LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Model Organisms for Emergent Misalignment” by Anna Soligo, Edward Turner, Mia Taylor, Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Neel Nanda


Listen Later

Ed and Anna are co-first authors on this work.

TL;DR
  • Emergent Misalignment (EM) showed that fine-tuning LLMs on insecure code caused them to become broadly misaligned. We show this is a robust and safety-relevant result, and open-source improved model organisms to accelerate future work.
  • Using 3 new datasets, we train small EM models which are misaligned 40% of the time, and coherent 99% of the time, compared to 6% and 69% prior.
  • We demonstrate EM in a 0.5B parameter model, and across Qwen, Llama and Gemma model families.
  • We show EM occurs in full finetuning, but also that it is possible with a single rank-1 LoRA adapter.
  • We open source all code, datasets, and finetuned models on GitHub and HuggingFace. Full details are in our paper, and we also present interpretability results in a parallel post.
Introduction

Emergent Misalignment found that fine-tuning models on narrowly misaligned data, such as insecure code [...]

---

Outline:

(00:16) TL;DR

(01:19) Introduction

(03:25) Coherent Emergent Misalignment

(07:02) EM with 0.5B Parameters

(08:11) EM with a Full Supervised Finetune

(09:13) EM with a Single Rank 1 LoRA Adapter

(10:01) Future Work

(11:05) Contributions

(11:33) Acknowledgments

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

June 16th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yHmJrDSJpFaNTZ9Tr/model-organisms-for-emergent-misalignment

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

...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

26,361 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,428 Listeners

The Peter Attia Drive by Peter Attia, MD

The Peter Attia Drive

8,957 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

4,145 Listeners

ManifoldOne by Steve Hsu

ManifoldOne

92 Listeners

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

Your Undivided Attention

1,591 Listeners

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

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

9,911 Listeners

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

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

90 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

72 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,471 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

16,083 Listeners

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis by PHD Ventures

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

537 Listeners

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups by Conviction

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

131 Listeners

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by swyx + Alessio

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

94 Listeners

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley by BG2Pod

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley

511 Listeners