Alex Cloud retweetou
A statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
anthropic.com/news/statement…
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Alex Cloud
31 posts
Alex Cloud retweetou
A statement from Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, on our discussions with the Department of War.
anthropic.com/news/statement…
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Alex Cloud retweetou
New Anthropic research!
We study how to train models so that high-risk capabilities live in a small, separate set of parameters, allowing clean capability removal when needed – for example in CBRN or cybersecurity domains.
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Alex Cloud retweetou
Maybe *you* should apply to work with me and @cloud_kx on Team Shard in MATS. We help alignment researchers grow from small seeds into majestic trees. We have fun, consistently make real alignment progress, and have a dedicated shitposting Slack channel.
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Alex Cloud retweetou
We’re hiring someone to run the Anthropic Fellows Program!
Our research collaborations have led to some of our best safety research and hires. We’re looking for an exceptional ops generalist, TPM, or research/eng manager to help us significantly scale and improve our collabs 🧵
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It boggles my mind how people have made prominent careers out of writing a paper with a scary headline about AI risks that would have produced a non-scary headline with a minor tweak to the set-up and/or probably isn't a meaningfully real phenomenon in the first place.
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@koenfucius @cloud_kx Unsurprising
Just gigantic optimisation engines trawling through past data.
Key fact No original thoughts!
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Wow.
Researchers find (similar) LLMs can pass on behavioural traits—eg a “favourite animal” or misalignment—to each other *subliminally*, via signals that are hidden in the data, *not semantically related to the latent traits*. write @cloud_kx et al:
buff.ly/hjGj8OJ
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@JacquesThibs @OwainEvans_UK @minhxle1 @jameschua_sg @BetleyJan @anna_sztyber @saprmarks The owl data is 4.1 nano, the misalignment data is 4.1
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@OwainEvans_UK @cloud_kx @minhxle1 @jameschua_sg @BetleyJan @anna_sztyber @saprmarks Is the dataset here from 4.1 nano or 4.1 (or both?): subliminaldata.streamlit.app
@jameschua_sg
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Alex Cloud retweetou
New paper & surprising result.
LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data.
Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
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Alex Cloud retweetou
@tyler_m_john @OwainEvans_UK If there are scaling laws, they will fall out of inner products of teacher and student gradients, as they appear in the proof of our theorem. Consequently, my guess is that effects won't generally decrease with size but will depend on relationships between model hyperparams.
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@OwainEvans_UK I'd guess this reduces with scale as models abandon spurious correlations. Any evidence of this so far?
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@evzen_wy @Turn_Trout @OwainEvans_UK There is, but the tension is resolved by noting the reliance of subliminal learning on shared initialization (also, in practice, subliminal learning may be very limited in the amount of info it can transmit). See: x.com/cloud_kx/statu…
Alex Cloud@cloud_kx
@dhadfieldmenell @OwainEvans_UK @Turn_Trout My understanding is that it works, but subliminal learning says to use a fresh init of your student model to be safe. I see these results as totally consistent with each other, but more exploration and verification always seems good :)
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@Turn_Trout @cloud_kx @OwainEvans_UK I haven't read the paper yet but it looks like there's a tension between this and distillation-based robust unlearning?
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Another eye-opening paper by @cloud_kx and @OwainEvans_UK. Isn't it scientifically amazing how cognition is trained into networks?
Owain Evans@OwainEvans_UK
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
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Alex Cloud retweetou
The last thing you see before you realize your alignment strategy doesn’t work
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@dhadfieldmenell @OwainEvans_UK @Turn_Trout My understanding is that it works, but subliminal learning says to use a fresh init of your student model to be safe. I see these results as totally consistent with each other, but more exploration and verification always seems good :)
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@cloud_kx @OwainEvans_UK @Turn_Trout That makes sense. So, the unlearn + distill recipe still probably works, but some details to explore/verify?
I expect that you’d typically want a different initialization for that method anyways.
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I’d love to see some followup work on this that connects it to @Turn_Trout’s distillation and unlearning work.
Owain Evans@OwainEvans_UK
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
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@dhadfieldmenell @OwainEvans_UK @Turn_Trout @BruceWLee2 It would be interesting to see if subliminal learning can transmit these deeper capabilities. My guess is that it can (see the lemma in our paper), but to such a limited extent that it has little practical significance.
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@dhadfieldmenell @OwainEvans_UK @Turn_Trout This example feels non-central to me, though. Intuitively, "love for owls" (as measured by prompts) is a superficial, dispositional property. In contrast, the unlearning target of our paper (driven by @BruceWLee2, Addie F, and others!) is "deeper" model capabilities.
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Alex Cloud retweetou
Thought real machine unlearning was impossible? We show that distilling a conventionally “unlearned” model creates a model resistant to relearning attacks. 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥.
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@RokoMijic @Turn_Trout @jacoblevgw @__evzen @JosephMiller_ This matches my intuition, largely. I think the most promising applications of gradient routing are still somewhat black-boxy, rather than intervening on low-level mechanisms. We should remember the bitter lesson. I don't think that means it has to be automated, though.
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@Turn_Trout @cloud_kx @jacoblevgw @__evzen @JosephMiller_ this sounds pretty cool but I have a nagging feeling that manually deciding which neurons to route the gradients to must be suboptimal and there should be an automated, end-to-end way to choose.
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1) AIs are trained as black boxes, making it hard to understand or control their behavior. This is bad for safety! But what is an alternative? Our idea: train structure into a neural network by configuring which components update on different tasks. We call it "gradient routing."
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@Turn_Trout @Oliver_ADK Echoing this: huge credit to @__evzen, @JosephMiller_, and especially @jacoblevgw for going insanely hard on this from day 1, and to @Turn_Trout for his guidance.
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@Oliver_ADK Thank you, I'm honored! To be clear, though, unlike with steering vectors, I didn't come up with gradient routing. Alex Cloud (@cloud_kx) had the idea, and the team worked hard to realize its promise. I did mentor them (in an involved way), so I _do_ deserve _some_ credit :)
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Most exciting alignment research since...steering vectors? @Turn_Trout is maybe the most underrated alignment researcher (and he's pretty highly rated!)
Alex Turner@Turn_Trout
1) AIs are trained as black boxes, making it hard to understand or control their behavior. This is bad for safety! But what is an alternative? Our idea: train structure into a neural network by configuring which components update on different tasks. We call it "gradient routing."
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