korrents

What Helen Toner thinks about LLMs

@helen-toner · 12 positions · 0 changes of mind

Director of strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former member of OpenAI's board. Writes Rising Tide, on how AI actually progresses and what policy can do about it.

Helen Toner did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

3 dated positions, 2025, in their own words. Our reading of what Helen Toner has said — not written or endorsed by them.

3 positions so far — this page is not yet offered to search engines.

  1. Our readingNonproliferation is the wrong frame for AI misuse; the workable strategy is to use the gap before a capability spreads to build defences against it.

    Their wordsWe should think of the gap between frontier models and proliferated models as an adaptation buffer: a limited time window when we know what bad actors will soon be able to use AI for, which gives us a chance to implement defensive measures that increase society’s resilience to the danger.

    ↗Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misusehelentoner.substack.com 2nd of 5 in this piece

  3. Our readingDelaying the open release of a new capability by months or years is worth doing, even though preventing its spread indefinitely is not.

    Their wordsThe current status quo—where new models that push the frontier are kept private, and openly available equivalents are only released after a lag of months or years—is valuable.

    ↗Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misusehelentoner.substack.com 3rd of 5 in this piece

  4. 2 days earlier

  5. Our readingNobody has built a model that resists targeted jailbreaking, so the ability of AI companies to steer their own models is still limited.

    Their wordsBut no one has (yet) been able to develop a model that is resistant to targeted “jailbreaking” that evades these restrictions.

    ↗The core challenge of AI alignment is “steerability”helentoner.substack.com 2nd of 2 in this piece