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Sprint projectSep 2, 2024

Steer: An API to Steer Open LLMs

Niranjan Nair · Team Steer

Submitted to Hackathon for Technical AI Safety Startups. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Steer: An API to Steer Open LLMs

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Steer aims to be an API that helps developers, researchers, and businesses steer open-source LLMs away from societal biases, and towards the use-cases that they need. To do this, Steer uses activation additions, a fairly new technique with great promise. Developers can simply enter steering prompts to make open models have safer and task-specific behaviors, avoiding the hassle of data collection and human evaluation for fine-tuning, and avoiding the extra tokens required from prompt-engineering approaches.

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Cite this project

@misc{nair2024steer,
  title = {{Steer: An API to Steer Open LLMs}},
  author = {Niranjan Nair},
  year = {2024},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to Hackathon for Technical AI Safety Startups, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/steer-an-api-to-steer-open-llms}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/steer-an-api-to-steer-open-llms}
}

Build something like this at the next Sprint

AI Collusion Research Sprint · Oct 23 - 25, 2026