Jakob Foerster
@j_foerst
Assoc Prof in ML @UniofOxford @StAnnesCollege @FLAIR_Ox/ RS @MetaAI, 2x dad. Ex: (A)PM @Google, DivStrat @GS, ex intern: @GoogleDeepmind, @GoogleBrain, @OpenAI
Making offline RL more honest, reproducible, and robust.
🌹 Today we're releasing Unifloral, our new library for Offline Reinforcement Learning! We make research easy: ⚛️ Single-file 🤏 Minimal ⚡️ End-to-end Jax Best of all, we unify prior methods into one algorithm - a single hyperparameter space for research! ⤵️
1/ 🕵️ Algorithm discovery could lead to huge AI breakthroughs! But what is the best way to learn or discover new algorithms? I'm so excited to share our brand new @rl_conference paper which takes a step towards answering this! 🧵
I’m building a new team at @GoogleDeepMind to work on Open-Ended Discovery! We’re looking for strong Research Scientists and Research Engineers to help us push the frontier of autonomously discovering novel artifacts such as new knowledge, capabilities, or algorithms, in an…
How can we extend the scientific method to cover recent events / the news.
👏👏👏 great work by a great friend.
📜 Today, we’re publishing our latest work in Nature introducing Aeneas, the first AI model for connecting the past.
Today (w/ @UniofOxford @Stanford @MIT @LSEnews) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19 LLMs, 707 political issues. We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more 🧵
Amazing opportunity! Please forward to anyone who might be interested. 🙏
Hiring! We're looking to fill contractor Research Engineer roles in New York City to work with us in FAIR on AI Research Agents. If that sounds fun, please fill out the expression of interest here: forms.gle/7m4fVqLXY5GwuL…
It’s time for the American AI community to wake up, drop the "open is not safe" bullshit, and return to its roots: open science and open-source AI, powered by an unmatched community of frontier labs, big tech, startups, universities, and non‑profits. If we don’t, we’ll be forced…
Love to see this from @WhiteHouse!
Could someone please replicate under a clean scientific setup and report back? Seems important of true.
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
Standard: Prompt -> response ✖️ (lacks diversity) Ours: Prompt -> intent, {prompt, intent} -> response ✔️ (high diversity and quality) Works everywhere we tried out of the box. That's it. Use it if you are not doing so already.
Unlock the Hidden Diversity in Your Language Model. In our new paper, Intent Factored Generation (IFG), we propose an inference time method to increase the diversity of generations from LLMs. IFG leads to improvements in searching for solutions to maths and code problems. (1/6)
My team at @AISecurityInst is hiring! This is an awesome opportunity to get involved with cutting-edge scientific research inside government on frontier AI models. I genuinely love my job and the team 🤗 Link: civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi?j… More Info: ⬇️
Welcome!
Last week, I joined Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL)! This is going to be an exciting ride! 🚀
Btw as an aside, we didn’t announce on Friday because we respected the IMO Board's original request that all AI labs share their results only after the official results had been verified by independent experts & the students had rightly received the acclamation they deserved
Would there be a way for big tech to "donate" the unused hours on their massive GPU clusters to open science and open-source AI developers? Could add up to significant amounts put to good use?
This paper scores very highly on the simplicity / ability Pareto frontier.
Unlock real diversity in your LLM! 🚀 LLM outputs can be boring and repetitive. Today, we release Intent Factored Generation (IFG) to: - Sample conceptually diverse outputs💡 - Improve performance on math and code reasoning tasks🤔 - Get more engaging conversational agents 🤖
Do you have a PhD (or equivalent) or will have one in the coming months (i.e. 2-3 months away from graduating)? Do you want to help build open-ended agents that help humans do humans things better, rather than replace them? We're hiring 1-2 Research Scientists! Check the 🧵👇
Gradual Disempowerment puts a name to one of the greatest and least controversial AI risks. How to maintain our current balance of power and human autonomy is one of the most pressing questions of our generation.
We're presenting ICML Position "Humanity Faces Existential Risk from Gradual Disempowerment" : come talk to us today East Exhibition Hall E-503. @DavidDuvenaud @raymondadouglas @AmmannNora @DavidSKrueger Also: meet Mary, protagonist of our poster.
Jakob’s lab at Oxford would be an amazing place to work on Full-Stack Alignment!
The term "AI alignment" is often used without specifying "to whom?" and much of the work on AI alignment in practice looks more like "AI controllability" without answering "who controls the controller?" (i.e. user or operator). One key challenge is that alignment is fundamentally…
Faster computers allow us to scale current methods to improve performance. But in the long term the bigger effect is that more compute allows us to improve our algorithms faster by running more experiments. This is commonly ignored as a scaling effect.