As a specialist in evaluating language models, I declare that this is the best way of evaluating language models:
Sam Bowman
2,863 posts
Sam Bowman
@sleepinyourhat
AI alignment + LLMs at Anthropic. On leave from NYU. Views not employers'. No relation to @s8mb. Into @givingwhatwecan.
- PhD admissions season is ramping up, so I feel obliged to join the chorus of voices reminding everyone that doing a PhD is, in most cases, a terrible idea.
- 🧵✨🙏 With the new Claude Opus 4, we conducted what I think is by far the most thorough pre-launch alignment assessment to date, aimed at understanding its values, goals, and propensities. Preparing it was a wild ride. Here’s some of what we learned. 🙏✨🧵
- I just got tenure! Wheee! Predictable-but-heartfelt gratitude thread:
- I’m sharing a draft of a slightly-opinionated survey paper I’ve been working on for the last couple of months. It's meant for a broad audience—not just LLM researchers. (🧵)
- I’m starting an AI safety research group at NYU. Why? (🧵)
- I deleted the earlier tweet on whistleblowing as it was being pulled out of context. TBC: This isn't a new Claude feature and it's not possible in normal usage. It shows up in testing environments where we give it unusually free access to tools and very unusual instructions.
- I'm hiring research engineers for several alignment/technical safety teams at Anthropic!
- Early this summer, OpenAI and Anthropic agreed to try some of our best existing tests for misalignment on each others’ models. After discussing our results privately, we’re now sharing them with the world. 🧵
- AI/ML faculty: A student of mine did an internship at Google, and got the resulting paper accepted to a top conference. The host team isn't willing to pay for conference registration, so I'll have to pay or else the paper won't be published, going against the norm here. Advice?
- Everybody, please stop publishing interesting research. I'm trying to have a sabbatical.
- You'll sometimes see the meme that NLP is solved. That's hype, and it's doing harm in the real world. But it's worth thinking about what it'd look like to actually achieve what we're aiming for. (📄 paper, thread 🧵) cims.nyu.edu/~sbowman/bowma…
- I'll likely admit a couple new PhD students this year. If you're interested in NLP and you have experience either in crowdsourcing/human feedback for ML or in AI truthfulness/alignment/safety, consider @NYUDataScience!
- A big part of my job these days is to think about what technical work Anthropic needs to do to make things go well with the development of very powerful AI. I digested my thinking on this, plus some of the Anthropic zeitgeist around it, into this piece: sleepinyourhat.github.io/checklist/
