Nathan Lambert
speaker
1,814 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 1 Feb
Nathan Lambert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's essentially a rehash of a paper I wrote years ago.
But this is essentially the chapter that will tell you why RLHF is never, ever fully solvable.
Because the way that even RL is set up is that...
it assumes that preferences can be quantified and that multiple preferences can be reduced to single values.
And I think it relates in the economics literature to the Von Neumann-Morgenstein utility theorem.
And that is the chapter where all of that...
philosophical, economic, and like psychological context, it tells you what gets compressed into doing RLHF.
So it's like you have all of this.
And then later in the book, it's like you use this RL math to make the number go up.
And I think that that's why I think it would be very rewarding for people to do research on is because it's like quantifying preferences is something that is just like humans have designed the problem in order to make preferences studyable.
But there's kind of fundamental debates on like,
An example is in a language model response, you have different things you care about, whether it's accuracy or in style.
And when you're collecting the data, they all get compressed into like, I like this more than another.
And it's like, that is happening.
And there's a lot of research in other areas of the world that go into like, how should you actually do this?
I think social choice theory is the...
subfield of economics around how you should aggregate preferences.
And there's like, I went to a workshop that published a white paper on like, how can you think about using social choice theory for ROHF?
So I mostly would want people that get excited about the math to come and have things where they can stumble into and learn this kind of broader context.
I think there's a fun thing.
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