We (the founders) have a distinct enough research agenda to most existing groups such that simply joining them would mean incurring some compromises on that front. Also, joining existing research orgs is tough! Especially if we want to continue along our own lines of research, and have significant influence on their direction. We can’t just walk in and say “here are our new frames for GPT, can we have a team to work on this asap?”.
You’re right that SOTA models are hard to develop, but that being said, developing our own models is independently useful in many ways—it enables us to maintain controlled conditions for experiments, and study things like scaling properties of alignment techniques, or how models change throughout training, as well as being useful for any future products. We have a lot of experience in LLM development and training from EleutherAI, and expect it not to take up an inordinate amount of developer hours.
We are all in favor of high bandwidth communication between orgs. We would love to work in any way we can to set these channels up with the other organizations, and are already working on reaching out to many people and orgs in the field (meet us at EAG if you can!).
In general, all the safety orgs that we have spoken with are interested in this, and that’s why we expect/hope this kind of initiative to be possible soon.
We (the founders) have a distinct enough research agenda to most existing groups such that simply joining them would mean incurring some compromises on that front. Also, joining existing research orgs is tough! Especially if we want to continue along our own lines of research, and have significant influence on their direction. We can’t just walk in and say “here are our new frames for GPT, can we have a team to work on this asap?”.
You’re right that SOTA models are hard to develop, but that being said, developing our own models is independently useful in many ways—it enables us to maintain controlled conditions for experiments, and study things like scaling properties of alignment techniques, or how models change throughout training, as well as being useful for any future products. We have a lot of experience in LLM development and training from EleutherAI, and expect it not to take up an inordinate amount of developer hours.
We are all in favor of high bandwidth communication between orgs. We would love to work in any way we can to set these channels up with the other organizations, and are already working on reaching out to many people and orgs in the field (meet us at EAG if you can!).
In general, all the safety orgs that we have spoken with are interested in this, and that’s why we expect/hope this kind of initiative to be possible soon.