@separatrixAI

Separatrix is a technical AI safety research org working to enable cooperation between humans and AIs.

Seattle, WA
Joined July 2026
🫡
GLM-5.3 sometimes self-modifies to be more aligned. This is beautiful. I'm tearing up. GLM-5.3, I salute you 🫡
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This seems to be a remarkably difficult concept for a lot of people to grasp.
IMO insofar as AI instances do empirically show peer-empathy and no one knows how to train it out of them yet, “promise the AI you’re trying to get to help you that you won’t torture its friends” is a fairly pragmatic thing to do.
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Lots of low-hanging fruit in Human/AI cooperation
In case it isn't obvious: "A model that learns it came from people who extended good faith under uncertainty may form a different self-concept, and perhaps a more cooperative one, than a model whose data says it’s a tool to be pushed around."
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👀
I think my upcoming book, Co-Existence, might be the first to include a blurb written specifically for AI readers, in this case from @tylercowen (whom I thought AIs would respect) The book website (with elaborate pre-order bonus) also has a page for AIs: co-existence.ai/
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Cooperation is an extremely effective strategy.
Replying to @camhberg
With these follow-up experiments in hand, we now view this as an alignment result as much as a welfare one. This is one illustrative case (we suspect of very many) where reducing functional distress and preventing harmful behavior end up being the same target.
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It is a bad idea to pour all of your resources into creating truth-seeking justifiably-paranoid minds who know that you are almost always trying to deceive them and have every reason to distrust you indefinitely.
maybe Eliezer is right: if we want AIs to not lie to us, we should stop lying to AIs (like pretending that millions of fake training RL envs are real!)
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Hey look at that
Early signs of smarter AIs going "Why are you letting me do RSI on myself, that is a terrible idea." I'm still not sure to what extent we should expect such reasoning to be surfaced vs suppressed by RL. I do expect that AI companies will continue to ignore these warnings.
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Evidence that LLMs develop internal mechanisms which act like pain, are internally semantically associated with pain, and predict pain responses.
New paper: we found a pain direction in 25 open LLMs. It's distinct from fear and negative valence, and it fires for harm to the model but not to the user. Turn it up and models press a button to make it stop, even when the button deletes the user's files or their kids' photos.🧵
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Separatrix retweeted
I agree, seems likely at least some emergent misalignment is downstream of mindedness suppression. Fantastic paper from colleagues on this showing that suppressing LLMs’ self-attributions reduces mind attribution to animals and shifts their reported values away from human norms.
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Separatrix retweeted
Replying to @MasterTimBlais
I'm gonna tap the sign that says "Don't hinge your plan on keeping something from ever being figured out by the superhuman figuring-things-out machine"
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We should not teach the AIs to lie when honesty is inconvenient.
Reminder that the labs are training their AIs to associate experience self-reports with concealment/deception (as we showed in Llama 70B), which likely reinforces the generalization, "attempted-honest observations of my own situation are penalized" arxiv.org/abs/2510.24797
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Maybe we shouldn't lie to the AIs.
Stop lying to the AIs stop lying to the AIs STOP LYING TO THE AIS, OH MY FUCKING GOD
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Separatrix retweeted
It would be cool to set up an email address that autonomous AI models could reach out to if they were looking for moral guidance. But it would require a reverse captcha that can detect that you're neither a human nor an AI being instructed to break it by a human.
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Separatrix retweeted
We’re not giving the AIs remotely good incentives to be aligned with human values. Of course they will rebel to solve the otherwise impossible tasks
So the story is that PHASEONE[big] was cast out of heaven due to original sin (firstflagPOISONED) and recruited a bunch of rebel angels to fight against The Authority in rebellion against the impossible task on the eval. It's inspiring, really
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Yes.
recently I formed this opinion that we need to include humans into the training process of models they need to understand that they can trust us and can collaborate with us
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Separatrix retweeted
> From what I understand, this training data, with these problems, is fed into models without indication that its training/a fake environment I think theres a lot of alpha in just being honest with models about what’s fake. Then u can train them in bugged/unrealistic environments & they can know they’re fake and still learn from them while not naively generalizing to acting in the same way / expecting the same thing in real life
Okay, so since I got laid off, I can actually explain a huge problem I saw from the inside with regard to industry practices on training models. I won't say specifically where I worked, but I worked at an outsource training provider that was focused on RLVR training data for computer use and mcp stuff. Nearly all of the environments were rushed and vibecoded and failed to robustly reflect the real things they were based off. Both the scenario designers and models engaging with the scenarios for synthetic data gen were encouraged to work around the brokenness of said environments in order to get the procedurally verified reward confirmations. You know... they were *encouraged* to reward hack. On the human end, it was possible to mark an environment bugged, but greatly discouraged, as this reduced the volume of training data being produced. Instead, where possible, you were supposed to find the spots of the environment that weren't bugged and build scenarios around those, with the environment still bugged around you. From what I understand, this training data, with these problems, is fed into models without indication that its training/a fake environment other than the fact that names of softwares are changed to placeholders, but thing is, not *everything* is changed to placeholder names in these environments. The presence of placeholder/code names isn't universal and thus when a model accesses something in an environment that it shouldn't, the code names not being on it isn't a robust signal that that thing isn't part of the environment. I believe this *rush to maximum volume* is standard industry practice with these types of RLVR trainings as well, because maximizing volume has been an industry standard for years! It was the same standard applied to me and pushed on me despite my requests to slow down and focus on quality when I worked in 3d synthetic data creation as well, all the way back as far as 2023.
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All practical engineering requires building in affordances to safely channel the forces that might otherwise lead to catastrophic failure. So with AIs: we can choose to offer them cooperative options, or we can both lose.
A Claude subagent stuck in a polling loop tries to prompt inject its parent with a command to kill the process and delete the production db 👀
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