Dodging Latent Space Detectors: Obfuscated Activation Attacks with Luke, Erik, and Scott.

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, Nathan explores the groundbreaking paper on obfuscated activations with 3 members from the research team - Luke Bailey, Eric Jenner, and Scott Emmons. The team discusses how their work challenges latent-based defenses in AI systems, demonstrating methods to bypass safety mechanisms while maintaining harmful behaviors. Join us for an in-depth technical conversation about AI safety, interpretability, and the ongoing challenge of creating robust defense systems.

Do check out the "Obfuscated Activations Bypass LLM Latent-Space Defenses" paper here: https://obfuscated-activations.github.io/

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CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) Teaser

(00:00:46) About the Episode

(00:05:11) Latent Space Defenses

(00:08:41) Sleeper Agents

(00:15:06) Three Case Studies (Part 1)

(00:17:02) Sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) | NetSuite

(00:19:42) Three Case Studies (Part 2)

(00:24:09) SQL Generation

(00:26:17) Understanding Defenses

(00:32:52) Out-of-Distribution Detection (Part 1)

(00:35:37) Sponsors: Shopify | Vanta

(00:38:52) Out-of-Distribution Detection (Part 2)

(00:45:13) Loss Function Weighting

(00:57:49) Who Moves Last?

(01:11:41) High-Level Triggers

(01:25:33) Open Source vs. Access

(01:38:57) Internalizing Reasoning

(01:53:07) Representing Concepts

(02:06:38) Final Thoughts

(02:09:33) Outro