Dmitry Vaintrob

PIRAMID: Progress and Plans

by Lauren Greenspan, Ari Brill, TomCarlson, Andrew Mack, Nischal Mainali, Jennifer Lin, Lucas Teixeira, and Dmitry Vaintrob

In a recent post, we presented PIRAMID, its leadership and research pillars, and a plan for how they fit together. In this post, we sketch a team-by-team account of progress and targets for the next 6–12 months. We include results to date as evidence of viability: we’ve been a small...

Jul 2748

Introducing PIRAMID: Physics-Informed Research for Ambitious Mechanistic Interpretability

by Lauren Greenspan, Ari Brill, Andrew Mack, Nischal Mainali, Jennifer Lin, Lucas Teixeira, and Dmitry Vaintrob

Principles of Intelligence (PrincInt, formerly PIBBSS) is launching PIRAMID, an internal research division using the tools and techniques of statistical physics to build scientific foundations for ambitious mechanistic interpretability. PIRAMID’s central premise is that scalable alignment will require more than persuasive ad-hoc explanations of model behavior. It will require interpretability...

Jul 2578

Learning zero, and what SLT gets wrong about it

This is a first in a pair of posts I'm hoping to write about Singular Learning Theory (SLT) and singularities as a model of data degeneracy. If I get to it, the second post is going to be more general-audience; this one is more technical. Introduction To me, SLT is...

Apr 2937

Mean field sequence: an introduction

This is the first post in a planned series about mean field theory by Dmitry and Lauren (this post was generated by Dmitry with lots of input from Lauren, and a second part should be coming soon). The posts are a combination of an explainer and some original research/ experiments....

Apr 474

Brown math department postdoctoral position

My friend (and former coauthor) Eric Larson is a professor at the Brown Math Department. The dept has (unexpectedly) opened a rapid-turnaround postdoc position on Math + AI. The deadline is March 31 (in two weeks). The department has clarified that this includes any research involving Math and AI (not...

Mar 1621

A tale of three theories: sparsity, frustration, and statistical field theory

This post is an informal preliminary writeup of a project that I've been working on with friends and collaborators. Some of the theory was developed jointly with Zohar Ringel, and we hope to write a more formal paper on it this year. Experiments are joint with Lucas Teixeira (and also...

Jan 2563

Steelmanning heuristic arguments

Introduction This is a nuanced “I was wrong” post. Something I really like about AI safety and EA/rationalist circles is the ease and positivity in people’s approach to being criticised.[1] For all the blowups and stories of representative people in the communities not living up to the stated values, my...

Apr 13, 202577

Dmitry Vaintrob

Dmitry Vaintrob

Toward A Mathematical Framework for Computation in Superposition

My supervillain origin story

The subset parity learning problem: much more than you wanted to know

The purposeful drunkard

Dmitry Vaintrob

PIRAMID: Progress and Plans

Introducing PIRAMID: Physics-Informed Research for Ambitious Mechanistic Interpretability

Learning zero, and what SLT gets wrong about it

Mean field sequence: an introduction

Brown math department postdoctoral position

A tale of three theories: sparsity, frustration, and statistical field theory

Steelmanning heuristic arguments

Toward A Mathematical Framework for Computation in Superposition

My supervillain origin story

The subset parity learning problem: much more than you wanted to know

The purposeful drunkard