paulfchristiano

I've returned to the Alignment Research Center (ARC) as executive director. My main focus will be driving forward ARC's research agenda—building techniques to find mechanistic explanations for neural network behavior and then using those explanations to detect and address misalignment. I think this is an ambitious bet that attacks the...

ARC has teamed up with AIcrowd to launch the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge, a contest to improve upon our estimation algorithms for random MLPs. The warm-up round begins this week, and later rounds will have a total prize pool of at least $100,000. We are very grateful to Sharada Mohanty,...

We have developed some relatively general methods for mechanistic estimation competitive with sampling by studying problems that are expressible as expectations of random products. This includes several different estimation problems, such as random halfspace intersections, random #3-SAT and random permanents. In this post, we will give a high-level introduction to...

Earlier this year ARC posted a prize for two matrix completion problems. We received a number of submissions we considered useful, but not any complete solutions. We are closing the contest and awarding the following partial prizes: * $500 to Elad Hazan for solving a related problem and pointing us...

I am excited about AI developers implementing responsible scaling policies; I’ve recently been spending time refining this idea and advocating for it. Most people I talk to are excited about RSPs, but there is also some uncertainty and pushback about how they relate to regulation. In this post I’ll explain...

Core claim I believe that sharing information about the capabilities and limits of existing ML systems, and especially language model agents, significantly reduces risks from powerful AI—despite the fact that such information may increase the amount or quality of investment in ML generally (or in LM agents in particular). Concretely,...

This month I lost a bunch of bets. Back in early 2016 I bet at even odds that self-driving ride sharing would be available in 10 US cities by July 2023. Then I made similar bets a dozen times because everyone disagreed with me. The first deployment to potentially meet...