Redwood is doing great research, and we are fairly aligned with their approach. In particular, we agree that hands-on experience building alignment approaches could have high impact, even if AGI ends up having an architecture unlike modern neural networks (which we don’t believe will be the case). While Conjecture and Redwood both have a strong focus on prosaic alignment with modern ML models, our research agenda has higher variance, in that we additionally focus on conceptual and meta-level research. We’re also training our own (large) models, but (we believe) Redwood are just using pretrained, publicly available models. We do this for three reasons:
Having total control over the models we use can give us more insights into the phenomena we study, such as training models at a range of sizes to study scaling properties of alignment techniques.
Some properties we want to study may only appear in close-to-SOTA models—most of which are private.
We are trying to make products, and close-to-SOTA models help us do that better. Though as we note in our post, we plan to avoid work that pushes the capabilities frontier.
We’re also for-profit, while Redwood is a nonprofit, and we’re located in London! Not everyone lives out in the Bay :)
Redwood is doing great research, and we are fairly aligned with their approach. In particular, we agree that hands-on experience building alignment approaches could have high impact, even if AGI ends up having an architecture unlike modern neural networks (which we don’t believe will be the case). While Conjecture and Redwood both have a strong focus on prosaic alignment with modern ML models, our research agenda has higher variance, in that we additionally focus on conceptual and meta-level research. We’re also training our own (large) models, but (we believe) Redwood are just using pretrained, publicly available models. We do this for three reasons:
Having total control over the models we use can give us more insights into the phenomena we study, such as training models at a range of sizes to study scaling properties of alignment techniques.
Some properties we want to study may only appear in close-to-SOTA models—most of which are private.
We are trying to make products, and close-to-SOTA models help us do that better. Though as we note in our post, we plan to avoid work that pushes the capabilities frontier.
We’re also for-profit, while Redwood is a nonprofit, and we’re located in London! Not everyone lives out in the Bay :)