We recovered this episode from the depth of lost podcast recordings! We carry on and Tom tells the story of his wonderful sociology turned AI Ph.D. at Berkeley. This comes with plenty of great commentary on the current state of the field and striving for impact. We cover the riverbank of Vienna, the heart of the sperm whale, and deep life lessons. 

This week Tom and Nate catch up on two everlasting themes of ML: compute and evaluation. We chat about AI2, Zuck's GPUs, evaluation as procurement, NIST comments, neglecting reward models, and plenty of other topics. We're on the tracks for 2024 and waiting for some things to happen. Links for what we covered this week:

• Zuck interview on The Verge
• Saturday night live George Washington during revolutionary war
• NIST RFI
• Sam Altman's uncomfortable proposition

We're excited to bring you something special today! Our first cross over episode brings some fresh energy to the podcast. Tom and Nate are joined by Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk (A popular Substack-based publication covering all things China https://www.chinatalk.media/). We cover lots of great ground here, from the economics of Hirschman to the competition from France. All good Patriots should listen to this episode, as we give a real assessment of where competition lies on the U.S.'s path to commercializing AI. Enjoy our best effort at a journal club!

Tom and Nate are ready to kick off the year, but not too ready! There's a ton to be excited about this year, but we're already worried for some parts of it. In this episode, we'll teach you how to be mindful of the so called "other side of ML".
Some links:
- Link to NYT lawsuit techdirt article https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/28/the-ny-times-lawsuit-against-openai-would-open-up-the-ny-times-to-all-sorts-of-lawsuits-should-it-win/
- Link to AI generated talk tool https://github.com/natolambert/interconnects-tools?tab=readme-ov-file#generated-research--video
- They just want to learn https://twitter.com/hamishivi/status/1730633057999483085 and pod episode https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/dario-amodei 

The end of the year is upon us! Tom and Nate bring a reflective mood to the podcast along with some surprises that may be a delight.
Here are some links for the loyal fans:
* RAND + executive order piece: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/15/billionaire-backed-think-tank-played-key-role-in-bidens-ai-order-00132128 
* Sam Altman's blog post we were reading: https://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-wish-someone-had-told-me

No stone is left unturned on this episode. As the end of the year approaches, Tom and Nate check in on all the vibes of the machine learning world: torrents, faked demos, alchemy, weightlifting, actual science, and blogs are all not safe in this episode.
Some links for your weekend:
- AI Alliance: https://thealliance.ai/
- Evaluation gaming on Interconnects: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/evals-are-marketing
- Fupi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtVknbxzn7Q

In this episode, Tom gives us a lesson on all things feedback, mostly where our scientific framings of it came from. 
Together, we link this to RLHF, our previous work in RL, and how we were thinking about agentic ML systems before it was cool.
Join us, on another great blast from the past on The Retort!
We also have brought you video this week!

We break down all the recent events of AI, and live react to some of the news about OpenAI's new super-method, codenamed Q*. From CEOs to rogue AI's, no one can be trusted in today's episode.

Some links to relevant content on Interconnects:
* Discussing how OpenAI's blunders open the doors for openness.
* Detailing what Q* probably is.

We cover all things OpenAI as they embrace their role as a consumer technology company with their first developer keynote.
Lots of links:

• Dev. day keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9mJuUkhUzk 
• Some papers we cover
  • Multinational AGI consortium (by non technical folks) https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09217 
  • Frontier model risk paper that DC loves https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03718 
  • Our Choices, Risk, and Reward Reports paper https://cltc.berkeley.edu/reward-reports/ 
• GPT 2 release blog with discussion of "dangers" of LLMs in 2019 https://openai.com/research/better-language-models 
• 1984 Apple ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I 

We discuss all the big regulation steps in AI this week, from the Biden Administration's Executive Order to the UK AI Safety Summit. 
Links:

• Link the Executive Order
• Link the Mozilla Open Letter 
• The Slaughterbots video 
• UK AI Safety Summit graph/meme