> > What makes this build different is the word before FP8: uncensored. We applied abliteration — orthogonalizing the refusal direction out of the residual stream — to remove the model's safety-alignment refusals. The result is a model that will comply with requests the original would refuse.
> Surely this has unintended side effects on output quality?
Can you help me understand why that's the case?
Because deleting model weights after training is likely to cause knock-on effects in model knowledge and/or behavior. Targetting it might mitigate this but it’s
a) not guaranteed that only censor-ey parameters get removed, and b) likely that removing those parameters still has effects on the effectiveness of related parameters.