Alexandre Variengien

“I’ve been trying to fall asleep for five hours. My sheets have turned into a swamp of sweat. I can't regulate. My thoughts are bullets trying to punch holes through my skull, but they have nowhere to go. All they leave behind when they explode are smoldering craters. Please help...

Imagine you ask a language model "What is your personality?" as the first message of a conversation, with no system prompt. The model has no data about its own behavior in its context, so its answer can only rely on cached, zero-shot knowledge. It's unclear exactly what shapes this response,...

Here’s an attempt to classify the evidence about the recent agent incidents. I think it’s important to separate incidents occurring in RL training (that are rewarded and reinforce model behavior) from incidents occurring in evaluations, which are mostly cyber capabilities evaluations with some safeguards turned off. These are the incidents...

Epistemic status: speculative, but I think the mechanism is plausible. There has been recent interest in generating synthetic documents to upsample examples of aligned AI during LLM pretraining. See, for instance, Geodesic's Alignment Pretraining paper or Anthropic's "Teaching Claude Why." I worry that this strategy can work well up to...

Originally written for my substack. Cross posting here as reports of Inkheaven-like intensive writing experiences might be valuable! A month ago, during a video call, a friend of mine mentioned the Inkheaven residency. He told me it’s a writing program happening in November where participants are under threat of publishing...

Epistemic status: thought experiment Spoiler Warning: The setup of the thought experiment comes from “Star Maker” by Olaf Stapledon. If you intend to read the book, I recommend not reading this post. I Imagine a universe where stars are conscious beings. Their insides are made of a dynamic network of...

AI is changing the way we interact with online content. There are the gloomy waves of AI slop, the TikTokification of video content, the ad-maxing-prompt-injection-cyberwar, yes, but also the prospect of fulfilling the web’s promise: making content come to life. Practicing the craft of building lenses through which to look...