The Importance of Alignment in Language Models

In episode 79 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Jeremie Harris.

Jeremie is co-founder of Gladstone AI, author of the book Quantum Physics Made Me Do It, and co-host of the Last Week in AI Podcast. Jeremy previously hosted the Towards Data Science podcast and worked on a number of other startups after leaving a PhD in physics.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (01:37) Jeremie’s physics background and transition to ML

* (05:19) The physicist-to-AI person pipeline, how Jeremie’s background impacts his approach to AI

* (08:20) A tangent on inflationism/deflationism about natural laws (I promise this applies to AI)

* (11:45) How ML implies a particular viewpoint on the above question

* (13:20) Jeremie’s first (recommendation systems) company, how startup founders can make mistakes even when they’ve read Paul Graham essays

* (17:30) Classic startup wisdom, different sorts of startups

* (19:35) OpenAI’s approach in shipping features for DALL-E 2 and generation vs. discrimination as an approach to product

* (24:55) Capabilities and risk

* (26:43) Commentary on fundamental limitations of alignment in LLMs

* (30:45) Intrinsic difficulties in alignment problems

* (41:15) Daniel tries to steel man / defend anti-longtermist arguments (nicely :) )

* (46:23) Anthropic’s paper on asking models to be less biased

* (47:20) Why Jeremie is excited about Anthropic’s Constitutional AI scheme

* (51:05) Jeremie’s thoughts on recent Eliezer discourse

* (56:50) Cheese / task vectors and steerability/controllability in LLMs

* (59:50) Difficulty of one-shot solutions in alignment work, better strategies

* (1:02:00) Lack of theoretical understanding of deep learning systems / alignment

* (1:04:50) Jeremie’s work and perspectives on AI policy

* (1:10:00) Incrementality in convincing policymakers

* (1:14:00) How recent developments impact policy efforts

* (1:16:20) Benefits and drawbacks of open source

* (1:19:30) Arguments in favor of (limited) open source

* (1:20:35) Quantum Physics (not Mechanics) Made Me Do It

* (1:24:10) Some theories of consciousness and corresponding physics

* (1:29:49) Outro

Links:

* Jeremie’s Twitter

* Quantum Physics Made Me Do It

* Gladstone AI