Do language models understand the causal structure of the world, or do they merely note correlations? And what happens when you build a big AI society out of them? In this brief episode, recorded at the Bay Area Alignment Workshop, I chat with Zhijing Jin about her research on these questions. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/axrpodcast Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/axrpodcast The transcript: https://axrp.net/episode/2024/11/14/episode-38_0-zhijing-jin-llms-causality-multi-agent-systems.html FAR.AI: https://far.ai/ FAR.AI on X (aka Twitter): https://x.com/farairesearch FAR.AI on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FARAIResearch The Alignment Workshop: https://www.alignment-workshop.com/ Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 00:35 - How the Alignment Workshop is 00:47 - How Zhijing got interested in causality and natural language processing 03:14 - Causality and alignment 06:21 - Causality without randomness 10:07 - Causal abstraction 11:42 - Why LLM causal reasoning? 13:20 - Understanding LLM causal reasoning 16:33 - Multi-agent systems Links: Zhijing's website: https://zhijing-jin.com/fantasy/ Zhijing on X (aka Twitter): https://x.com/zhijingjin Can Large Language Models Infer Causation from Correlation?: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05836 Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agents: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16698 Episode art by Hamish Doodles: hamishdoodles.com

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