Nominated Posts for the 2019 Review
2019 Review Discussion
It seems likely to me that AIs will be able to coordinate with each other much more easily (i.e., at lower cost and greater scale) than humans currently can, for example by merging into coherent unified agents by combining their utility functions. This has been discussed at least since 2009, but I'm not sure its implications have been widely recognized. In this post I talk about two such implications that occurred to me relatively recently.
I was recently reminded of this quote from Robin Hanson's Prefer Law To Values:
...The later era when robots are vastly more capable than people should be much like the case of choosing a nation in which to retire. In this case we don’t expect to have much in the way of skills to
[Epistemic status: Strong claims vaguely stated and weakly held. I expect that writing this and digesting feedback on it will lead to a much better version in the future. EDIT: So far this has stood the test of time. EDIT: As of September 2020 I think this is one of the most important things to be thinking about.]
This post attempts to generalize and articulate a problem that people have been thinking about since at least 2016. [Edit: 2009 in fact!] In short, here is the problem:
Consequentialists can get caught in commitment races, in which they want to make commitments as soon as possible. When consequentialists make commitments too soon, disastrous outcomes can sometimes result. The situation we are in (building AGI and letting it self-modify) may be...
Okay, so now having thought about this a bit...
I at first read this and was like "I'm confused – isn't this what the whole agent foundations agenda is for? Like, I know there are still kinks to work out, and some of this kinks are major epistemological problems. But... I thought this specific problem was not actually that confusing anymore."
"Don't have your AGI go off and do stupid things" is a hard problem, but it seemed basically to be restating "the alignment problem is hard, for lots of finnicky confusing reasons."
Then I realized "holy christ most AGI ... (read more)
If you're not familiar with the double descent phenomenon, I think you should be. I consider double descent to be one of the most interesting and surprising recent results in analyzing and understanding modern machine learning. Today, Preetum et al. released a new paper, “Deep Double Descent,” which I think is a big further advancement in our understanding of this phenomenon. I'd highly recommend at least reading the summary of the paper on the OpenAI blog. However, I will also try to summarize the paper here, as well as give a history of the literature on double descent and some of my personal thoughts.
Prior work
The double descent phenomenon was first discovered by Mikhail Belkin et al., who were confused by the phenomenon wherein modern ML practitioners would
...Fwiw, I really liked Rethinking Bias-Variance Trade-off for Generalization of Neural Networks (summarized in AN #129), and I think I'm now at "double descent is real and occurs when (empirical) bias is high but later overshadowed by (empirical) variance". (Part of it is that it explains a lot of existing evidence, but another part is that my prior on an explanation like that being true is much higher than almost anything else that's been proposed.)
I was pretty uncertain about the arguments in this post and the followup when they first came out. (More preci... (read more)
"Gradient hacking" is a term I've been using recently to describe the phenomenon wherein a deceptively aligned mesa-optimizer might be able to purposefully act in ways which cause gradient descent to update it in a particular way. In Risks from Learned Optimization, we included the following footnote to reflect this possibility:
...Furthermore, a deceptively aligned mesa-optimizer would be incentivized to cause there to be a systematic bias in the direction of preventing the base optimizer from modifying its mesa-objective. Thus, in the context of a local optimization process, a deceptive mesa-optimizer might try to “hack” its own gradient (by, for example, making itself more brittle in the case where its objective gets changed) to ensure that the base optimizer adjusts it in such a way that leaves its
It does seem useful to make the distinction between thinking about how gradient hacking failures look like in worlds where they cause an existential catastrophe, and thinking about how to best pursue empirical research today about gradient hacking.
The stereotyped image of AI catastrophe is a powerful, malicious AI system that takes its creators by surprise and quickly achieves a decisive advantage over the rest of humanity.
I think this is probably not what failure will look like, and I want to try to paint a more realistic picture. I’ll tell the story in two parts:
- Part I: machine learning will increase our ability to “get what we can measure,” which could cause a slow-rolling catastrophe. ("Going out with a whimper.")
- Part II: ML training, like competitive economies or natural ecosystems, can give rise to “greedy” patterns that try to expand their own influence. Such patterns can ultimately dominate the behavior of a system and cause sudden breakdowns. ("Going out with a bang," an instance of optimization daemons.)
I...
I think this post (and similarly, Evan's summary of Chris Olah's views) are essential both in their own right and as mutual foils to MIRI's research agenda. We see related concepts (mesa-optimization originally came out of Paul's talk of daemons in Solomonoff induction, if I remember right) but very different strategies for achieving both inner and outer alignment. (The crux of the disagreement seems to be the probability of success from adapting current methods.)
Strongly recommended for inclusion.
[Epistemic status: Argument by analogy to historical cases. Best case scenario it's just one argument among many. Edit: Also, thanks to feedback from others, especially Paul, I intend to write a significantly improved version of this post in the next two weeks. Edit: I never did, because in the course of writing my response I realized the original argument made a big mistake. See this review.]
I have on several occasions heard people say things like this:
The original Bostrom/Yudkowsky paradigm envisioned a single AI built by a single AI project, undergoing intelligence explosion all by itself and attaining a decisive strategic advantage as a result. However, this is very unrealistic. Discontinuous jumps in technological capability are very rare, and it is very implausible that one project...
It's hard to know how to judge a post that deems itself superseded by a post from a later year, but I lean toward taking Daniel at his word and hoping we survive until the 2021 Review comes around.
Note: I am not Chris Olah. This post was the result of lots of back-and-forth with Chris, but everything here is my interpretation of what Chris believes, not necessarily what he actually believes. Chris also wanted me to emphasize that his thinking is informed by all of his colleagues on the OpenAI Clarity team and at other organizations.
In thinking about AGI safety—and really any complex topic on which many smart people disagree—I’ve often found it very useful to build a collection of different viewpoints from people that I respect that I feel like I understand well enough to be able to think from their perspective. For example, I will often try to compare what an idea feels like when I put on my Paul Christiano hat to
...The content here is very valuable, even if the genre of "I talked a lot with X and here's my articulation of X's model" comes across to me as a weird intellectual ghostwriting. I can't think of a way around that, though.
This post is eventually about partial agency. However, it's been a somewhat tricky point for me to convey; I take the long route. Epistemic status: slightly crazy.
I've occasionally said that everything boils down to credit assignment problems.
One big area which is "basically credit assignment" is mechanism design. Mechanism design is largely about splitting gains from trade in a way which rewards cooperative behavior and punishes uncooperative behavior. Many problems are partly about mechanism design:
- Building functional organizations;
- Designing markets to solve problems (such as prediction markets, or kidney-transplant trade programs);
- Law, and law enforcement;
- Practical coordination problems, such as splitting rent;
- Social norms generally;
- Philosophical issues in ethics/morality (justice, fairness, contractualism, issues in utilitarianism).
Another big area which I claim as "basically credit assignment" (perhaps more controversially) is artificial intelligence.
In the 1970s, John Holland...
I think I have juuust enough background to follow the broad strokes of this post, but not to quite grok the parts I think Abram was most interested in.
I definitely caused me to think about credit assignment. I actually ended up thinking about it largely through the lens of Moral Mazes (where challenges of credit assignment combine with other forces to create a really bad environment). Re-reading this post, while I don't quite follow everything, I do successfully get a taste of how credit assignment fits into a bunch of different domains.
For the "myop... (read more)
This is the first of five posts in the Risks from Learned Optimization Sequence based on the paper “Risks from Learned Optimization in Advanced Machine Learning Systems” by Evan Hubinger, Chris van Merwijk, Vladimir Mikulik, Joar Skalse, and Scott Garrabrant. Each post in the sequence corresponds to a different section of the paper.
Evan Hubinger, Chris van Merwijk, Vladimir Mikulik, and Joar Skalse contributed equally to this sequence. With special thanks to Paul Christiano, Eric Drexler, Rob Bensinger, Jan Leike, Rohin Shah, William Saunders, Buck Shlegeris, David Dalrymple, Abram Demski, Stuart Armstrong, Linda Linsefors, Carl Shulman, Toby Ord, Kate Woolverton, and everyone else who provided feedback on earlier versions of this sequence.
Motivation
The goal of this sequence is to analyze the type of learned optimization that occurs when a...
For me, this is the paper where I learned to connect ideas about delegation to machine learning. The paper sets up simple ideas of mesa-optimizers, and shows a number of constraints and variables that will determine how the mesa-optimizers will be developed – in some environments you want to do a lot of thinking in advance then delegate execution of a very simple algorithm to do your work (e.g. this simple algorithm Critch developed that my group house uses to decide on the rent for each room), and in some environments you want to do a little thinking and ... (read more)
An actual debate about instrumental convergence, in a public space! Major respect to all involved, especially Yoshua Bengio for great facilitation.
For posterity (i.e. having a good historical archive) and further discussion, I've reproduced the conversation here. I'm happy to make edits at the request of anyone in the discussion who is quoted below. I've improved formatting for clarity and fixed some typos. For people who are not researchers in this area who wish to comment, see the public version of this post here. For people who do work on the relevant areas, please sign up in the top right. It will take a day or so to confirm membership.
Original Post
Yann LeCun: "don't fear the Terminator", a short opinion piece by Tony Zador and me that was just...
Note 1: This review is also a top-level post.
Note 2: I think that 'robust instrumentality' is a more apt name for 'instrumental convergence.' That said, for backwards compatibility, this comment often uses the latter.
In the summer of 2019, I was building up a corpus of basic reinforcement learning theory. I wandered through a sun-dappled Berkeley, my head in the clouds, my mind bent on a single ambition: proving the existence of instrumental convergence.
Somehow.
I needed to find the right definitions first, and I couldn't even imagine what... (read more)
This essay is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Human-Aligned AI Summer School 2019 about our work on mesa-optimisation. My goal here is to write an informal, accessible and intuitive introduction to the worry that we describe in our full-length report.
I will skip most of the detailed analysis from our report, and encourage the curious reader to follow up this essay with our sequence or report.
The essay has six parts:
Two distinctions draws the foundational distinctions between
“optimised” and “optimising”, and between utility and reward.
What objectives? discusses the behavioral and internal approaches to understanding objectives of ML systems.
Why worry? outlines the risk posed by the utility ≠ reward gap.
Mesa-optimisers introduces our language for analysing this worry.
An alignment agenda sketches different alignment problems presented by these ideas,...
More than a year since writing this post, I would still say it represents the key ideas in the sequence on mesa-optimisation which remain central in today's conversations on mesa-optimisation. I still largely stand by what I wrote, and recommend this post as a complement to that sequence for two reasons:
First, skipping some detail allows it to focus on the important points, making it better-suited than the full sequence for obtaining an overview of the area.
Second, unlike the sequence, it deemphasises the mechanism of optimisation, and explicitly cas... (read more)
AI risk ideas are piling up in my head (and in my notebook) faster than I can write them down as full posts, so I'm going to condense multiple posts into one again. I may expand some or all of these into full posts in the future. References to prior art are also welcome as I haven't done an extensive search myself yet.
The "search engine" model of AGI development
The current OpenAI/DeepMind model of AGI development (i.e., fund research using only investor / parent company money, without making significant profits) isn't likely to be sustainable, assuming a soft takeoff, but the "search engine" model very well could be. In the "search engine" model, a company (and eventually the AGI itself) funds AGI research and development by selling AI
...I have now linked at least 10 times to the heading on "'Generate evidence of difficulty' as a research purpose" section of this post. It was a thing that I kind of wanted to point to before this post came out, but felt confused about it, and this post finally gave me a pointer to it.
I think that section was substantially more novel and valuable to me than the rest of this post, but it is also evidence that others might have also not had some of the other ideas on their map, and so they might found it similarly valuable because of a different section.
This post is based on chapter 15 of Uri Alon’s book An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits. See the book for more details and citations; see here for a review of most of the rest of the book.
Fun fact: biological systems are highly modular, at multiple different scales. This can be quantified and verified statistically, e.g. by mapping out protein networks and algorithmically partitioning them into parts, then comparing the connectivity of the parts. It can also be seen more qualitatively in everyday biological work: proteins have subunits which retain their function when fused to other proteins, receptor circuits can be swapped out to make bacteria follow different chemical gradients, manipulating specific genes can turn a fly’s antennae into legs, organs perform specific...
The material here is one seed of a worldview which I've updated toward a lot more over the past year. Some other posts which involve the theme include Science in a High Dimensional World, What is Abstraction?, Alignment by Default, and the companion post to this one Book Review: Design Principles of Biological Circuits.
Two ideas unify all of these:
- Our universe has a simplifying structure: it abstracts well, implying a particular kind of modularity.
- Goal-oriented systems in our universe tend to evolve a modular structure which reflects the structure of the u
I've been thinking more about partial agency. I want to expand on some issues brought up in the comments to my previous post, and on other complications which I've been thinking about. But for now, a more informal parable. (Mainly because this is easier to write than my more technical thoughts.)
This relates to oracle AI and to inner optimizers, but my focus is a little different.
1
Suppose you are designing a new invention, a predict-o-matic. It is a wonderous machine which will predict everything for us: weather, politics, the newest advances in quantum physics, you name it. The machine isn't infallible, but it will integrate data across a wide range of domains, automatically keeping itself up-to-date with all areas of science and current events. You fully expect that...
This reminds me of That Alien Message, but as a parable about mesa-alignment rather than outer alignment. It reads well, and helps make the concepts more salient. Recommended.
Technical Appendix: First safeguard?
This sequence is written to be broadly accessible, although perhaps its focus on capable AI systems assumes familiarity with basic arguments for the importance of AI alignment. The technical appendices are an exception, targeting the technically inclined.
Why do I claim that an impact measure would be "the first proposed safeguard which maybe actually stops a powerful agent with an imperfect objective from ruining things – without assuming anything about the objective"?
The safeguard proposal shouldn't have to say "and here we solve this opaque, hard problem, and then it works". If we have the impact measure, we have the math, and then we have the code.
So what about:
- Quantilizers? This
Here are prediction questions for the predictions that TurnTrout himself provided in the concluding post of the Reframing Impact sequence.
Human values and preferences are hard to specify, especially in complex domains. Accordingly, much AGI safety research has focused on approaches to AGI design that refer to human values and preferences indirectly, by learning a model that is grounded in expressions of human values (via stated preferences, observed behaviour, approval, etc.) and/or real-world processes that generate expressions of those values. There are additionally approaches aimed at modelling or imitating other aspects of human cognition or behaviour without an explicit aim of capturing human preferences (but usually in service of ultimately satisfying them). Let us refer to all these models as human models.
In this post, we discuss several reasons to be cautious about AGI designs that use human models. We suggest that the AGI safety research community put...
I continue to agree with my original comment on this post (though it is a bit long-winded and goes off on more tangents than I would like), and I think it can serve as a review of this post.
If this post were to be rewritten, I'd be particularly interested to hear example "deployment scenarios" where we use an AGI without human models and this makes the future go well. I know of two examples:
- We use strong global coordination to ensure that no powerful AI systems with human models are ever deployed.
- We build an AGI that can do science / engineering really wel
(Cross-posted to personal blog. Summarized in Alignment Newsletter #76. Thanks to Jan Leike and Tom Everitt for their helpful feedback on this post.)
There are a few different classifications of safety problems, including the Specification, Robustness and Assurance (SRA) taxonomy and the Goodhart's Law taxonomy. In SRA, the specification category is about defining the purpose of the system, i.e. specifying its incentives. Since incentive problems can be seen as manifestations of Goodhart's Law, we explore how the specification category of the SRA taxonomy maps to the Goodhart taxonomy. The mapping is an attempt to integrate different breakdowns of the safety problem space into a coherent whole. We hope that a consistent classification of current safety problems will help develop solutions that are effective for entire classes of problems,...
Writing this post helped clarify my understanding of the concepts in both taxonomies - the different levels of specification and types of Goodhart effects. The parts of the taxonomies that I was not sure how to match up usually corresponded to the concepts I was most confused about. For example, I initially thought that adversarial Goodhart is an emergent specification problem, but upon further reflection this didn't seem right. Looking back, I think I still endorse the mapping described in this post.
I hoped to get more comments on this post... (read more)
Since the CAIS technical report is a gargantuan 210 page document, I figured I'd write a post to summarize it. I have focused on the earlier chapters, because I found those to be more important for understanding the core model. Later chapters speculate about more concrete details of how AI might develop, as well as the implications of the CAIS model on strategy. ETA: This comment provides updates based on more discussion with Eric.
The Model
The core idea is to look at the pathway by which we will develop general intelligence, rather than assuming that at some point we will get a superintelligent AGI agent. To predict how AI will progress in the future, we can look at how AI progresses currently -- through research and development (R&D)...
I trust past-me to have summarized CAIS much better than current-me; back when this post was written I had just finished reading CAIS for the third or fourth time, and I haven't read it since. (This isn't a compliment -- I read it multiple times because I had a lot of trouble understanding it.)
I've put in two points of my own in the post. First:
... (read more)(My opinion: I think this isn't engaging with the worry with RL agents -- typically, we're worried about the setting where the RL agent is learning or planning at test time, which can happen in learn-to-learn and on
This is a post about my own confusions. It seems likely that other people have discussed these issues at length somewhere, and that I am not up with current thoughts on them, because I don’t keep good track of even everything great that everyone writes. I welcome anyone kindly directing me to the most relevant things, or if such things are sufficiently well thought through that people can at this point just correct me in a small number of sentences, I’d appreciate that even more.
~
The traditional argument for AI alignment being hard is that human value is ‘complex’ and ‘fragile’. That is, it is hard to write down what kind of future we want, and if we get it even a little bit wrong, most futures that...
This is , right? And then you might just constrain the subset of W which the agent can search over?
Exactly.
One toy model to conceptualize what a "compact criterion" might look like: imagine we take a second-order expansion of u around some u-maximal world-state . Then, the eigendecomposition of the Hessian of u around tells us which directions-of-change in the world state u cares about a little or a lot. If the constraints lock the accessible world-states into the directions which u doesn't care about much (i.e. eigenvalu... (read more)
This post is excellent, in that it has a very high importance-to-word-count ratio. It'll take up only a page or so, but convey a very useful and relevant idea, and moreover ask an important question that will hopefully stimulate further thought.