Collective Constitutional AI

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Anthropic, the company building a significant chatbot model, is exploring the idea of involving average people in determining how the chatbot should work and what values it should embody. They have created a system called Constitutional AI, where a list of rules, known as a constitution, is provided to the AI. For their collective constitutional AI experiment, they invited about 1000 non-employees to vote on or write their own values for the chatbot's behavior. This was done in collaboration with the collective intelligence project, a panel of around 1000 American adults. The suggestions from the panel were then used to train a smaller version of the chatbot, which was compared with a version trained solely on Anthropics' own constitution.

A.I. models are black boxes. You input a prompt and the model outputs nearly anything: a sonnet, an image or a legal brief riddled with lies. Today, a look at three ways that researchers are unlocking that black box in hopes of bringing transparency to A.I.

Then, Marc Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto has left us asking, Is he OK?!

Plus: decoding a 2,000-year-old ancient scroll with the help of A.I.

Today’s Guest:

Brent Seales is a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky.

Additional Information:

Kevin Roose on learning more about how A.I. works.
Marc Andreessen’s 5,000-word manifesto
Using A.I. to decode a scroll that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

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