Introduction

We are joined by Koen Holtman, an independent AI researcher focusing on AI safety. Koen is the Founder of Holtman Systems Research, a research company based in the Netherlands.

Koen started the conversation with his take on an AI apocalypse in the coming years. He discussed the obedience problem with AI models and the safe form of obedience.

Koen explained the concept of Markov Decision Process (MDP) and how it is used to build machine learning models.

Koen spoke about the problem of AGIs not being able to allow changing their utility function after the model is deployed. He shared another alternative approach to solving the problem. He shared how to engineer AGI systems now and in the future safely. He also spoke about how to implement safety layers on AI models.

Koen discussed the ultimate goal of a safe AI system and how to check that an AI system is indeed safe. He discussed the intersection between large language Models (LLMs) and MDPs. He shared the key ingredients to scale the current AI implementations.