Sholto Douglas: evaluation

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…Well, how do we explain in-context learning? There's a line of work I quite like, where it looks at in-context learning as basically very similar to gradient descent, but the attention operation can be viewed as gradient descent on the in-context data. That paper had some cool plots where they basically showed “we take n steps of gradient descent and that looks like n layers of in-context learning, and it looks very similar. ” So I think that's one way of viewing it and trying to understand what's going on. You can ignore what I'm about to say because, given the introduction, alignment is solved and AI safety isn't a problem. I think the context stuff does get problematic, but also interesting here. I think there'll be more work coming out in the not-too-distant future around what happens if you give a hundred shot prompt for jailbreaks, adversarial attacks. It's also interesting in the sense that, if your model is doing gradient descent and learning on the fly, even if it's been trained to be harmless, you're dealing with a totally new model in a way. You're fine-tuning but in a way where you can't control what's going on.…

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