Timaeus was announced in late October 2023, with the mission of making fundamental breakthroughs in technical AI alignment using deep ideas from mathematics and the sciences. This is our first progress update.

In service of the mission, our first priority has been to support and contribute to ongoing work in Singular Learning Theory (SLT) and developmental interpretability, with the aim of laying theoretical and empirical foundations for a science of deep learning and neural network interpretability.

Our main uncertainties in this research were:

• Is SLT useful in deep learning? While SLT is mathematically established, it was not clear whether the central quantities of SLT could be estimated at sufficient scale, and whether SLT's predictions actually held for realistic models (esp. language models). 
• Does structure in neural networks form in phase transitions? The idea of developmental interpretability was to view phase transitions as a core primitive in the [...]

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Outline:

(01:57) Contributions

(02:17) Research Contributions

(02:21) What we learned

(04:33) Papers

(05:45) Outreach Contributions

(05:49) Posts

(06:43) Code

(06:57) Talks

(07:19) Events

(08:11) Organization

(08:27) What we need

(09:08) Whats next

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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