LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“AI safety techniques leveraging distillation” by ryan_greenblatt


Listen Later

It's currently possible to (mostly or fully) cheaply reproduce the performance of a model by training another (initially weaker) model to imitate the stronger model's outputs.[1] I'll refer to this as distillation. In the case of RL, distilling the learned capabilities is much, much cheaper than the RL itself (especially if you are distilling back into the original base model). But even for pre-training, distilling is cheaper than the original training.[2]

In this post, I'll discuss how we could utilize distillation to potentially remove (or possibly detect) misalignment. I'll also discuss a few other applications.[3] My overall take is that techniques utilizing distillation are mildly to moderately promising and the low cost of distillation might make them surprisingly viable, but it's quite tricky to reason about how effective these techniques are.

Distilling to remove misalignment

I'll assume that we have a powerful model[4] that we're worried [...]

---

Outline:

(01:01) Distilling to remove misalignment

(11:16) Detecting problematic actions using (distillation) training

(15:01) How does distillation interact with neuralese?

(15:57) Other techniques leveraging distillation

(16:01) Distillation as a (non-mechanistic) interpretability technique

(17:13) Distillation for precise capability and knowledge control

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

June 19th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8KKujApx4g7FBm6hE/ai-safety-techniques-leveraging-distillation

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

LessWrong (30+ Karma)By LessWrong


More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)

View all
Making Sense with Sam Harris by Sam Harris

Making Sense with Sam Harris

26,469 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,395 Listeners

The Peter Attia Drive by Peter Attia, MD

The Peter Attia Drive

7,953 Listeners

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll | Wondery

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

4,142 Listeners

ManifoldOne by Steve Hsu

ManifoldOne

89 Listeners

Your Undivided Attention by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology

Your Undivided Attention

1,472 Listeners

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg by All-In Podcast, LLC

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

9,207 Listeners

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

88 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

417 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,461 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,321 Listeners

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis by PHD Ventures

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

482 Listeners

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups by Conviction

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

121 Listeners

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by swyx + Alessio

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

75 Listeners

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley by BG2Pod

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley

461 Listeners