We’ve added four new benchmarks to the Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub: Aider Polyglot, WeirdML, Balrog, and Factorio Learning Environment!
Before we only featured our own evaluation results, but this new data comes from trusted external leaderboards. And we've got more on the way 🧵
4. Factorio Learning Environment by Jack Hopkins, Märt Bakler , and
@akbir.bsky.social
This benchmark uses the factory-building game Factorio to test complex, long-term planning, with settings for lab-play (structured tasks) and open-play (unbounded growth).
jackhopkins.github.io/factorio-lea...
New Anthropic blog post: Subtle sabotage in automated researchers.
As AI systems increasingly assist with AI research, how do we ensure they're not subtly sabotaging that research? We show that malicious models can undermine ML research tasks in ways that are hard to detect.
control is a complimentary approach to alignment.
its really sensible, practical and can be done now, even before systems are superintelligent.
youtu.be/6Unxqr50Kqg?...
This is a crazy paper. Fine-tuning a big GPT-4o on a small amount of insecure code or even "bad numbers" (like 666) makes them misaligned in almost everything else. They are more likely to start offering misinformation, spouting anti-human values, and talk about admiring dictators. Why is unclear.
This is the entire goal
Trump announces 500B in AI funding. Five days ago.
Deepseek r1 release. 8 days ago.
The fact that Deepseek R1 was released three days /before/ Stargate means these guys stood in front of Trump and said they needed half a trillion dollars while they knew R1 was open source and trained for $5M.
Beautiful.
Can anyone get a shorter DeepSeek R1 CoT than this?
Process based supervision done right, and with pretty CIDs to illustrate :)
I don’t really have the energy for politics right now. So I will observe without comment:
Executive Order 14110 was revoked (Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence)
R1 model is impressive
David Lynch smirking in an interview -Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film. -Elaborate on that. -No.
New randomized, controlled trial by the World Bank of students using GPT-4 as a tutor in Nigeria. Six weeks of after-school AI tutoring = 2 years of typical learning gains, outperforming 80% of other educational interventions.
And it helped all students, especially girls who were initially behind.
Generative AI has flaws and biases, and there is a tendency for academics to fix on that (85% of equity LLM papers focus on harms)…
…yet in many ways LLMs are uniquely powerful among new technologies for helping people equitably in education and healthcare. We need an urgent focus on how to do that
On one hand, this paper finds adding inference-time compute (like o1 does) improves medical reasoning, which is an important finding suggesting a way to continue to improve AI performance in medicine
On the other hand, scientific illustrations are apparently just anime now arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06458
my metabolism is noticeably higher in london than the bay.
What can AI researchers do *today* that AI developers will find useful for ensuring the safety of future advanced AI systems? To ring in the new year, the Anthropic Alignment Science team is sharing some thoughts on research directions we think are important.
alignment.anthropic.com/2025/recomme...
My hottest take is that nothing makes any sense at all outside of the context of the constantly increasing value of human life, but that increase in value is so invisible (and exists in a world that was built for previous, lower values) that we constantly think the opposite has happened.
wait what does that mean?
Does it mean there are bugs in lean, or that it does too much work to check a proof?
wait isn’t everything just regularisation?
no - why isn’t lean suffice?
like i really have outgrown most scenarios where i think my race has held me back but this one won’t let go
Nothing kills my excitement of returning to the US like the response i get from CBP officers.
Felix Hill and some other DMers and I after cold water swimming at Parliament Hill Lido a few years ago
Felix Hill was such an incredible mentor — and occasional cold water swimming partner — to me. He's a huge part of why I joined DeepMind and how I've come to approach research. Even a month later, it's still hard to believe he's gone.
A brilliant colleague and wonderful soul Felix Hill recently passed away. This was a shock and in an effort to sort some things out, I wrote them down. Maybe this will help someone else, but at the very least it helped me. Rest in peace, Felix, you will be missed. www.janexwang.com/blog/2025/1/...
