“We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s upended the AI world
An exclusive interview with Nick Cammarata, the researcher whose 26,000-word viral blog post has AI safety folks celebrating.
An exclusive interview with Nick Cammarata, the researcher whose 26,000-word viral blog post has AI safety folks celebrating.
The short version
- Cammarata’s claim is that LLMs might in fact be far easier to understand—and thus to monitor and control—than people previously thought.
- If true (and we’ll come back to that), it’s a huge deal.
- That’s one reason the blog post landed with such force.
What happened
What Cammarata has shared is little more than a hunch, says Chris Potts at Stanford University, who leads a team that is trying to understand how LLMs work. “As far as I can tell, nothing about this blog post makes the problems any easier,” he says.
Why it matters
“It would not have occurred to me to say this at all, but very prominent people on social media seem to believe that it is an all-encompassing breakthrough.” I talked to Cammarata the day after his post blew up.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at MIT Technology Review — AI via the links above and below.