We Are Conjecture, A New Alignment Research Startup
Conjecture is a new alignment startup founded by Connor Leahy, Sid Black and Gabriel Alfour, which aims to scale alignment research. We have VC backing from, among others, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Patrick and John Collison, Arthur Breitman, Andrej Karpathy, and Sam Bankman-Fried. Our founders and early staff are mostly EleutherAI alumni and previously independent researchers like Adam Shimi. We are located in London. Of the options we considered, we believe that being a for-profit company with products[1] on the market is the best one to reach our goals. This lets us scale investment quickly while maintaining as much freedom as possible to expand alignment research. The more investors we appeal to, the easier it is for us to select ones that support our mission (like our current investors), and the easier it is for us to guarantee security to alignment researchers looking to develop their ideas over the course of years. The founders also retain complete control of the company. We're interested in your feedback, questions, comments, and concerns. We'll be hosting an AMA on the Alignment Forum this weekend, from Saturday 9th to Sunday 10th, and would love to hear from you all there. (We'll also be responding to the comments thread here!) Our Research Agenda We aim to conduct both conceptual and applied research that addresses the (prosaic) alignment problem. On the experimental side, this means leveraging our hands-on experience from EleutherAI to train and study state-of-the-art models without pushing the capabilities frontier. On the conceptual side, most of our work will tackle the general idea and problems of alignment like deception, inner alignment, value learning, and amplification, with a slant towards language models and backchaining to local search. Our research agenda is still actively evolving, but some of the initial directions are: * New frames for reasoning about large language models: * What: Propose and expand on a frame of GPT-like mode
Thanks for pointing out my imprecise statement there! What I meant of course "is we can't prove the Collatz Conjecture" (which is a simple statement about a simple dynamic system), but I wrote something that doesn't precisely say that, so apologies for that.
The main thing I intended to convey here is that the amounts of effort going into proving simple things (including the things you have mentioned that were in fact proven!) are often extremely unintuitively high to people not familiar with this, and that this happens all over CS and math.