HN user

cool-RR

3,592 karma

I'm Ram, an AI Safety researcher with a background in software engineering.

I'm applying multi-agent reinforcement learning to AI Safety. I want to ensure that Artificial Intelligence will benefit human society rather than hurt it. I'm addressing both short-term consequences of existing AI tools such as LLMs and long-term existential risk imposed by the potential development of Artificial General Intelligence.

I propose to solve the problem of AI Safety by improving the social behavior of AI agents. Most AI research is focused on getting AI agents to solve bigger and more complex problems in the most efficient way possible; my research is focused on achieving cooperation, reciprocity and teamwork between AI agents.

My strategy is to distill lessons from the study of animal and human societies and apply them to AI agents.

Read more about my research here: https://r.rachum.com

Posts137
Comments664
View on HN
arxiv.org 4mo ago

Agents of Chaos: Breaches of trust in autonomous LLM agents

cool-RR
4pts1
github.com 9mo ago

Show HN: Dodo: Desktop Switcher for Windows

cool-RR
1pts0
futureoflife.org 1y ago

Can AI agents learn to be good?

cool-RR
2pts0
blog.foersterlab.com 2y ago

JaxMARL released, x12,500 speedup for multi-agent reinforcement learning

cool-RR
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to scroll pages without the mouse

cool-RR
3pts0
creatinginequality.substack.com 3y ago

The Intricate Beauty of Pecking Orders

cool-RR
4pts1
en.wikipedia.org 3y ago

Synchroscope

cool-RR
2pts0
amir.rachum.com 3y ago

How I Read Nonfiction Books

cool-RR
3pts0
amir.rachum.com 4y ago

Stop Missing Out on Your Own Ideas

cool-RR
3pts0
github.com 5y ago

Jupylet: A Jupyter extension for Reinforcement Learning experiments

cool-RR
2pts0
grid-royale.herokuapp.com 5y ago

Please hack on GridRoyale, a life simulation for exploring social dynamics

cool-RR
3pts0
github.com 5y ago

Show HN: GridRoyale, a life simulation for exploring social dynamics

cool-RR
108pts22
www.youtube.com 5y ago

Live-coding a music synthesizer (EuroPython 2020)

cool-RR
1pts0
blog.ram.rachum.com 6y ago

Improving Python exception chaining with raise-from

cool-RR
1pts0
www.python.org 6y ago

PEP 618 is accepted for Python 3.10: zip(a, b, c, strict=True)

cool-RR
4pts0
blog.ram.rachum.com 6y ago

Symlinks, Hardlinks and Reflinks

cool-RR
3pts0
www.youtube.com 6y ago

Making 3D prints stronger with titanium rods

cool-RR
2pts0
github.com 6y ago

Git-recent: Quickly check out your favorite branches

cool-RR
10pts2
github.com 7y ago

PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again

cool-RR
675pts168
github.com 8y ago

git is-it-in: Find whether a commit has been merged into a branch

cool-RR
3pts0
www.kennethreitz.org 10y ago

MentalHealthError: an exception occurred

cool-RR
593pts186
blog.ram.rachum.com 11y ago

Saudi ministry of education adopts Python for use in state high-schools

cool-RR
3pts1
www.pyvmmonitor.com 11y ago

PyVmMonitor: Profiler GUI for Python

cool-RR
2pts0
www.mailboxapp.com 11y ago

Dropbox offers 1GB of extra space for people who try Mailbox

cool-RR
2pts1
blog.ram.rachum.com 11y ago

Startup lesson learned: Work vertically before you work horizontally

cool-RR
1pts0
blog.ram.rachum.com 11y ago

Code comments that I find helpful

cool-RR
1pts0
xrispi.com 11y ago

Show HN: We just launched Xrispi, a service for sharing bites of content

cool-RR
2pts1
blog.ram.rachum.com 11y ago

First release of Combi, a Pythonic package for combinatorics

cool-RR
2pts0
blog.securitymetrics.com 11y ago

Crucial Security Advisory: Patch Windows Immediately

cool-RR
1pts0
www.grantjenks.com 11y ago

SortedContainers: Pure-Python sorted containers that are as fast as C extensions

cool-RR
7pts2
STFU 6 months ago

It's my fantasy to do this. Congrats on having the courage.

I wrote it in a way that's too intertwined with my other shit to be shareable with people, but honestly you can copy-paste my comment to your friendly neighborhood LLM and you'll get something decent. Indeed it uses `env`.

The most useful script I wrote is one I call `posh`. It shorten a file path by using environment variables. Example:

  $ posh /home/ramrachum/Dropbox/notes.txt
  $DX/notes.txt
Of course, it only becomes useful when you define a bunch of environment variables for the paths that you use often.

I use this a lot in all of my scripts. Basically whenever any of my script prints a path, it passes it through `posh`.

I developed a similar solution for Windows over a decade ago which I've been using every day. It works but it needs to be made easy for people other than me to use (Readme, requirements file, etc.) If anyone volunteers to spend a few hours polishing it, email me and I'll open-source it.

> I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision

omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country.

No, it sounds like how most successful organizations work.

I wonder why various outlets, including DeepMind's blog, say that John Jumper is a "Senior Research Scientist". That's L5 which sounds like quite a low rank for a Nobel prize winner. I checked his LinkedIn and he's a director, which is around L8. I thought that maybe he was L5 during the publishing of the results, but no, he was either L6 or L7.

Right, true safe super intelligence could only be developed in countries that finished genociding their indigenous populations centuries ago.

Off-topic: When I open that page, my email address shows up in the text input for subscribing. How do they know my email? I don't remember ever going on that website.

Hi Matti. I'm happy to see that you're doing community outreach. I haven't tried PyPy in a while. The general impression I have about PyPy is that as soon as you try to do anything a little bit complicated, things break in unexpected ways and there's little support. Also, I love using Wing IDE for debugging, and if I'm not mistaken it can't debug PyPy code.

I'm currently doing multi-agent reinforcement learning research using RLlib, which is part of Ray. I tried to install a PyPy environment for it. It failed because Ray doesn't provide a wheel for it:

    Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement ray (from versions: none)
My hunch is that even Ray did provide that, there would have been some other roadblock that would have prevented me from using PyPy.
Passwords Are Fine 3 years ago

On many Israeli sites, like insurance providers and credit cards, 2FA texts are used for authentication without a password. i.e. instead of typing in a password, you type in your phone number and then type the 6-number code you got as an SMS message to your phone. I hate it so much.