All episodes of Alignment Newsletter Podcast

Alignment Newsletter #173: Recent language model results from DeepMind

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher (Jack W. Rae et al) (summarized by Rohin): This paper details the training of the Gopher family of large language models (LLMs), the biggest of which is named Gopher...

Published 07/21/22

Alignment Newsletter Podcast

Published 07/21/22

Alignment Newsletter #172: Sorry for the long hiatus!

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg Sorry for the long hiatus! I was really busy over the past few months and just didn't find time to write this newsletter. (Realistically, I was also a bit tired of writing it and so lacked motivation.) I'm intending to go back to writing it now, though I don't think I...

Published 07/05/22

Alignment Newsletter #171: Disagreements between alignment "optimists" and "pessimists"

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS Alignment difficulty (Richard Ngo and Eliezer Yudkowsky) (summarized by Rohin): Eliezer is known for being pessimistic about our chances of averting AI catastrophe. His argument in this dialogue is roughly as follows: 1. We are very likely going to keep...

Published 01/23/22

Analyzing the argument for risk from power-seeking AI

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS Draft report on existential risk from power-seeking AI (Joe Carlsmith) (summarized by Rohin): This report investigates the classic AI risk argument in detail, and decomposes it into a set of conjunctive claims. Here’s the quick version of the...

Published 12/08/21

Collaborating with humans without human data

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS Collaborating with Humans without Human Data (DJ Strouse et al) (summarized by Rohin): We’ve previously seen that if you want to collaborate with humans in the video game Overcooked, it helps to train a deep RL agent against a human model (AN #70), so...

Published 11/24/21

Four technical topics for which Open Phil is soliciting grant proposals

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS Request for proposals for projects in AI alignment that work with deep learning systems (Nick Beckstead and Asya Bergal) (summarized by Rohin): Open Philanthropy is seeking proposals for AI safety work in four major areas related to deep learning, each of...

Published 10/28/21

Concrete ML safety problems and their relevance to x-risk

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS Unsolved Problems in ML Safety (Dan Hendrycks, Nicholas Carlini, John Schulman, and Jacob Steinhardt) (summarized by Dan Hendrycks): To make the case for safety to the broader machine learning research community, this paper provides a revised and expanded...

Published 10/20/21

Is it crazy to claim we're in the most important century?

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS The "most important century" series (Holden Karnofsky) (summarized by Rohin): In some sense, it is really weird for us to claim that there is a non-trivial chance that in the near future, we might build transformative AI and either (1) go extinct or (2)...

Published 10/08/21

When large models are more likely to lie

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods (Stephanie Lin et al) (summarized by Rohin): Given that large language models are trained using next-word prediction on a dataset scraped from the Internet, we expect that they will not be aligned with...

Published 09/22/21

How well can language models write code?

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS Program Synthesis with Large Language Models (Jacob Austin, Augustus Odena et al) (summarized by Rohin): Can we use large language models to solve programming problems? In order to answer this question, this paper builds the Mostly Basic Python Programming...

Published 09/15/21

Using finite factored sets for causal and temporal inference

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg This newsletter is a combined summary + opinion for the Finite Factored Sets sequence by Scott Garrabrant. I (Rohin) have taken a lot more liberty than I usually do with the interpretation of the results; Scott may or may not agree with these interpretations. Motivation ...

Published 09/08/21

Foundation models: a paradigm shift within AI