Glad to see a new Alignment research lab in Europe. Good luck with the start and the hiring!
I’m wondering, you’re saying:
That being said, our publication model is non-disclosure-by-default, and every shared work will go through an internal review process out of concern for infohazards.
That’s different from Eleuther’s position[1]. Is this a change of mind or a different practice due to the different research direction? Will you continue open-sourcing your ML models?
TL;DR: For the record, EleutherAI never actually had a policy of always releasing everything to begin with and has always tried to consider each publication’s pros vs cons. But this is still a bit of change from EleutherAI, mostly because we think it’s good to be more intentional about what should or should not be published, even if one does end up publishing many things. EleutherAI is unaffected and will continue working open source. Conjecture will not be publishing ML models by default, but may do so on a case by case basis.
Longer version:
First of all, Conjecture and EleutherAI are separate entities. The policies of one do not affect the other. EleutherAI will continue as it has.
To explain a bit of what motivated this policy: We ran into some difficulties when handling infohazards at EleutherAI. By the very nature of a public open source community, infohazard handling is tricky to say the least. I’d like to say on the record that I think EAI actually did an astoundingly good job not pushing every cool research or project discovery we encountered, for what it is. However, there are still obvious limitations to how well you can contain information spread in an environment that open.
I think the goal of a good infohazard policy should not be to make it as hard as possible to publish information or talk to people about your ideas to limit the possibility of secrets leaking, but rather to make any spreading of information more intentional. You can’t undo the spreading of information, it’s a one-way street. As such, the “by-default” component is what I think is important to allow actual control over what gets out and what not. By having good norms around not immediately sharing everything you’re working on or thinking about widely, you have more time to deliberate and consider if keeping it private is the best course of action. And if not, then you can still publish.
That’s the direction we’re taking things with Conjecture. Concretely, we are working on writing a well thought out infohazard policy internally, and plan to get the feedback of alignment researchers outside of Conjecture on whether each piece of work should or should not be published.
We have the same plan with respect to our models, which we by default will not release. However, we may choose to do so on a case by case basis and with feedback from external alignment researchers. While this is different from EleutherAI, I’d note that EAI does not, and has never, advocated for literally publishing anything and everything all the time as fast as possible. EAI is a very decentralized organization, and many people associated with the name work on pretty different projects, but in general the projects EAI chooses to do are informed by what we considered net good to be working on publicly (e.g. EAI would not release a SOTA-surpassing, or unprecedentedly large model). This is a nuanced point about EAI policy that tends to get lost in outside communication.
We recognize that Conjecture’s line of work is infohazardous. We think it’s almost guaranteed that when working on serious prosaic alignment you will stumble across capabilities increasing ideas (one could argue one of the main constraints on many current models’ usefulness/power is precisely their lack of alignment, so incremental progress could easily remove bottlenecks), and we want to have the capacity to handle these kinds of situations as gracefully as possible.
Thanks for your question and giving us the chance to explain!
Glad to see a new Alignment research lab in Europe. Good luck with the start and the hiring!
I’m wondering, you’re saying:
That’s different from Eleuther’s position[1]. Is this a change of mind or a different practice due to the different research direction? Will you continue open-sourcing your ML models?
“A grassroots collective of researchers working to open source AI research.”
TL;DR: For the record, EleutherAI never actually had a policy of always releasing everything to begin with and has always tried to consider each publication’s pros vs cons. But this is still a bit of change from EleutherAI, mostly because we think it’s good to be more intentional about what should or should not be published, even if one does end up publishing many things. EleutherAI is unaffected and will continue working open source. Conjecture will not be publishing ML models by default, but may do so on a case by case basis.
Longer version:
First of all, Conjecture and EleutherAI are separate entities. The policies of one do not affect the other. EleutherAI will continue as it has.
To explain a bit of what motivated this policy: We ran into some difficulties when handling infohazards at EleutherAI. By the very nature of a public open source community, infohazard handling is tricky to say the least. I’d like to say on the record that I think EAI actually did an astoundingly good job not pushing every cool research or project discovery we encountered, for what it is. However, there are still obvious limitations to how well you can contain information spread in an environment that open.
I think the goal of a good infohazard policy should not be to make it as hard as possible to publish information or talk to people about your ideas to limit the possibility of secrets leaking, but rather to make any spreading of information more intentional. You can’t undo the spreading of information, it’s a one-way street. As such, the “by-default” component is what I think is important to allow actual control over what gets out and what not. By having good norms around not immediately sharing everything you’re working on or thinking about widely, you have more time to deliberate and consider if keeping it private is the best course of action. And if not, then you can still publish.
That’s the direction we’re taking things with Conjecture. Concretely, we are working on writing a well thought out infohazard policy internally, and plan to get the feedback of alignment researchers outside of Conjecture on whether each piece of work should or should not be published.
We have the same plan with respect to our models, which we by default will not release. However, we may choose to do so on a case by case basis and with feedback from external alignment researchers. While this is different from EleutherAI, I’d note that EAI does not, and has never, advocated for literally publishing anything and everything all the time as fast as possible. EAI is a very decentralized organization, and many people associated with the name work on pretty different projects, but in general the projects EAI chooses to do are informed by what we considered net good to be working on publicly (e.g. EAI would not release a SOTA-surpassing, or unprecedentedly large model). This is a nuanced point about EAI policy that tends to get lost in outside communication.
We recognize that Conjecture’s line of work is infohazardous. We think it’s almost guaranteed that when working on serious prosaic alignment you will stumble across capabilities increasing ideas (one could argue one of the main constraints on many current models’ usefulness/power is precisely their lack of alignment, so incremental progress could easily remove bottlenecks), and we want to have the capacity to handle these kinds of situations as gracefully as possible.
Thanks for your question and giving us the chance to explain!
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Connor.
I’m glad to hear that you will develop a policy and won’t be publishing models by default.