Interpretability Externalities Case Study - Hungry Hungry Hippos
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Interpretability seems pretty useful for alignment, but it also seems pretty dangerous for capabilities. Overall the field seems net-bad. Using an oversimplified model, my general reason for thinking this is because for any given interpretability advance, it can either be used for the purposes of capabilities or the purposes of alignment. Alignment is both harder, and has fewer people working on it than improving model capabilities. Even if the marginal interpretability advance would be net good for alignment if alignment and capabilities were similar in size and difficulty, we should still expect that it will get used for the purposes of capabilities.
Lots of people like pointing to how better interpretability almost never makes long-term improvements to model capabilities, but it leads to just as few improvements to model alignment! And the number & quality of papers or posts using interpretability methods for capabilities vastly exceeds the number & quality using interpretability methods for alignment.
The only example of interpretability leading to novel alignment methods I know of is shard theory's recent activation additions work (notably work that is not so useful if Nate & Eliezer are right about AGI coherence). In contrast, it seems like all the papers using interpretability to advance capabilities rely on Anthropic's transformer circuits work.
These are two interesting case-studies, and more work should probably be done comparing their relative merits. But in lieu of that, my explanation for the difference in outcomes is this:
Anthropic's work was highly explorational, while Team Shard's was highly targeted. Anthropic tried to understand the transformer architecture and training process in general, while shard theory tried to understand values and only values. If capabilities is easier than alignment, it should not be too surprising if an unfocused approach makes capabilities relatively easier, while a focused-on-values approach makes alignment relatively easier. The unfocused approach will gather a wide range of low-hanging fruit, but little low-hanging fruit is alignment related, so most fruit gathered will be capabilities related.
This is why I'm pessimistic about most interpretability work. It just isn't focused enough! And its why I'm optimistic about interpretability (and interpretability adjacent) work focused on understanding explicitly the value systems of our ML systems, and how those can be influenced.
So a recommendation for those hoping to work on interpretability and have it be net-positive: Focus on understanding the values of models! Or at least other directly alignment relevant parts of models.
For example, I mostly expect a solution to superposition to be net-negative, in the same way that transoformer circuits is net-negative. Though at the same time I also expect superposition to have lots of alignment benefits in the short-term. If AGI is further off, superposition ends up being net-negative, the closer AGI is to now, the more positive a superposition solution becomes.
Another sort of interpretability advance I'm worried about: locating the optimization algorithms operating inside neural networks. I admit these have large alignment boosts, but that seems inconsequential compared to their large potential for large boosts to capabilities. Such advances may be necessary for alignment though, so I'm more happy in a world where these are not so widely publicized, and given only to the superintelligence alignment wings of AGI labs [EDIT: and a group of researchers outside the labs, all in a way such that nobody shares it with people who may use the knowledge to advance capabilities].
This is why I'm pessimistic about most interpretability work. It just isn't focused enough
Most of the "exploratory" interp work you suggest is trying to achieve an ambitious mechanistic understanding of models, which requires a really high degree of model understanding in general. They're not trying to solve particular concrete problems, and it seems unfair to evaluate them according to a different theory of change. If you're going to argue against this line of work, I think you should either argue that they're failing to achieve their theory of change, or that their theory of change is either doomed or useless.
So: do you think that ambitious mech interp is impossible? Do you think that current interp work is going the wrong direction in terms of achieving ambitious understanding? Or do you think that it'd be not useful even if achieved?
I agree that if your theory of change for interp goes through, "interp solves a concrete problem like deception or sensor tampering or adversarial robustness", then you better just try to solve those concrete problems instead of improving interp in general. But I think the case for ambitious mech interp isn't terrible, and so it's worth exploring and investing in anyways.
The only example of interpretability leading to novel alignment methods I know of is shard theory's recent activation additions work
There's a lot of interpretability work that performs act-add like ablations to confirm that their directions are real, and ITI is basically act adds but they compute act adds with many examples instead of just a pair. But again, most mech interp people aren't aiming to use mech interp to solve a specific concrete problem you can exhibit on models today, so it seems unfair to complain that most of the work doesn't lead to novel alignment methods.
a lot of interpretability work that performs act-add like ablations to confirm that their directions are real
Minor clarifying point: Act-adds cannot be cast as ablations. Do you mean to say that the interp work uses activation addition to confirm real directions? Or that they use activation ablation/resampling/scrubbing?
ITI is basically act adds but they compute act adds with many examples instead of just a pair
Yup, ITI was developed concurrently, and (IIRC, private correspondence) was inspired by their work on Othello-GPT. So this is another instance of interp leading to an alignment technique (albeit two independent paths leading to a similar technique).
Minor clarifying point: Act-adds cannot be cast as ablations.
Sorry, ablation might be the wrong word here (but people use it anyways): the technique is to subtract/add/move along the discovered direction and see what happens to the outputs. It's possible there's a better or standard word that I can't think of write now.
Also, another example of an attempt at interp -> alignment would arguably be the model editing stuff following causal tracing in the ROME paper?
I'd probably call it an act-add style intervention? Ablation connotes the removal of something. I originally thought patch, but patch should be about setting it to be equal to the activation on another input, and being able to put in 10x the original value doesn't count as patching.
So: do you think that ambitious mech interp is impossible? Do you think that current interp work is going the wrong direction in terms of achieving ambitious understanding? Or do you think that it'd be not useful even if achieved?
Mostly I think that MI is right to think it can do a lot for alignment, but I suspect that lots of the best things it can do for alignment it will do in a very dual-use way, which skews heavily towards capabilities. Mostly because capabilities advances are easier and there are more people working on those.
At the same time I suspect that many of those dual use concerns can be mitigated by making your MI research targeted. Not necessarily made such that you can do off-the-shelf interventions based on your findings, but made such that if it ever has any use, that use is going to be for alignment, and you can predict broadly what that use will look like.
This also doesn't mean your MI research can't be ambitious. I don't want to criticize people for being ambitious or too theoretical! I want to criticize people for producing knowledge on something which, while powerful, seems powerful in too many directions to be useful if done publicly.
I agree that if your theory of change for interp goes through, "interp solves a concrete problem like deception or sensor tampering or adversarial robustness", then you better just try to solve those concrete problems instead of improving interp in general. But I think the case for ambitious mech interp isn't terrible, and so it's worth exploring and investing in anyways.
I don't entirely know what you mean by this. How would we solve alignment by not going through a concrete problem? Maybe you think MI will be secondary to that process, and will give us useful information about what problems are necessary to solve? In such a case I still don't see why you need ambitious MI. You can just test the different problem classes directly. Maybe you think the different problem classes are too large to test directly. Even in that case, I still think that a more targeted approach would be better, where you generate as much info about those target classes as possible, while minimizing info that can be used to make your models better. And you selectively report only the results of your investigation which bear on the problem class. Even if the research is exploratory, the result & verification demonstration can still be targeted.
But again, most mech interp people aren't aiming to use mech interp to solve a specific concrete problem you can exhibit on models today, so it seems unfair to complain that most of the work doesn't lead to novel alignment methods.
Maybe I misspoke. I dislike current MI because I expect large capability improvements before and at the same time as the alignment improvements, but I don't dispute future alignment improvements. Just whether they'll be worth it. The reason I brought up that was as some motivation for why I think targeted is better, and why I don't like some peoples' criticism of worries about MI externalities by appealing to the lack of capabilities advances caused by MI. There've certainly been more attempts at capabilities improvements motivated by MI than there have been attempts at alignment improvements. Regardless of what you think about the future of the field, its interesting when people make MI discoveries which don't lead to too much capabilities advances.
I personally like activation additions because they give me evidence about how models mechanistically behave in a way which directly tells me about which threat models are more or less likely, and it has the potential to make auditing and iteration a lot easier. Accomplishments which ambitious MI is nowhere close to, and for which I expect its methods would have to pay a lot in terms of capability advances in order to get to. I mention this as evidence for why I expect targeted approaches are faster and cheaper than ambitious ones. At least if done publicly.
A couple of unconnected points:
Mostly I think that MI is right to think it can do a lot for alignment, but I suspect that lots of the best things it can do for alignment it will do in a very dual-use way, which skews heavily towards capabilities. Mostly because capabilities advances are easier and there are more people working on those.
This doesn't clearly follow: one way for x to be easier is [there are many ways to do x, so that it's not too hard to find one]. If it's easy to find a few ways to get x, giving me another one may not help me at all. If it's hard to find any way to do x, giving me a workable approach may be hugely helpful.
(I'm not making a case one way or another on the main point - I don't know the real-world data on this, and it's also entirely possible that the bar on alignment is so high that most/all MI isn't useful for alignment)
I mention this as evidence for why I expect targeted approaches are faster and cheaper than ambitious ones
I'm not entirely clear I understand you here, but if I do, my response would be: targeted approaches may be faster and cheaper at solving the problems they target. Ambitious approaches are more likely to help solve problems that you didn't know existed, and didn't realize you needed to target.
If targeted approaches are being used for [demonstrate that problems of this kind are possible], I expect they are indeed faster and cheaper. If we're instead talking about being used as part of an alignment solution, targeted approaches seem likely to be ~irrelevant (of course I'd be happy if I'm wrong on this!).
(again, assuming I understand how you're using 'targeted' / 'ambitious')
1Note that the previous post on this topic from Lawrence and Marius includes public comments about interp externalities from several people including me
The rough TLDR of my opinion is that interp seems reasonably far from being dangerous to capabilities, and there's a ton of work to be done, and I think the value of building a thriving academic field around it seems super high, and I think significant barriers to publishing and sharing work is toxic to this, and IMO this consideration dominates over some capabilities externalities. I also think that getting capabilities people to pivot from whatever they're doing now to mech interp seems like a win, it's not clear this should be more capabilities-y than the counterfactual, but clearly better for alignment in expectation. I also think junior people get way too stressed about this and should chill out, since your first piece of work is highly unlikely to have any effects, positive or negative
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