#222 – Can we tell if an AI is loyal by reading its mind? DeepMind's Neel Nanda (part 1)

We don’t know how AIs think or why they do what they do. Or at least, we don’t know much. That fact is only becoming more troubling as AIs grow more capable and appear on track to wield enormous cultural influence, directly advise on major government decisions, and even operate military equipment autonomously. We simply can’t tell what models, if any, should be trusted with such authority.

Neel Nanda of Google DeepMind is one of the founding figures of the field of machine learning trying to fix this situation — mechanistic interpretability (or “mech interp”). The project...