The case for training frontier AIs on Sumerian-only corpus

Let your every day be full of joy, love the child that holds your hand, let your wife delight in your embrace, for these alone are the concerns of humanity.[1]

— Epic of Gilgamesh - Tablet X



Say we want to train a scientist AI to help in a precise, narrow field of science (e.g. medicine design) but prevent its power from being applied anywhere else (e.g. chatting with humans, designing bio-weapons, etc.) even if it has these abilities.

Here's one safety layer one could implement:

1. Train a scientist AI on a large scientific corpus translated exclusively into Sumerian. Keep it in a secure containment environment.
2. Train a less-smart reporter whose sole ability is to translate from Sumerian to English only if the Sumerian content is about medical research. It refuses to translate other kinds of content.
3. Human operators are only allowed to interact with the scientist AI through [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
January 15th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PkqGxkm8XRASJ35bF/the-case-for-training-frontier-ais-on-sumerian-only-corpus-1

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.