Leading Indicators of AI Danger: Owain Evans on Situational Awareness & Out-of-Context Reasoning, from The Inside View

In this special crossover episode of The Cognitive Revolution, Nathan introduces a conversation from The Inside View featuring Owain Evans, AI alignment researcher at UC Berkeley's Center for Human Compatible AI. Evans and host Michael Trazzi delve into critical AI safety topics, including situational awareness and out-of-context reasoning. Discover Evans' groundbreaking work on the reversal curse and connecting the dots, exploring how large language models process and infer information. This timely discussion highlights the importance of situational awareness in AI systems, particularly in light of recent advancements in AI capabilities. Don't miss this insightful exploration of the evolving relationship between human and artificial intelligence.

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CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) About the Show

(00:00:22) Sponsors: Weights & Biases RAG++

(00:01:28) About the Episode

(00:04:10) Intro

(00:05:09) Owain Evans' Research

(00:06:36) Situational Awareness

(00:09:07) Measuring Situational Awareness

(00:14:29) Claude's Situational Awareness

(00:19:06) Sponsors: Shopify | LMNT

(00:22:01) Needle in a Haystack

(00:26:26) Concrete Examples of Tasks

(00:34:51) Sponsors: Notion | Oracle

(00:37:29) Anti-Imitation Tasks

(00:50:03) GPT-4 Base Model Results

(01:01:48) Benchmark Saturation

(01:07:23) Future Research Directions

(01:12:01) Out-of-Context Reasoning

(01:27:29) Safety Implications

(01:36:24) Scaling and Reasoning

(01:44:28) Mixture of Functions

(01:54:12) Research Style and Taste

(02:08:51) Capabilities and Downsides

(02:18:56) Reception and Impact

(02:25:30) Outro

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