AI Summer

Nathan Lambert is the author of the popular AI newsletter Interconnects. He is also a research scientist who leads post-training at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research organization funded by the estate of Paul Allen. This means that the organization can afford to train its own models—and it’s one of the only such organizations committed to doing so in an open manner. So Lambert is one of the few people with hands-on experience building cutting-edge LLMs who can talk freely about his work. In this December 17 conversation, Lambert walked us through the steps required to train a modern model and explained how the process is evolving. Note that this conversation was recorded before OpenAI announced its new o3 model later in the month.Links mentioned during the interview:The Allen Institute's Tülu 3 blog postThe Allen Institute's OLMo 2 modelThe original paper that introduced RLHFNathan Lambert on OpenAI's reinforcement fine-tuning API This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aisummer.org

Jon Askonas, an Assistant Professor of Politics at Catholic University of America, is well connected to conservatives and Republicans in Washington DC. In this December 16 conversation, he talked to Tim and Dean about Silicon Valley’s evolving relationship to the Republican party, who will be involved in AI policy in the second Trump Administration, and what AI policy issues are likely to be be prioritized—he predicts it won’t be existential risk. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aisummer.org