Oly Sourbut

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832 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 20 Jan

Oly Sourbut’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Future of Life Institute Podcast · How AI Can Help Humanity Reason Better (with Oly Sourbut) · 20 Jan 2026 podcast

And the trouble is, of course, as soon as you've got ML components, it's much harder to scrutinize those.

And it definitely has been demonstrated it's certainly possible to kind of hide biases in them.

through training or even a kind of lightweight fine tuning on top at the end.

So this gets a bit harder.

So yes, if some institution or some organization publishes an ML component of such a system, even if they make it kind of open source in this sense, which is more like open binary, then that trust problem remains.

And this is where we go back to, well,

are the ways that we can generalizably evaluate for the kind of non-bias, honesty, all these kinds of epistemic virtues that you might want from such a component.

And then can you trust plugging that into your open source software, which is the scaffold and so on.

And maybe the kind of trust is able to kind of be built in this piecemeal way, which adds up to some level of justified trust.

But yeah, trust is a difficult problem.

For the kind of epistemic stack concept that I was very vaguely gesturing at you about, that Ben and I recently have written on, one of the ways that we would hope to achieve trust would be through potentially open sourcing of various tools that are kind of feeding into the system, and also

Another source of trust is kind of participatory input or participatory input in principle.

So if you look at Wikipedia, almost no one actually bothers to contribute to Wikipedia.

I learned that I'm extremely rare in doing so.

But you know that you can in principle go and look at the history of edits.

You know that you can in principle go and look at the conversation about a given page.

You know that you can even in principle contribute portions or edits to the page.

And so I think that gives a certain amount of trust as well.

Although under intense adversarial pressure, even that kind of participativeness can apparently not be sufficient to justify trust for some people.

So yeah, there are various ways of building trust and a lot of them don't come through.

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