Uploaded July 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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Disclaimer: This is the third video from our Cohere partnership. We were not told what to say in the interview, and didn't edit anything out from the interview.

Sara Hooker, VP of Research at Cohere and leader of Cohere for AI, returns to challenge the use of compute thresholds (FLOPS) as a serious AI governance tool. She walks through her recent paper showing why the US executive order and EU AI Act get this wrong — compute alone tells you almost nothing about what a model can actually do.

The conversation then pivots to the AI language gap, where Sara lays out how current models systematically fail non-English speakers. She discusses the limitations of RLHF for multilingual alignment, the long tail problem in data representation, and why building models that work across languages requires fundamentally rethinking how we evaluate and train these systems.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 Intro
00:02:12 FLOPS paper and compute thresholds
00:26:42 The hardware lottery
00:30:22 The AI language gap
00:33:25 Safety across languages
00:38:31 Emergent capabilities
00:41:23 Creativity and language models
00:43:40 The long tail problem
00:44:26 LLMs and society
00:45:36 Model bias and representation
00:48:51 Language and capabilities
00:52:27 Ethical frameworks and RLHF

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REFERENCES:
person:
[00:00:00] Sara Hooker
sarahooker.me
paper:
[00:02:12] On the Limitations of Compute Thresholds as a Governance Strategy
arxiv.org/pdf/2407.05694v1
[00:30:22] The AI Language Gap
cohere.com/research/papers/the-AI-language-gap.pdf
[00:33:25] The Multilingual Alignment Prism
arxiv.org/pdf/2406.18682
[00:52:27] RLHF Can Speak Many Languages
arxiv.org/pdf/2407.02552
[00:52:27] Back to Basics Revisiting REINFORCE for RLHF
arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14740
policy:
[00:02:12] Executive Order on AI Safety
whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence
[00:02:12] EU AI Act
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2024-0138_EN.pdf
article:
[00:02:12] The Bitter Lesson
incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
website:
[00:30:22] Cohere Aya
cohere.com/research/aya
[00:38:31] ARC-AGI Challenge
github.com/fchollet/ARC-AGI

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LINKS:
Full Transcript: app.rescript.info/share/a1ebc4751c1643da186faeeabba94abb
Download PDF transcript: app.rescript.info/api/public/sessions/b88defad1a057e21/pdf

Sara Hooker
sarahooker.me
linkedin.com/in/sararosehooker
scholar.google.com/citations?user=2xy6h3sAAAAJ&hl=en
https://x.com/sarahookr

Chollet's ARC challenge
github.com/fchollet/ARC-AGI