“Timaeus in 2024” by Jesse Hoogland, Stan van Wingerden, Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel, Daniel Murfet

TLDR: We made substantial progress in 2024:

• We published a series of papers that verify key predictions of Singular Learning Theory (SLT) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
• We scaled key SLT-derived techniques to models with billions of parameters, eliminating our main concerns around tractability.
• We have clarified our theory of change and diversified our research portfolio to pay off across a range of different timelines.

In 2025, we will accelerate our research on the science and engineering of alignment, with a particular focus on developing techniques that can meaningfully impact the safety of current and near-future frontier models.

Overview

Timaeus's mission is to empower humanity by making breakthrough scientific progress on AI safety. We pursue this mission through technical research on interpretability and alignment and through outreach to scaling labs, researchers, and policymakers.

As described in our new position paper, our research agenda aims to understand how [...]

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Outline:

(00:57) Overview

(03:01) Research Progress in 2024

(03:23) 1. Basic Science: Validating SLT

(08:06) 2. Engineering: Scaling to LLMs

(10:43) 3. Alignment: Aiming at Safety

(15:08) Research Outlook for 2025

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

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First published:
February 20th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gGAXSfQaiGBCwBJH5/timaeus-in-2024

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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