Where the challenge of aligning an LLM-based AI comes from, and the obvious solution.
** Evolutionary Psychology is the Root Cause**
LLMs are pre-trained using stochastic gradient-descent on very large amounts of human-produced text, normally drawn from the web, books, journal articles and so forth. A pre-trained LLM has learned in detail how to simulate all the different human text-generation processes that produced this text — everything from a cooperatively edited wikipedia article to shit-postings. We are thus 'distilling' human intelligence into the pre-trained LLM.[1]
This has many advantages for alignment: an LLM pre-trained this way understands and produces output using human language and ontologies, and also has a deep understanding of human values and ethics — thus avoiding a number of issues around alignment that were major concerns before it became apparent that our first AGI was very likely to be based on or at least incorporate an LLM.
January 23rd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XdpJsY6QGdCbvo2dS/why-aligning-an-llm-is-hard-and-how-to-make-it-easier)
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO).
