Sometimes people talk about two AIs being “the same” or “different” AIs. We think the intuitive binary of “same vs. different” conflates several concepts which are often better to disambiguate. In this post, we spell out some of these distinctions. We don’t think anything here is particularly novel; we wrote this post because we think it's probably mildly helpful for people to think this through, and because Buck fairly often wants to reference it.

Some example distinctions:

• In a debate protocol[1], people often refer to the judge and debaters as three “different” AIs because their tokens are subject to different training incentives. But you could also say that the two debaters are “the same AI” because their prompts and context look similar. Or you could say that all three are the “same AI” because they were [...]

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Outline:

(02:32) Model identity

(03:13) Shared activations and shared context

(04:22) Shared memory

(04:53) Shared reward

(06:44) Shared role in training

(08:34) Acknowledgements

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.