The Lytic Threshold

Why we picked it

**This is a ticketed event. Please register at [this link](https://luma.com/gprawfks).** In this talk, Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali: 1) Discusses rare cases where deployed LLMs have been observed to engage in self-directed behavior which would have led to catastrophic outcomes if the agent escaping containment were equipped with stronger capabilities. 2) Introduces arbitrium, a peptide-based communication method used by certain bacteriophages which release small molecules known as autoinducers to decide coordinated population-level behavior, and in particular lytic and lysogenic pathways, with a quorum-sensing mechanism. 3) Explores landmark results from alignment science which inform our current understanding of LLM biology (<250 malicious documents required to poison training datasets vs <100 viral particles required to produce infection in humans). 4) Analyzes early findings from experiments which attempt to investigate scalable improvements to defenses that monitor the internal activat