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...
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...
In April, we held our second workshop on statistical physics and AI safety, organized around a research agenda we've been building over the past year: Physics Inspired Ambitious Mechanistic Interpretability (PIAMI). (Stay tuned for a PIAMI research roadmap, to be shared soon.) This post is a summary of the week's...
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....
Join us for the AI Safety x Physics Grand Challenge, a research hackathon designed to engage physicists in technical AI safety research. While we expect LessWrong community members with both technical AI safety and physics expertise to benefit most from this event, we encourage anyone interested in exploring this intersection...
We invite proposals that probe aspects of renormalization in AI systems that will help us predict, explain, and interpret neural network behavior at different levels of abstraction. We import ‘renormalization’ from physics, as a technique to coarse-grain theoretical descriptions of complex interactions to focus on those that are most relevant...
This opportunity space was developed with Dmitry Vaintrob and Lucas Teixeira as part of PIBBSS' horizon scanning initiative. A detailed roadmap of can be found here. Background The basic premise is to view different aspects of a neural network (NN) as a complex statistical system, as follows: The data-generating process...