Camila Blank

I’m funding two of my MATS scholars for two months each for work done on a paper explaining what’s going on with subliminal learning. This was during a period when they were not funded by the main MATS programme, paid at the same rates as MATS. While there is an obvious conflict of interest, since I supervised the paper, I do not financially profit and my bar for mentoring people is noticeably higher than my bar for funding them, so I am not too worried about this. And I think this is a great paper! Subliminal learning is a mysterious phenomenon of wide interest, and I think the forthcoming paper provides a satisfying explanation. Basic science on mysterious phenomena in LLMs is valuable work in a bunch of hard to foresee ways.