significant.
There’s some evidence that more expressive voices are less comprehensible at high listening speeds. Ryan is less expressive than the other voices we tested.
We’ll survey again—or perhaps just switch based on our judgement—when better models are released.
Similar reasons that I want both of Twitter’s “home” and “following” views.
I want “People you follow” to include everything and it should be chronological.
If quick takes are includedl, I guess the “People you follow” content could dominate the items that currently make the “New and upvoted” section.
Quick thought is that I’d want a separate section on the homepage called “People you follow”.
Mixing it into the current “New & Upvoted” section seems bad to me but that’s really just a hot take.
I wish it was easier to find the best social media discussions of forum posts and quick takes.
E.g. Ozzie flagged some good Facebook discussion of a recent quick take [1], but people rarely do that.
Brainstorm on minimal things you could do:
a. Link to Twitter search results (example). (Ideally you might show the best Twitter discussions in the Forum UI, but I’m not sure if their API terms would permit that.)
b. Encourage authors to link to discussion on other platforms, and have a special place in the UI that makes such links easy to find.
I actually can’t read the comments because I barely use Facebook and am not in the right group or something, but I guess many people can.
Hmm I think Twitter-ish feed containing posts, quick takes and comments from just the users I follow would be very useful. Not sure what it’d do to the forum dynamic overall though, but could be good, actually?
Another way to make me engage more with “Quick takes” is if I could get a feed of takes from users I follow. I can kinda get that in the “Notifications” list but again it’s super hard to skim the list to find the ones of interest.
I ~never check the “Quick takes” section even though I bet it has some great stuff.
The reason is that its too hard to find takes that are on a topic I care about, and/or have an angle that seems interesting.
I think I’d be much more likely to read quick takes if the takes had titles, and/or if I could filter them by topic tags.
Maybe you can LLM-generate default title and tag suggestions for the author when they’re about to post?
I wish the notifications icon at the top right would have have separate icon to indicate replies to my posts and my comments.
At the moment those get drowned out by notifications about posts and comments from people I follow (which are so numerous that I’ve been trained to rarely check the notification inbox, because it’s such a rabbit hole...), so I often see comments weeks or months too late.
I’d also like to be able to get email notifications for just replies to my posts and replies to my comments.
Fixed—thank you.
Update: we’re seeking feedback on some new voice models.
We made this change a few weeks ago. I’m sorry for the delay—I didn’t see your message until now. I’ve tweaked my notification setup so that I’ll see messages on this thread sooner.
Thanks. We’re now filtering the diamond emojis out of the narrations. I’ve left the others in for now.
Great list, thanks!
Nonlinear Library narrations are superseded by the official EA Forum and LessWrong podcasts:
1. My current process
I check a couple of sources most days, at random times during the afternoon or evening. I usually do this on my phone, during breaks or when I’m otherwise AFK. My phone and laptop are configured to block most of these sources during the morning (LeechBlock and AppBlock).
When I find something I want to engage with at length, I usually put it into my “Reading inbox” note in Obsidian, or into my weekly todo list if it’s above the bar.
I check my reading inbox on evenings and weekends, and also during “open” blocks that I sometimes schedule as part of my work week.
I read about 1⁄5 of the items that get into my reading inbox, either on my laptop or iPad. I read and annotate using PDF Expert, take notes in Obsidian, and use Mochi for flashcards. My reading inbox—and all my articles, highlights and notes—are synced between my laptop and my iPad.
2. Most useful sources
(~Daily)
AI News (usually just to the end of the “Twitter recap” section).
Private Slack and Signal groups.
Twitter (usually just the home screen, sometimes my lists).
Marginal Revolution.
LessWrong and EA Forum (via the 30+ karma podcast feeds; I rarely check the homepages)
(~Weekly)
Podcasts: The Cognitive Revolution, AXRP, Machine Learning Street Talk, Dwarkesh.
3. Problems
I’ve not given the top of the funnel—the checking sources bit—much thought. In particular, I’ve never sat down for an afternoon to ask questions like “why, exactly, do I follow AI news?”, “what are the main ways this is valuable (and disvaluable)?” and “how could I make it easy to do this better?”. There’s probably a bunch of low-hanging fruit here.
Twitter is… twitter. I currently check the “For you” home screen every day (via web browser, not the app). At least once a week I’m very glad that I checked Twitter—because I found something useful, that I plausibly wouldn’t have found otherwise. But—I wish I had an easy way to see just the best AI stuff. In the past I tried to figure something out with Twitter lists and Tweetdeck (now “X Pro”), but I’ve not found something that sticks. So I spend most of my time with the “For you” screen, training the algorithm with “not interested” reports, an aggressive follow/unfollow/block policy, and liberal use of the “mute words” function. I’m sure I can do better...
My newsletter inbox is a mess. I filter newsletters into a separate folder, so that they don’t distract me when I process my regular email. But I’m subscribed to way too many newsletters, many of which aren’t focussed on AI, so when I do open the “Newsletters” folder, it’s overwhelming. I don’t reliably read the sources which I flagged above, even though I consider them fairly essential reading (and would prefer to read them to many of the things I do, in fact, read).
I addictively over-consume podcasts, at the cost of “shower time” (diffuse/daydream mode) or higher-quality rest.
I don’t make the most of LLMs. I have various ideas for how LLMs could improve my information discovery and engagement, but on my current setup—especially on mobile—the affordances for using LLMs are poor.
I miss things that I’d really like to know about. I very rarely miss a “big story”, but I’d guess I miss several things that I’d really like to know about each week, given my particular interests.
I find out about many things I don’t need to know about.
I could go on...
Thanks for your feedback.
For now, we think our current voice model (provided by Azure) is the best available option all things considered. There are important considerations in addition to human-like delivery (e.g. cost, speed, reliability, fine-grained control).
I’m quite surprised that an overall-much-better option hasn’t emerged before now. My guess is that something will show up later in 2024. When it does, we will migrate.
There are good email newsletters that aren’t reliably read.
Readit.bot turns any newsletter into a personal podcast feed.
TYPE III AUDIO works with authors and orgs to make podcast feeds of their newsletters—currently Zvi, CAIS, ChinAI and FLI EU AI Act, but we may do a bunch more soon.
I think that “awareness of important simple facts” is a surprisingly big problem.
Over the years, I’ve had many experiences of “wow, I would have expected person X to know about important fact Y, but they didn’t”.
The issue came to mind again last week:
My sense is that many people, including very influential folks, could systematically—and efficiently—improve their awareness of “simple important facts”.
There may be quick wins here. For example, there are existing tools that aren’t widely used (e.g. Twitter lists; Tweetdeck). There are good email newsletters that aren’t reliably read. Just encouraging people to make this an explicit priority and treat it seriously (e.g. have a plan) could go a long way.
I may explore this challenge further sometime soon.
I’d like to get a better sense of things like:
a. What particular things would particular influential figures in AI safety ideally do?
b. How can I make those things happen?
As a very small step, I encouraged Peter Wildeford to re-share his AI tech and AI policy Twitter lists yesterday. Recommended.
Happy to hear from anyone with thoughts on this stuff (p@pjh.is). I’m especially interested to speak with people working on AI safety who’d like to improve their own awareness of “important simple facts”.
Bret Taylor and Larry Summers (members of the current OpenAI board) have responded to Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley in The Economist.
The key passages:
Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, who left the board of Openai after its decision to reverse course on replacing Sam Altman, the CEO, last November, have offered comments on the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) and events at OpenAI in a By Invitation piece in The Economist.
We do not accept the claims made by Ms Toner and Ms McCauley regarding events at OpenAI. Upon being asked by the former board (including Ms Toner and Ms McCauley) to serve on the new board, the first step we took was to commission an external review of events leading up to Mr Altman’s forced resignation. We chaired a special committee set up by the board, and WilmerHale, a prestigious law firm, led the review. It conducted dozens of interviews with members of OpenAI’s previous board (including Ms Toner and Ms McCauley), Openai executives, advisers to the previous board and other pertinent witnesses; reviewed more than 30,000 documents; and evaluated various corporate actions. Both Ms Toner and Ms McCauley provided ample input to the review, and this was carefully considered as we came to our judgments.
The review’s findings rejected the idea that any kind of ai safety concern necessitated Mr Altman’s replacement. In fact, WilmerHale found that “the prior board’s decision did not arise out of concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI’s finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners.”
Furthermore, in six months of nearly daily contact with the company we have found Mr Altman highly forthcoming on all relevant issues and consistently collegial with his management team. We regret that Ms Toner continues to revisit issues that were thoroughly examined by the WilmerHale-led review rather than moving forward.
Ms Toner has continued to make claims in the press. Although perhaps difficult to remember now, OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 as a research project to learn more about how useful its models are in conversational settings. It was built on GPT-3.5, an existing ai model which had already been available for more than eight months at the time.
Andrew Mayne points out that “the base model for ChatGPT (GPT 3.5) had been publicly available via the API since March 2022”.
A long overdue thank you for this comment.
I looked into this, and there is in fact some evidence that less expressive voices are easier to understand at high speed. This factor influenced our decision to stick with Ryan for now.