LawrenceC(Lawrence Chan)

Karma: 4,851

I do AI Alignment research. Currently independent, but previously at: METR, Redwood, UC Berkeley, Good Judgment Project.

I’m also a part-time fund manager for the LTFF.

Obligatory research billboard website: https://chanlawrence.me/

Book Review: Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications (MIRI Course List)

LawrenceC14 Apr 2015 9:08 UTC

21 points

12 comments8 min readLW link

Paper: Discovering novel algorithms with AlphaTensor [Deepmind]

LawrenceC5 Oct 2022 16:20 UTC

82 points

18 comments1 min readLW link

(www.deepmind.com)

Paper: In-context Reinforcement Learning with Algorithm Distillation [Deepmind]

LawrenceC26 Oct 2022 18:45 UTC

29 points

5 comments1 min readLW link

(arxiv.org)

Causal Scrubbing: a method for rigorously testing interpretability hypotheses [Redwood Research]

LawrenceC, Adrià Garriga-alonso, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, ryan_greenblatt, jenny, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Buck and Nate Thomas

3 Dec 2022 0:58 UTC

197 points

35 comments20 min readLW link 1 review

Causal scrubbing: Appendix

LawrenceC, Adrià Garriga-alonso, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, ryan_greenblatt, jenny, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Buck and Nate Thomas

3 Dec 2022 0:58 UTC

17 points

4 comments20 min readLW link

Causal scrubbing: results on a paren balance checker

LawrenceC, Adrià Garriga-alonso, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, ryan_greenblatt, Tao Lin, jenny, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Buck and Nate Thomas

3 Dec 2022 0:59 UTC

34 points

2 comments30 min readLW link

Causal scrubbing: results on induction heads

LawrenceC, Adrià Garriga-alonso, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, ryan_greenblatt, Tao Lin, jenny, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Buck and Nate Thomas

3 Dec 2022 0:59 UTC

34 points

1 comment17 min readLW link

Paper: Transformers learn in-context by gradient descent

LawrenceC16 Dec 2022 11:10 UTC

28 points

11 comments2 min readLW link

(arxiv.org)

Paper: Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback (Anthropic)

LawrenceC16 Dec 2022 22:12 UTC

68 points

11 comments1 min readLW link

(www.anthropic.com)

Shard Theory in Nine Theses: a Distillation and Critical Appraisal

LawrenceC19 Dec 2022 22:52 UTC

138 points

30 comments18 min readLW link

Touch reality as soon as possible (when doing machine learning research)

LawrenceC3 Jan 2023 19:11 UTC

107 points

7 comments8 min readLW link

Paper: Superposition, Memorization, and Double Descent (Anthropic)

LawrenceC5 Jan 2023 17:54 UTC

53 points

11 comments1 min readLW link

(transformer-circuits.pub)

Evaluations (of new AI Safety researchers) can be noisy

LawrenceC5 Feb 2023 4:15 UTC

130 points

10 comments16 min readLW link

OpenAI/Microsoft announce “next generation language model” integrated into Bing/Edge

LawrenceC7 Feb 2023 20:38 UTC

79 points

4 comments1 min readLW link

(blogs.microsoft.com)

Paper: The Capacity for Moral Self-Correction in Large Language Models (Anthropic)

LawrenceC16 Feb 2023 19:47 UTC

65 points

9 comments1 min readLW link

(arxiv.org)

Behavioral and mechanistic definitions (often confuse AI alignment discussions)

LawrenceC20 Feb 2023 21:33 UTC

33 points

5 comments6 min readLW link

Meta “open sources” LMs competitive with Chinchilla, PaLM, and code-davinci-002 (Paper)

LawrenceC24 Feb 2023 19:57 UTC

38 points

19 comments1 min readLW link

(research.facebook.com)

Sam Altman: “Planning for AGI and beyond”

LawrenceC24 Feb 2023 20:28 UTC

104 points

54 comments6 min readLW link

(openai.com)

Natural Abstractions: Key claims, Theorems, and Critiques

LawrenceC, Leon Lang and Erik Jenner

16 Mar 2023 16:37 UTC

206 points

20 comments45 min readLW link

[Appendix] Natural Abstractions: Key Claims, Theorems, and Critiques

LawrenceC, Erik Jenner and Leon Lang

16 Mar 2023 16:38 UTC

46 points

0 comments13 min readLW link