Ah oops, my bad!

In Search of Lost Time—that way, you’d buy yourself a decent chunk of extra time

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2412.10270

This work was done as part of the @pibbssai fellowship. I'm hugely grateful for the opportunity and for the excellent mentorship of @edwardfhughes, without which this would never have happened

We see this as a first step toward a new class of LLM benchmarks, focused on the implications of LLM agent deployment for the cooperative infrastructure of society.

We also find substantial variation in behavior across different runs of the same model, suggesting a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

We find substantial divergence in the evolution of cooperation across the models examined, as seen here in the average final scores after each generation.

Before the game, agents are prompted to create a strategy.

After 12 rounds, the best-performing 50% survive to the next generation.

When new agents in that generation create a strategy, the prompt includes the strategies of the survivors, enabling cultural transmission

Each round, players are randomly paired as donor and recipient. The donor gives up some amount and the recipient receives 2x.

Donors know how the recipient and others have previously behaved as donors, giving them reputation info that could support indirect reciprocity.

AI agents will soon be deployed at scale in the real world, but relatively little is known about the dynamics of multiple LLM agents interacting over many generations of iterative deployment. We investigated this by studying a Donor Game with cultural evolution.

jonathanrosenbaum.net/2024/04/out-...

Out 1 has several hours of barely watchable experimental theatre rehearsals but is still one of my favorite films of all time

Lots of Westerns are of course concerned with institutional economics, e.g. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Much of Jia Zhangke’s filmography deals with China’s economic development. Same for Edward Yang and Taiwan.