Rohin Shah
speaker
1,071 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 2 Jun
Rohin Shah’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
don't do the academic thing of using a fancy method to solve your problem and instead solve it with the absolute simplest method you can.
that's that's the generous uh that's the generous version yeah uh the the cynical version is more like academia rewards complex formal looking stuff and poorly tuned bass lines it won't reward poorly tuned bass lines if it knows that poorly tuned but it's like it's kind of hard to tell if a bass line has been poorly tuned or not and so often what's a poorly tuned bass line
Sorry, a poorly tuned baseline is like, you know, you have some default way of solving the problem that you are trying to do better than.
Do you make the baseline look bad by not doing a very good job of it?
That's right, but not intentionally.
It will often be like, you know, you implement the baseline once, and then you don't tune the hyperparameters for it, and so it performs less well than it really should.
It's just like very easy to not spend enough time working with your baseline to make it work well.
And then as a result- It makes your other thing look better.
Exactly.
And given the incentives in academia of like publishing novel things and publishing a lot, I think this is a fairly common problem.
So I think if you want to publish, that tends to be the thing that you do.
If you want your research to be used by people like companies, it's quite important that you try the obvious stuff and you try fairly hard with the obvious stuff.
And only if that really does fail do you try to do something fancier.
Yeah, I think probably the one I would point to most is the AI control work from Redwood Research.
I think we were always planning to monitor our AI systems.
It's not like the idea of monitoring was new to us, but the specific conceptual frameworks they brought to how you might evaluate how well this works, specifically the distinction between trusted and untrusted models.
I think that was quite good.
The first paper they published on it that showed how a variety of different control protocols, how you can evaluate their safety and their usefulness and use this to decide which one you should be doing.
I think that's influenced me quite a lot on how exactly I think about the control work.
I think that's probably the most obvious example.
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