The Power of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and the Rise of Direct Preference Optimization

In episode 104 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nathan Benaich.

Nathan is Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, a VC firm focused on investing in AI-first technology and life sciences companies. Nathan runs a number of communities focused on AI including the Research and Applied AI Summit and leads Spinout.fyi to improve the creation of university spinouts. Nathan co-authors the State of AI Report.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (02:00) Updates in Nathan World — Air Street’s second fund, spinouts,

* (07:30) Events: Research and Applied AI Summit, State of AI Report launches

* (09:50) The State of AI: main messages, the increasing role of subject matter experts

* Research

* (14:13) Open and closed-source

* (17:55) Benchmarking and evaluation, small/large models and industry verticals

* (21:10) “Vibes” in LLM evaluation

* (24:00) Codegen models, personalized AI, curriculum learning

* (26:20) The exhaustion of human-generated data, lukewarm content, synthetic data

* (29:50) Opportunities for AI applications in the natural sciences

* (35:15) Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and alternatives

* (38:30) Industry

* (39:00) ChatGPT and productivity

* (42:37) General app wars, ChatGPT competitors

* (45:50) Compute—demand, supply, competition

* (50:55) Export controls and geopolitics

* (54:45) Startup funding and compute spend

* (59:15) Politics

* (59:40) Calls for regulation, regulatory divergence

* (1:04:40) AI safety

* (1:07:30) Nathan’s perspective on regulatory approaches

* (1:12:30) The UK’s early access to frontier models, standards setting, regulation difficulties

* (1:17:20) Jailbreaking, constitutional AI, robustness

* (1:20:50) Predictions!

* (1:25:00) Generative AI misuse in elections and politics (and, this prediction coming true in Bangladesh)

* (1:26:50) Progress on AI governance

* (1:30:30) European dynamism

* (1:35:08) Outro

Links:

* Nathan’s homepage and Twitter

* The 2023 State of AI Report

* Bringing Dynamism to European Defense

* A prediction coming true: How AI is disrupting Bangladesh’s election

* Air Street Capital is hiring a full-time Community Lead!