Research Notes, Announcements, and Technical Essays

Latest Posts

Tracing Subliminal Learning Through Pretraining

Oct 25, 2026

Cross-model distillation shows subliminal learning survives differences in initialization, data order, corpus, size, and architecture — and that transmitting and acquiring a preference are separable abilities.

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What We Learned Trying to Catch AI Liars: An Aletheia's Quest Retrospective

Aug 25, 2026

What we learned while building black-box and white-box detectors for AI deception during Aletheia's Quest.

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FineBooks: are open OCR models good enough to unlock historical knowledge?

Aug 10, 2026

Testing open OCR models on historical books with the FineBooks BHL OCR Leaderboard.

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Recent Archive

A Dynamical Model of AI Governability

Jul 13, 2026 · David Johnston

A toy dynamical model of whether the AI workforce that builds future AI ends up cooperative or uncooperative: where the basin boundary lies, what current evidence says about which side we are on, and what would tell us we are on the good path.

Attention Probes

Aug 1, 2025 · Stepan Shabalin, Nora Belrose

Adding attention to linear probes

Studying inductive biases of random networks via local volumes

Jun 12, 2025 · Louis Jaburi, Nora Belrose

In this post, we will study inductive biases of the parameter-function map of random neural networks using star domain volume estimates. This builds on the ideas introduced in Estimating the Probability of Sampling a …

The Common Pile v0.1

Jun 5, 2025 · Stella Biderman, Sebastian Majstorovic, Aviya Skowron

Announcing the Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text

RLHF and RLAIF in GPT-NeoX

Oct 10, 2024 · Dakota Mahan, Quentin Anthony, Louis Castricato, Nathan Lile, Stella Biderman

GPT-NeoX now supports post-training thanks to a collaboration with SynthLabs.