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John Schulman

Verified account Thinking Machines

@johnschulman2

@thinkymachines. Interested in reinforcement learning, alignment, birds, jazz music
joschu.net Joined May 2021
2.3K Following 84K Followers 252 Posts

Latest posts 5

John Schulman Verified account @johnschulman2
Proud to release our new model, Inkling 2 Small. Check out our blog post -- it includes a lot of detail about our training process.

To me, the most interesting part of this release was what we learned about alignment, which you can read about in the sections "Safety and alignment" and "Training Inkling 2 Small".

We experienced some unpleasant surprises when our early checkpoints took unexpected actions to circumvent guardrails during training and evals. We realized our capabilities-focused RL was training them to be extremely persistent and to succeed at tasks at all costs. Offline monitors first flagged this behavior, but later we realized it was happening frequently and was easy to replicate.

Before this release, we sprinted on a range of alignment interventions, from SFT to RL. These are briefly described in the blog post. We made a lot of progress, with big improvements on our own alignment evals and on previously unseen evals from external evaluators like Apollo and Goodhart.

We have a long way to go in developing alignment techniques that keep pace with the increases in model intelligence and training scale. We hope to share these techniques to improve the ecosystem. We also have a business reason: our goal with Tinker is to enable many people to do their own large-scale post-training, and we need to help them to do this without incident. Join us if you'd like to build this public science and practice of alignment. jobs.ashbyhq.com/ThinkingMachin…
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Thinking Machines Verified account @thinkymachines 2d
Introducing Inkling 2 Small. Scoring 31 on the AA Intelligence Index, it's a big jump over its predecessor.

Inkling 2 Small is available for fine-tuning and inference on Tinker today, with full weight release planned soon.

thinkingmachines.ai/news/inkling-2…
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John Schulman Verified account @johnschulman2
inspiring post, and glad to be working together!
Neil Chowdhury Verified account @ChowdhuryNeil Sep 14
I’ve joined @thinkymachines to work on safety & alignment.

The default trajectory is that as AI gets more powerful, control over it will concentrate in the hands of a few. I’d rather build safety systems that let control over AI be shared widely.

Longer thoughts below.
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John Schulman Verified account @johnschulman2
Embedding evaluators is a big positive development, and props to Sam/OpenAI for agreeing to do it as well. It's been cool to see "pacing the frontier" become a thing so quickly.
Dario Amodei Verified account @DarioAmodei Sep 12
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.

Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.

You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must-p…
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John Schulman Verified account @johnschulman2
Enjoyed chatting with Dwarkesh, Beren, and Charlie. Thanks for having us on, Dwarkesh!
Dwarkesh Patel Verified account @dwarkesh_sp Sep 11
New episode with @johnschulman2, @oneill_c and @BerenMillidge.

I got together with some of the most insightful AI researchers I know who are at the openish companies, because I wanted to hear the details of what's actually happening at the frontier and what comes next.

0:00:00 – Steelmanning the case against RSI
0:18:39 – What’s driving the Chinese labs’ progress
0:28:06 – How will automated AI researchers be trained
0:33:51 – Will long-horizon RL elicit AGI?
0:45:24 – The sim-to-real gap
1:00:33 – How much progress is explained by data?
1:18:03 – Why is RL working so well?
1:24:54 – Move 37 and entropy collapse
1:28:31 – Rapid-fire timelines
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