Jeremie Harris: Realistic Alignment and AI Policy

In episode 79 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir (twitter.com/spaniel_bashir) speaks to Jeremie Harris (twitter.com/jeremiecharris?s=20).
Jeremie is co-founder of Gladstone AI, author of the book Quantum Physics Made Me Do It, and co-host of the Last Week in AI Podcast. Jeremy previously hosted the Towards Data Science podcast and worked on a number of other startups after leaving a PhD in physics.
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Outline:
* (00:00) Intro
* (01:37) Jeremie’s physics background and transition to ML
* (05:19) The physicist-to-AI person pipeline, how Jeremie’s background impacts his approach to AI
* (08:20) A tangent on inflationism/deflationism about natural laws (I promise this applies to AI)
* (11:45) How ML implies a particular viewpoint on the above question
* (13:20) Jeremie’s first (recommendation systems) company, how startup founders can make mistakes even when they’ve read Paul Graham essays
* (17:30) Classic startup wisdom, different sorts of startups
* (19:35) OpenAI’s approach in shipping features for DALL-E 2 and generation vs. discrimination as an approach to product
* (24:55) Capabilities and risk
* (26:43) Commentary on fundamental limitations of alignment in LLMs
* (30:45) Intrinsic difficulties in alignment problems
* (41:15) Daniel tries to steel man / defend anti-longtermist arguments (nicely :) )
* (46:23) Anthropic’s paper on asking models to be less biased
* (47:20) Why Jeremie is excited about Anthropic’s Constitutional AI scheme
* (51:05) Jeremie’s thoughts on recent Eliezer discourse
* (56:50) Cheese / task vectors and steerability/controllability in LLMs
* (59:50) Difficulty of one-shot solutions in alignment work, better strategies
* (1:02:00) Lack of theoretical understanding of deep learning systems / alignment
* (1:04:50) Jeremie’s work and perspectives on AI policy
* (1:10:00) Incrementality in convincing policymakers
* (1:14:00) How recent developments impact policy efforts
* (1:16:20) Benefits and drawbacks of open source
* (1:19:30) Arguments in favor of (limited) open source
* (1:20:35) Quantum Physics (not Mechanics) Made Me Do It
* (1:24:10) Some theories of consciousness and corresponding physics
* (1:29:49) Outro

Links:
* Jeremie’s Twitter (twitter.com/jeremiecharris?s=20)
* Quantum Physics Made Me Do It (penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/696896/quantum-phy…)
* Gladstone AI (gladstone.ai)

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