Arvind Narayanan is a leading voice disambiguating what AI does and does not do. His work, with Sayash Kapoor at AI Snake Oil , is one of the few beacons of reasons in a AI media ecosystem with quite a few bad Apples. Arvind is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy . You can learn more about Arvind and his work on his website , X , or Google Scholar . This episode is all in on figuring out what current LLMs do and...
Oct 17, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Read the full post here : https://www.interconnects.ai/p/building-on-evaluation-quicksand Chapters 00:00 Building on evaluation quicksand 01:26 The causes of closed evaluation silos 06:35 The challenge facing open evaluation tools 10:47 Frontiers in evaluation 11:32 New types of synthetic data contamination 13:57 Building harder evaluations Figures Fig 1: https://huggingface.co/datasets/natolambert/interconnects-figures/resolve/main/manual/openai-predictions.webp Get full access to Interconnects...
Oct 16, 2024•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrew Trask is one of the bright spots in engaging with AI policy for me in the last year. He is a passionate idealist, trying to create a future for AI that enables privacy, academic research, and government involvement in a rapidly transforming ecosystem. Trask is a leader of the OpenMined organization facilitating researcher access to non-public data and AIs, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, a PhD student at the University of Oxford, an author and educator on Deep Learning. Yo...
Oct 10, 2024•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast How scaling changes model behavior Some trends are reasonable to extrapolate, some are not. Even for the trends we are succeeding at extrapolating, it is not clear how that signal translates into different AI behaviors. Read it here: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-scaling-changes-model-behavior [00:00] How scaling changes model behavior [05:03] Metaphors for what scaling may solve [08:45] Short-term scaling is already de-risked Fig. 1: https://huggingface.co/datasets/natolambert/interconnect...
Oct 09, 2024•12 min•Transcript available on Metacast SB1047's veto, OpenAI's turnover, and a constant treadmill pushing AI startups to be all too similar to big technology name brands. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/ai-safety-culture-vs-capitalism 00:00 AI Safety's Crux: Culture v Capitalism 06:03 SB1047 as a regulatory litmus test for AI safety 08:36 Capitalism at the helm Get full access to Interconnects at www.interc...
Oct 02, 2024•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Riley Goodside is a staff prompting engineer at Scale AI. Previously working in data science, he is often seen as the default for the new role of a “prompt engineer.” He regularly posts incisive prompts that illicit notable behavior from the most popular AI models. I really resonated with this saying from Anthropic’s recent podcast on prompt engineering — “now we write essays and treat them as code.” In order to be good at prompting, you need to understand that natural language operates as our c...
Sep 30, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sorry this one was late! Thanks for bearing with me, and keep sending feedback my way. Still a year or two away from when I have time to record these, but I would love to. Open-source tools, examples, limits, and the state of training multimodal models. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/molmo-and-llama-3-vision 00:00 Llama 3.2 Vision and Molmo: Foundations for the multim...
Sep 27, 2024•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast What productionizing test-time compute shows us about the future of AI. Exploration has landed in language model training. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/reverse-engineering-openai-o1 00:00 Reverse engineering OpenAI's o1 01:52 From Q-star to Strawberry to o1 05:13 Training o1 with reinforcement learning 09:24 What is o1 doing when given a prompt? 11:49 Questions to c...
Sep 17, 2024•19 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Scale AI's future versus further scaling of language model performance. How Nvidia may take all the margins from the data market, too. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/ai-data-foundry 00:00 Futures of the data foundry business model 02:57 What it is like to work with data vendors 06:06 Data foundries: Risks 08:18 Data foundries: Growth vectors 09:50 Realistic expectatio...
Sep 11, 2024•12 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast And why the concept of mandating "model spec's" could be a good start. (Oops, forgot to upload this yesterday!) This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/a-post-training-approach-to-ai-regulation 0:00 A post-training approach to AI regulation with Model Specs 1:45 Expanded roles of Model Specifications 3:40 Near future of Model Specifications Get full access to Interconnects at ...
Sep 10, 2024•6 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Whether or not scaling works, we should spend more on inference. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/openai-strawberry-and-inference-scaling-laws 00:00 OpenAI's Strawberry, LM self-talk, inference scaling laws, and spending more on inference 01:51 OpenAI's Strawberry 04:16 Self-talk in language models 07:45 Inference scaling laws Fig 1: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nato...
Sep 05, 2024•11 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Ai2 released OLMoE, which is probably our "best" model yet relative to its peers, but not much has changed in the process. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/olmoe-and-building-better-llms 00:00 OLMoE and the hidden simplicity in training better foundation models 02:04 Frontier model team compute allocations 04:19 De-risking training complexity 06:40 On organizational com...
Sep 04, 2024•11 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast The Open Source Initiative is working towards a definition. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/defining-open-source-ai 0:00 On the current definitions of open-source AI and the state of the data commons 3:17 Reasons to not mandate fully released data 4:24 Sufficient but not exhaustive data docs 5:22 Frustration with the data commons 7:04 We need more examples to define th...
Aug 28, 2024•8 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast The latest model from one of the most popular fine-tuning labs makes us question how a model should be identified as a "frontier model." This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/nous-hermes-3 0:00 Nous Hermes 3 and exploiting underspecified evaluations 5:29 Parsing training lessons from Hermes 3 Fig 1: https://huggingface.co/datasets/natolambert/interconnects-figures/resolve/ma...
Aug 16, 2024•9 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast I had the pleasure of Talking with Ross Taylor , who has a great spectrum of unique experiences in the language modeling space — evaluation experience, Galactica lead author, Llama post training, etc. This is a really great conversation on the frontier of language model (LM) reasoning, LM deployments and demos, LM’s for science, RLHF, and other topics. I’ve been trying to get Ross to come on for a bit. He’s one of those people in the LM space that doesn’t speak too much, but when you do, you lis...
Aug 08, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Apple, Meta, and Nvidia all agree -- synthetic data, iterative training, human preference labels, and lots of filtering. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/frontier-model-post-training 00:00 Llama 3.1 post-training and the new normal for RLHF 01:18 A new standard pipeline 01:45 Human preference data 02:59 Scaling RLHF 05:03 Synthetic data 06:10 The new normal 06:51 Data q...
Aug 07, 2024•10 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast This week, I had the pleasure of chatting with Sebastian Raschka . Sebastian is doing a ton of work on the open language model ecosystem and AI research broadly. He’s been writing the great Ahead of AI newsletter (that has the biggest audience overlap with Interconnects, at 26%, so a lot of you know him) and multiple educational books , all on top of being a full time machine learning engineer at Lightning.ai , where he maintains LitGPT , which he described as being like Karpathy’s NanoGPT, with...
Aug 01, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast And how to understand Llama three point one's results. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/gpt-4o-mini-changed-chatbotarena 0:00 GPT-4o-mini changed ChatBotArena 3:23 Llama 3 in the arena 5:13 Partial solutions and next steps Fig 1: https://huggingface.co/datasets/natolambert/interconnects-figures/resolve/main/new-chatbotarena/img_013.png Fig 2: https://huggingface.co/data...
Jul 31, 2024•8 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Defining the future of the AI economy and regulation. Is Meta's AI play equivalent to the Unix stack for open-source software? This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/llama-405b-open-frontier-model 00:00 Llama 3.1 405b, Meta's AI strategy, and the new open frontier model ecosystem 01:37 Meta's open frontier model 03:51 Zuckerberg's vision for open-source AI (vs. reality) 08:35...
Jul 23, 2024•15 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast SB 1047, AI regulation, and unlikely allies for open models The rallying of the open-source community against CA SB 1047 can represent a turning point for AI regulation. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/sb-1047-and-open-weights 00:00 Introduction 01:53 SB 1047 and targeting regulation 07:57 Unlikely allies of "open" 12:05 What would I regulate today? Get full access to ...
Jul 17, 2024•14 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast I Switched to Claude 3.5 Speculations on the role of RLHF and why I love the model for people who pay attention. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/switched-to-claude-from-chatgpt 00:00 I Switched to Claude 3.5 03:57 Product priorities 05:15 RLHF's peak? Fig 1: https://huggingface.co/datasets/natolambert/interconnects-figures/resolve/main/claude/img_016.png Fig 2: https:/...
Jul 03, 2024•7 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast I’m really excited to resume the Interconnects Interviews with Dean W. Ball from the Hyperdimensional Substack (you should subscribe). We cover the whole stack of recent happenings in AI policy, focusing of course on California’s bill SB 1047. We cover many, many more great topics here including: * What will happen in the case of a minor AI disaster, * If Meta will release the 405B model, and why, * The status of Chinese open-source AI, * Training on model outputs, * Anthropic’s recent strategy,...
Jun 27, 2024•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Things to be aware of if you work on language model fine-tuning. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/rlhf-roundup-2024 00:00 RLHF Roundup: Trying to get good at PPO, charting RLHF's impact, RewardBench retrospective, and a reward model competition 04:32 How big is the impact of RLHF relative to pretraining? 05:54 RewardBench retrospective after 100 models and 90% peak accu...
Jun 26, 2024•12 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast Synthetic data is known to be a super powerful tool for every level of the language modeling stack. It's documented as being used for expanding vanilla pretraining data and creating large swaths of fine-tuning data. Many, many more rumors surround its use, Anthropic's pretraining-scale constitutional AI, Mistral AI's first models being pretrained on OpenAI outputs, Q-star's hopes as OpenAI's remaining moat, and much more. The diversity of use cases for synthetic data makes planning around the ro...
Jun 21, 2024•11 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast Signs point to a general-use Sora-like model coming very soon, maybe even with open-weights. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/text-to-video-ai-is-already-abundant 0:00 Text-to-video AI is already abundant 5:08 What's next for the text-to-video market? 6:49 Are text-to-video models good for the world? Fig 1: https://huggingface.co/datasets/natolambert/interconnects-figur...
Jun 18, 2024•8 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast Apple Intelligence makes a lot of sense when you get out of the AI bubble. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/apple-intelligence 00:00 AI for the rest of us 02:46 Apple's technical approach 03:32 Core models: What did Apple build? 05:35 Alignment strategies: Some new things! 10:00 Orchestrating adapters and on-device magic 11:58 Light for other narratives around AI Fig 1:...
Jun 12, 2024•13 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast A realistic path to robotic foundation models Not "agents" and not "AGI." Some thoughts and excitement after revisiting the industry thanks to Physical Intelligence founders Sergey Levine and Chelsea Finn. This is AI generated audio with Python and 11Labs. Source code: https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools Original post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/robotic-foundation-models 0:00 A realistic path to robotic foundation models 2:51 Key factors for the future of robotics 6:19 Everyth...
Jun 05, 2024•8 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast 
