The Inside View

Siméon Campos is the founder of EffiSciences and SaferAI, mostly focusing on alignment field building and AI Governance. More recently, he started the newsletter Navigating AI Risk on AI Governance , with a first post on slowing down AI. Note: this episode was recorded in October 2022 so a lot of the content being discussed references what was known at the time, in particular when discussing GPT-3...

Collin Burns is a second-year ML PhD at Berkeley, working with Jacob Steinhardt on making language models honest, interpretable, and aligned. In 2015 he broke the Rubik’s Cube world record, and he's now back with " Discovering latent knowledge in language models without supervision ", a paper on how you can recover diverse knowledge represented in large language models without supervision.  ...

Victoria Krakovna is a Research Scientist at DeepMind working on AGI safety and a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organization working to mitigate technological risks to humanity and increase the chances of a positive future. In this interview we discuss three of her recent LW posts, namely DeepMind Alignment Team Opinions On AGI Ruin Arguments, Refining The Sharp Left Tur...

David Krueger is an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge and got his PhD from Mila. His research group focuses on aligning deep learning systems, but he is also interested in governance and global coordination. He is famous in Cambridge for not having an AI alignment research agenda per se, and instead he tries to enable his seven PhD students to drive their own research. In this epi...

Ethan Caballero is a PhD student at Mila interested in how to best scale Deep Learning models according to all downstream evaluations that matter. He is known as the fearless leader of the "Scale Is All You Need" movement and the edgiest person at MILA. His first interview is the second most popular interview on the channel and today he's back to talk about Broken Neural Scaling Laws and how to us...

Irina Rish a professor at the Université de Montréal, a core member of Mila (Quebec AI Institute), and the organizer of the neural scaling laws workshop towards maximally beneficial AGI . In this episode we discuss Irina's definition of Artificial General Intelligence, her takes on AI Alignment, AI Progress, current research in scaling laws, the neural scaling laws workshop she has been organizing...

Shahar is a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge . In his past life, he was a Google Engineer, though right now he spends most of your time thinking about how to prevent the risks that occur if companies like Google end up deploying powerful AI systems, by organizing AI Governance role-playing workshops . In this episode, we talk about a broad variety of t...

Katja runs AI Impacts, a research project trying to incrementally answer decision-relevant questions about the future of AI. She is well known for a survey published in 2017 called, When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence From AI Experts and recently published a new survey of AI Experts: What do ML researchers think about AI in 2022 . We start this episode by discussing what Katja is curre...

Markus Anderljung is the Head of AI Policy at the Centre for Governance of AI  in Oxford and was previously seconded to the UK government office as a senior policy specialist. In this episode we discuss Jack Clark's AI Policy takes , answer questions about AI Policy from Twitter and explore what is happening in the AI Governance landscape more broadly. Youtube: https://youtu.be/DD303irN3ps Tr...

Alex Lawsen is an advisor at 80,000 hours , released an Introduction to Forecasting Youtube Series and has recently been thinking about forecasting AI progress, why you cannot just " update all the way bro " (discussed in my latest episode with Connor Leahy) and how to develop inside views about AI Alignment in general. Youtube: https://youtu.be/vLkasevJP5c Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/ale...

Robert Long is a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. His work is at the intersection of the philosophy of AI Safety and consciousness of AI. We talk about the recent LaMDA controversy, Ilya Sutskever's slightly conscious tweet, the metaphysics and philosophy of consciousness, artificial sentience, and how a future filled with digital minds could get really weird.  Youtube: ht...

Ethan Perez is a research scientist at Anthropic, working on large language models. He is the second Ethan working with large language models coming on the show but, in this episode, we discuss why alignment is actually what you need, not scale. We discuss three projects he has been pursuing before joining Anthropic, namely the Inverse Scaling Prize , Red Teaming Language Models with Language Mode...

Robert Miles has been making videos for Computerphile, then decided to create his own Youtube channel about AI Safety. Lately, he's been working on  a Discord Community that uses Stampy the chatbot to answer Youtube comments. We also spend some time discussing recent AI Progress and why Rob is not that optimistic about humanity's survival. Transcript: https://theinsideview.ai/rob Youtube: htt...

Connor was the first guest of this podcast. In the last episode, we talked a lot about EleutherAI, a grassroot collective of researchers he co-founded, who open-sourced GPT-3 size models such as GPT-NeoX and GPT-J.  Since then, Connor co-founded Conjecture, a company aiming to make AGI safe through scalable AI Alignment research. One of the goals of Conjecture is to reach a fundamental unders...

Raphaël Millière is a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. He has previously completed a PhD in philosophy in Oxford, is interested in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, and has recently been discussing at length the current progress in AI with popular Twitter threads on GPT-3, Dalle-2 and a thesis he called “scaling maximali...

Blake Richards is an Assistant Professor in the Montreal Neurological Institute and the School of Computer Science at McGill University and a Core Faculty Member at MiLA. He thinks that AGI is not a coherent concept, which is why he ended up on a recent AGI political compass meme. When people asked on Twitter who was the edgiest people at MiLA, his name got actually more likes than Ethan, so &nbsp...

Ethan is known on Twitter as the edgiest person at MILA. We discuss all the gossips around scaling large language models in what will be later known as the Edward Snowden moment of Deep Learning. On his free time, Ethan is a Master’s degree student at MILA in Montreal, and has published papers on out of distribution generalization and robustness generalization, accepted both as oral presentations...

Peter is the co-CEO of Rethink Priorities, a fast-growing non-profit doing research on how to improve the long-term future. On his free time, Peter makes money in prediction markets and is quickly becoming one of the top forecasters on Metaculus. We talk about the probability of London getting nuked, Rethink Priorities and why EA should fund projects that scale. Check out the video and transcript...

Emil is a resident at the Google Arts & Culture Lab were he explores the intersection between art and machine learning. He recently built his own Machine Learning server, or rig, which costed him €25000. Emil's Story: https://www.emilwallner.com/p/ml-rig Youtube: https://youtu.be/njbPpxhE6W0 00:00 Intro 00:23 Building your own rig 06:11 The Nvidia GPU rder hack 15:51 Inside Emil's rig 21:31 Mo...

Sonia is a graduate student applying ML to neuroscience at MILA. She was previously applying deep learning to neural data at Janelia, an NLP research engineer at a startup and graduated in computational neuroscience at Princeton University.  Anonymous feedback : https://app.suggestionox.com/r/xOmqTW   Twitter : https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi   Sonia's December update : https://t....

Phil Trammell is an Oxford PhD student in economics and research associate at the Global Priorities Institute. Phil is one of the smartest person I know, when considering the intersection of the long-term future and economic growth. Funnily enough, Phil was my roomate, a few years ago in Oxford, and last time I called him he casually said that he had written an extensive report on the econ of AI....

In this episode I discuss Brain Computer Interfaces with Slava Bobrov, a self-taught Machine Learning Engineer applying AI to neural biosignals to control robotic limbs. This episode will be of special interest to you if you're an engineer who wants to get started with brain computer interfaces, or just broadly interested in how this technology could enhance human intelligence. Fun fact: most of t...

We talk about AI generated art with Charlie Snell, a Berkeley student who wrote extensively about AI art for ML@Berkeley's blog ( https://ml.berkeley.edu/blog/ ). We look at multiple slides with art throughout our conversation, so I highly recommend watching the video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcwidpxeAHI). In the first part we go through Charlie's explanations of DALL-E, a model trained e...

I interview Sav Sidorov about top-down learning, contrarianism, religion, university, robotics, ego , education, twitter, friends, psychedelics, B-values and beauty. Highlights & Transcript: https://insideview.substack.com/p/sav Watch the video: https://youtu.be/_Y6_TakG3d0

We talk about Evan’s background @ MIRI & OpenAI, Coconut, homogeneity in AI takeoff, reproducing SoTA & openness in multipolar scenarios, quantilizers & operationalizing strategy stealing, Risks from learned optimization & evolution, learned optimization in Machine Learning, clarifying Inner AI Alignment terminology, transparency & interpretability, 11 proposals for safe advanc...