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In this post, I’m trying to put forward a narrow, pedagogical point, one that comes up mainly when I’m arguing in favor of LLMs having limitations that human learning does not. (E.g. here, here, here.) See the bottom of the post for a list of subtexts that you should NOT...
Jeremy Howard was recently[1] interviewed on the Machine Learning Street Talk podcast: YouTube link, interactive transcript, PDF transcript. Jeremy co-invented LLMs in 2018, and taught the excellent fast.ai online course which I found very helpful back when I was learning ML, and he uses LLMs all the time, e.g. 90%...
The conversation begins (Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to-be-invented techniques, to be a ruthless sociopath, happy to lie, cheat, and steal, whenever doing so is selfishly beneficial, and with callous indifference to whether anyone (including its own programmers and...
Some people say “the brain is a computer”. Other people say “well, the brain is not really a computer, because, like, what’s the hardware versus the software?” I agree: “the brain is a computer” is kinda missing the mark. I prefer: “the brain is a machine that runs an algorithm”.[1]...
Let’s call “interpretability-in-the-loop training” the idea of running a learning algorithm that involves an inscrutable trained model, and there’s some kind of interpretability system feeding into the loss function / reward function. Interpretability-in-the-loop training has a very bad rap (and rightly so). Here’s Yudkowsky 2022: > When you explicitly optimize...
(Heavily revised on Feb. 9, 2026—see changelog at the bottom.) There’s a lot of talk about “algorithmic progress” in LLMs, especially in the context of exponentially-improving algorithmic efficiency. For example: * Epoch AI: “[training] compute required to reach a set performance threshold has halved approximately every 8 months”. * Dario...
This post is partly a belated response to Joshua Achiam, currently OpenAI’s Head of Mission Alignment: > If we adopt safety best practices that are common in other professional engineering fields, we'll get there … I consider myself one of the x-risk people, though I agree that most of them...