TurnTrout's shortform feed

TurnTrout

This is a special post for quick takes by TurnTrout. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Apply for MATS mentorship at Team Shard before October 2nd. Alex Cloud (@cloud) and I run this MATS stream together. We help alignment researchers grow from seeds into majestic trees. We have fun, consistently make real alignment progress, and have a dedicated shitposting channel.

Our mentees have gone on to impactful jobs, including (but not limited to)

@lisathiergart (MATS 3.0) moved on to being a research lead at MIRI and now a senior director at the SL5 task force,
@cloud (MATS 6.0) went from mentee to co-mentor in one round and also secured a job at Anthropic, and
@Jacob G-W (MATS 6.0) also accepted an offer from Anthropic!

We likewise have a strong track record in research outputs, including

Pioneering steering vectors for use in LLMs (Steering GPT-2-XL by adding an activation vector),
Masking Gradients to Localize Computation in Neural Networks, and
Distillation Robustifies Unlearning.

Our team culture is often super tight-knit and fun. For example, in this last MATS round, we lifted together every Wednesday and Thursday.

Apply here before October 2nd. (Don't procrastinate, and remember the planning fallacy!)

Testimonials

If you're interested in learning what making progress on a hard problem actually feels like, Team Shard is where you want to be.
— Bruce Lee. MATS 7.0, primary author of Distillation Robustifies Unlearning

I really like Team Shard's focus on solving big problems that other people are missing. This focus resulted in me doing work that I think is much more impactful than I would have otherwise done. Being in Team Shard is also really fun.
— Luke Marks. MATS 8.0, primary author on Optimizing The Final Output Can Obfuscate CoT

Alex Tu

... (read more)

TurnTrout's shortform feed

28

Ω 10

TurnTrout's shortform feed

28

Ω 10

Testimonials