Key Findings * This research involving multiple LLMs indicates that biological weapon attack planning currently lies beyond the capability frontier of LLMs as assistive tools. The authors found no statistically significant difference in the viability of plans generated with or without LLM assistance. * This research did not measure the...
Over a year and a half have passed since EleutherAI's last retrospective, and a great deal of things have changed. In the first year, what started off as a Discord server created by some TPU enthusiasts grew into a much larger and more vibrant community. Since then, the EleutherAI collective...
This is one area where I hope the USG will be able to exert coercive force to bring companies to heel. Early access evals, access to base models, and access to training data seem like no-brainers from a regulatory POV.
I think you're misrepresenting Gwern's argument. He's arguing that terrorists are not optimizing for killing the most people. He makes no claims about whether terrorists are scientifically incompetent.
Thanks! I like your title more :)
It seems helpful to me if policy discussions can include phrases like "the evidence suggests that if the current ML systems were trying to deceive us, we wouldn't be able to change them not to".
I take this as evidence that TurnTrout's fears about this paper are well-grounded. This claim is not meaningfully supported by the paper, but I expect many people to repeat it as if it is supported by the paper.
We ended up talking about this in DMs, but to gist of it is:
Back in June Hoagy opened a thread in our "community research projects" channel and the work migrated there. Three of the five authors of the [eventual paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08600) chose to have EleutherAI affiliation (for any work we organize with volunteers, we tell them they're welcome to use an EleutherAI affiliation on the paper if they like) and we now have an entire channel dedicated to future work. I believe Hoagy has two separate paper ideas currently in the works and over a half dozen people working on them.
Ooops. It appeared that I deleted my comment (deeming it largely off-topic) right as you were replying. I'll reproduce the comment below, and then reply to your question.
... (read more)I separately had a very weird experience with them on the Long Term Future Fund where Conor Leahy applied for funding for Eleuther AI. We told him we didn't want to fund Eleuther AI since it sure mostly seemed like capabilities-research but we would be pretty interested in funding AI Alignment research by some of the same people. He then confusingly went around to a lot of people around EleutherAI and told them that "Open Phil is not interested in funding pre-paradigmatic AI Alignment research and
I agree that a control group is vital for good science. Nonetheless, I think that such an experiment is valuable and informative, even if it doesn't meet the high standards required by many professional science disciplines. I believe in the necessity of acting under uncertainty. Even with its flaws, this study is sufficient evidence for us to want to enact temporary regulation at the same time as we work to provide more robust evaluations.
But... this study doesn't provide evidence that LLMs increase bioweapon risk.
It doesn't let the government institute prior restraint on speech.
So far, I'm confident that our proposals will not impede the vast majority of AI developers, but if we end up receiving feedback that this isn't true, we'll either rethink our proposals or remove this claim from our advocacy efforts.
It seems to me like you've received this feedback already in this very thread. The fact that you're going to edit the claim to basically say "this doesn't effect most people because most people don't work on LLMs" completely dodges the actual issue here, which is that there's a large non-profit and independent open source LLM community that this would heavily impact.
I applaud your honestly in admitting one approach you might take is to "remove this claim from our advocacy efforts," but am quite sad to see that you don't seem to care about limiting the impact of your regulation to potentially dangerous models.
Over a year and a half have passed since EleutherAI's last retrospective, and a great deal of things have changed. In the first year, what started off as a Discord server created by some TPU enthusiasts grew into a much larger and more vibrant community. Since then, the EleutherAI collective has gone on to do many things, including becoming an inspirational launch point, stepping stone, and template for its members and many new organizations.
Given that we have so much to share in a second retrospective, we have condensed the important takeaways and announcements here. We look forward to sharing the full story soon!
EleutherAI members have authored 28 papers, trained dozens of models,... (read 1090 more words →)
Training a 6B model for 500B tokens costs about 20k USD. That number increases linearly with model size and # of tokens, and decreases with the amount of money you have. Work like this is super doable, especially at large labs.