I thought this series of comments from a former DeepMind employee (who worked on Gemini) were insightful so I figured I should share.
...From my experience doing early RLHF work for Gemini, larger models exploit the reward model more. You need to constantly keep collecting more preferences and retraining reward models to make it not exploitable. Otherwise you get nonsensical responses which have exploited the idiosyncracy of your preferences data. There is a reason few labs have done RLHF successfully.
It's also know that more capable models exploit loopholes in reward functions better. Imo, it's a pretty intuitive idea that more capable RL agents will find larger rewards. But there's evidence from papers like this as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.03544
To be clear, I don't think the current paradigm as-is is dangerous. I'm stating the obvious because this platform has gone a bit bonkers.
The danger comes from finetuning LLMs to become AutoGPTs which have memory, actions, and maximize rewards, and are deployed autonomously. Widepsread proliferation of GPT-4+ models will almost certainly make lots of these agents which will cause a lot of damage and potentially cause something ind
If you work at a social media website or YouTube (or know anyone who does), please read the text below:
Community Notes is one of the best features to come out on social media apps in a long time. The code is even open source. Why haven't other social media websites picked it up yet? If they care about truth, this would be a considerable step forward beyond. Notes like “this video is funded by x nation” or “this video talks about health info; go here to learn more” messages are simply not good enough.
If you work at companies like YouTube or know someone who does, let's figure out who we need to talk to to make it happen. Naïvely, you could spend a weekend DMing a bunch of employees (PMs, engineers) at various social media websites in order to persuade them that this is worth their time and probably the biggest impact they could have in their entire career.
If you have any connections, let me know. We can also set up a doc of messages to send in order to come up with a persuasive DM.
Oh, that’s great, thanks! Also reminded me of (the less official, more comedy-based) “Community Notes Violating People”. @Viliam
My current speculation as to what is happening at OpenAI
How do we know this wasn't their best opportunity to strike if Sam was indeed not being totally honest with the board?
Let's say the rumours are true, that Sam is building out external orgs (NVIDIA competitor and iPhone-like competitor) to escape the power of the board and potentially going against the charter. Would this 'conflict of interest' be enough? If you take that story forward, it sounds more and more like he was setting up AGI to be run by external companies, using OpenAI as a fundraising bargaining chip, and having a significant financial interest in plugging AGI into those outside orgs.
So, if we think about this strategically, how long should they wait as board members who are trying to uphold the charter?
On top of this, it seems (according to Sam) that OpenAI has made a significant transformer-level breakthrough recently, which implies a significant capability jump. Long-term reasoning? Basically, anything short of 'coming up with novel insights in physics' is on the table, given that Sam recently used that line as the line we need to cross to get to AGI.
So, it could be a mix of, Ilya thinking they have achieved AG...
Attempt to explain why I think AI systems are not the same thing as a library card when it comes to bio-risk.
To focus on less of an extreme example, I’ll be ignoring the case where AI can create new, more powerful pathogens faster than we can create defences, though I think this is an important case (some people just don’t find it plausible because it relies on the assumption that AIs being able to create new knowledge).
I think AI Safety people should make more of an effort to walkthrough the threat model so I’ll give an initial quick first try:
1) Library. If I’m a terrorist and I want to build a bioweapon, I have to spend several months reading books at minimum to understand how it all works. I don’t have any experts on-hand to explain how to do it step-by-step. I have to figure out which books to read and in what sequence. I have to look up external sources to figure out where I can buy specific materials.
Then, I have to somehow find out how to to gain access to those materials (this is the most difficult part for each case). Once I gain access to the materials, I still need to figure out how to make things work as a total noob at creating bioweapons. I will fail. Even experts fa...
I recently sent in some grant proposals to continue working on my independent alignment research. It gives an overview of what I'd like to work on for this next year (and more really). If you want to have a look at the full doc, send me a DM. If you'd like to help out through funding or contributing to the projects, please let me know.
Here's the summary introduction:
12-month salary for building a language model system for accelerating alignment research and upskilling (additional funding will be used to create an organization), and studying how to supervise AIs that are improving AIs to ensure stable alignment.
Crossposted from my website. Hoping to provide updates on my learning system every month or so.
TLDR of what I've been thinking about lately:
I'm currently ruminating on the idea of doing a video series in which I review code repositories that are highly relevant to alignment research to make them more accessible.
I do want to pick out repos with perhaps even bad documentation that are still useful and then hope on a call with the author to go over the repo and record it. At least have something basic to use when navigating the repo.
This means there would be two levels: 1) an overview with the author sharing at least the basics, and 2) a deep dive going over most of the code. The former likely contains most of the value (lower effort for me, still gets done, better than nothing, points to repo as a selection mechanism, people can at least get started).
I am thinking of doing this because I think there may be repositories that are highly useful for new people but would benefit from some direction. For example, I think Karpathy and Neel Nanda's videos have been useful in getting people started. In particular, Karpathy saw OOM more stars to his repos (e.g. nanoGPT) after the release of his videos (which, to be fair, he's famous, and a number of stars is definitely not a perfect proxy for usage).
I'm interested in any feedback ...
I’m still thinking this through, but I am deeply concerned about Eliezer’s new article for a combination of reasons:
In the end, I expect this will just alienate people. And stuff like this concerns me.
I think it’s possible that the most memetically power...
So I think what I'm getting here is that you have an object-level disagreement (not as convinced about doom), but you are also reinforcing that object-level disagreement with signalling/reputational considerations (this will just alienate people). This pattern feels ugh and worries me. It seems highly important to separate the question of what's true from the reputational question. It furthermore seems highly important to separate arguments about what makes sense to say publicly on-your-world-model vs on-Eliezer's-model. In particular, it is unclear to me whether your position is "it is dangerously wrong to speak the truth about AI risk" vs "Eliezer's position is dangerously wrong" (or perhaps both).
I guess that your disagreement with Eliezer is large but not that large (IE you would name it as a disagreement between reasonable people, not insanity). It is of course possible to consistently maintain that (1) Eliezer's view is reasonable, (2) on Eliezer's view, it is strategically acceptable to speak out, and (3) it is not in fact strategically acceptable for people with Eliezer's views to speak out about those views. But this combination of views does imply endorsing a silencing of reasonable disagreements which seems unfortunate and anti-epistemic.
My own guess is that the maintenance of such anti-epistemic silences is itself an important factor contributing to doom. But, this could be incorrect.
This seems like a fairly important paper by Deepmind regarding generalization (and lack of it in current transformer models): https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871
Here’s an excerpt on transformers potentially not really being able to generalize beyond training data:
...Our contributions are as follows:
- We pretrain transformer models for in-context learning using a mixture of multiple distinct function classes and characterize the model selection behavior exhibited.
- We study the in-context learning behavior of the pretrained transformer model on functions th
Given funding is a problem in AI x-risk at the moment, I’d love to see people to start thinking of creative ways to provide additional funding to alignment researchers who are struggling to get funding.
For example, I’m curious if governance orgs would pay for technical alignment expertise as a sort of consultant service.
Also, it might be valuable to have full-time field-builders that are solely focused on getting more high-net-worth individuals to donate to AI x-risk.
On joking about how "we're all going to die"
Setting aside the question of whether people are overly confident about their claims regarding AI risk, I'd like to talk about how we talk about it amongst ourselves.
We should avoid jokingly saying "we're all going to die" because I think it will corrode your calibration to risk with respect to P(doom) and it will give others the impression that we are all more confident about P(doom) than we really are.
I think saying it jokingly still ends up creeping into your rational estimates on timelines and P(doom). I expe...
What are some important tasks you've found too cognitively taxing to get in the flow of doing?
One thing that I'd like to consider for Accelerating Alignment is to build tools that make it easier to get in the habit of cognitively demanding tasks by reducing the cognitive load necessary to do the task. This is part of the reason why I think people are getting such big productivity gains from tools like Copilot.
One way I try to think about it is like getting into the habit of playing guitar. I typically tell people to buy an electric guitar rather than an ac...
Projects I'd like to work on in 2023.
Wrote up a short (incomplete) bullet point list of the projects I'd like to work on in 2023:
Jacques' AI Tidbits from the Web
I often find information about AI development on X (f.k.a.Twitter) and sometimes other websites. They usually don't warrant their own post, so I'll use this thread to share. I'll be placing a fairly low filter on what I share.
There's someone on X (f.k.a.Twitter) called Jimmy Apples (🍎/acc) and he has shared some information in the past that turned out to be true (apparently the GPT-4 release date and that OAI's new model would be named "Gobi"). He recently tweeted, "AGI has been achieved internally." Some people think that the Reddit comment below may be from the same guy (this is just a weak signal, I’m not implying you should consider it true or update on it):
I think it would be great if alignment researchers read more papers
But really, you don't even need to read the entire paper. Here's a reminder to consciously force yourself to at least read the abstract. Sometimes I catch myself running away from reading an abstract of a paper even though it is very little text. Over time I've just been forcing myself to at least read the abstract. A lot of times you can get most of the update you need just by reading the abstract. Try your best to make it automatic to do the same.
To read more papers, consider using Semant...
On hyper-obession with one goal in mind
I’ve always been interested in people just becoming hyper-obsessed in pursuing a goal. One easy example is with respect to athletes. Someone like Kobe Bryant was just obsessed with becoming the best he could be. I’m interested in learning what we can from the experiences of the hyper-obsessed and what we can apply to our work in EA / Alignment.
I bought a few books on the topic, I should try to find the time to read them. I’ll try to store some lessons in this shortform, but here’s a quote from Mr. Beast’s Joe Rogan in...
I shared the following as a bio for EAG Bay Area 2024. I'm sharing this here if it reaches someone who wants to chat or collaborate.
Hey! I'm Jacques. I'm an independent technical alignment researcher with a background in physics and experience in government (social innovation, strategic foresight, mental health and energy regulation). Link to Swapcard profile. Twitter/X.
CURRENT WORK
I think people might have the implicit idea that LLM companies will continue to give API access as the models become more powerful, but I was talking to someone earlier this week that made me remember that this is not necessarily the case. If you gain powerful enough models, you may just keep it to yourself and instead spin AI companies with AI employees to make a ton of cash instead of just charging for tokens.
For this reason, even if outside people build the proper brain-like AGI setup with additional components to squeeze out capabilities from LLMs, they may be limited by:
1. open-source models
2. the API of the weaker models from the top companies
3. the best API of the companies that are lagging behind
A frame for thinking about takeoff
One error people can make when thinking about takeoff speeds is assuming that because we are in a world with some gradual takeoff, it now means we are in a "slow takeoff" world. I think this can lead us to make some mistakes in our strategy. I usually prefer thinking in the following frame: “is there any point in the future where we’ll have a step function that prevents us from doing slow takeoff-like interventions for preventing x-risk?”
In other words, we should be careful to assume that some "slow takeoff" doesn't have a...
Clarification on The Bitter Lesson and Data Efficiency
I thought this exchange provided some much-needed clarification on The Bitter Lesson that I think many people don't realize, so I figured I'd share it here:
Lecun responds:
Then, Richard Sutton agrees with Yann. Someone asks him:
There are those who have motivated reasoning and don’t know it.
Those who have motivated reasoning, know it, and don’t care.
Finally, those who have motivated reasoning, know it, but try to mask it by including tame (but not significant) takes the other side would approve of.
It seems that @Scott Alexander believes that there's a 50%+ chance we all die in the next 100 years if we don't get AGI (EDIT: how he places his probability mass on existential risk vs catastrophe/social collapse is now unclear to me). This seems like a wild claim to me, but here's what he said about it in his AI Pause debate post:
...Second, if we never get AI, I expect the future to be short and grim. Most likely we kill ourselves with synthetic biology. If not, some combination of technological and economic stagnation, rising totalitarianism + illiberalism
In light of recent re-focus on AI governance to reduce AI risk, I wanted to share a post I wrote about a year ago that suggests an approach using strategic foresight to reduce risks: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GbXAeq6smRzmYRSQg/foresight-for-agi-safety-strategy-mitigating-risks-and.
Governments all over the world use frameworks like these. The purpose in this case would be to have documents ready ahead of time in case a window of opportunity for regulation opens up. It’s impossible to predict how things will evolve so instead you focus on what’s plausi...
I'm working on an ultimate doc on productivity I plan to share and make it easy, specifically for alignment researchers.
Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions as I work on it.
Roam Research link for easier time reading.
Google Docs link in case you want to leave comments there.
I’m collaborating on a new research agenda. Here’s a potential insight about future capability improvements:
There has been some insider discussion (and Sam Altman has said) that scaling has started running into some difficulties. Specifically, GPT-4 has gained a wider breath of knowledge, but has not significantly improved in any one domain. This might mean that future AI systems may gain their capabilities from places other than scaling because of the diminishing returns from scaling. This could mean that to become “superintelligent”, the AI needs to run ...
Link to YouTube explanation:
Link to paper (sharing on GDrive since it's behind a paywall on Science): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PIwThxbTppVkxY0zQ_ua9pr6vcWTQ56-/view?usp=share_link
Top Diplomacy players seem to focus on gigabrain strategies rather than deception
Diplomacy players will no longer want to collaborate with you if you backstab them once. This is so pervasive they'll still feel you are untrustworthy across tournaments. Therefore, it's mostly optimal to be honest and just focus on gigabrain strategies. That said, a smart...
Project idea: GPT-4-Vision to help conceptual alignment researchers during whiteboard sessions and beyond
Thoughts?
What are people’s current thoughts on London as a hub?
Anything else I’m missing?
I’m particularly curious about whether it’s worth it for independent researchers to go there. Would they actually interact with other r...
AI labs should be dedicating a lot more effort into using AI for cybersecurity as a way to prevent weights or insights from being stolen. Would be good for safety and it seems like it could be a pretty big cash cow too.
If they have access to the best models (or specialized), it may be highly beneficial for them to plug them in immediately to help with cybersecurity (perhaps even including noticing suspicious activity from employees).
I don’t know much about cybersecurity so I’d be curious to hear from someone who does.
Small shortform to say that I’m a little sad I haven’t posted as much as I would like to in recent months because of infohazard reasons. I’m still working on Accelerating Alignment with LLMs and eventually would like to hire some software engineer builders that are sufficiently alignment-pilled.
Call To Action: Someone should do a reading podcast of the AGISF material to make it even more accessible (similar to the LessWrong Curated Podcast and Cold Takes Podcast). A discussion series added to YouTube would probably be helpful as well.
you need to be flow state maxxing. you curate your environment, prune distractions. make your workspace a temple, your mind a focused laser. you engineer your life to guard the sacred flow. every notification is an intruder, every interruption a thief. the world fades, the task is the world. in flow, you're not working, you're being. in the silent hum of concentration, ideas bloom. you're not chasing productivity, you're living it. every moment outside flow is a plea to return. you're not just doing, you're flowing. the mundane transforms into the extraord...
Regarding Q*, the (and Zero, the other OpenAI AI model you didn't know about)
Let's play word association with Q*:
From Reuters article:
...The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans. Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on
Beeminder + Freedom are pretty goated as productivity tools.
I’ve been following Andy Matuschak’s strategy and it’s great/flexible: https://blog.andymatuschak.org/post/169043084412/successful-habits-through-smoothly-ratcheting
New tweet about the world model (map) paper:
Sub-tweeting because I don't want to rain on a poor PhD student who should have been advised better, but: that paper about LLMs having a map of the world is perhaps what happens when a famous physicist wants to do AI research without caring to engage with the existing literature.
I haven’t looked into the paper in question yet, but I have been concerned about researchers taking old ideas about AI risk and looking to prove things that might not be there yet as an AI risk communication point. Then, being overconfide...
I expect that my values would be different if I was smarter. Personally, if something were to happen and I’d get much smarter and develop new values, I’m pretty sure I’d be okay with that as I expect I’d have better, more refined values.
Why wouldn’t an AI also be okay with that?
Is there something wrong with how I would be making a decision here?
Do the current kinds of agents people plan to build have “reflective stability”? If you say yes, why is that?
“We assume the case that AI (intelligences in general) will eventually converge on one utility function. All sufficiently intelligent intelligences born in the same reality will converge towards the same behaviour set. For this reason, if it turns out that a sufficiently advanced AI would kill us all, there’s nothing that we can do about it. We will eventually hit that level of intelligence.
Now, if that level of intelligence is doesn’t converge towards something that kills us all, we are safer in a world where AI capabilities (of the current regime) essent...
I'm still in some sort of transitory phase where I'm deciding where I'd like to live long term. I moved to Montreal, Canada lately because I figured I'd try working as an independent researcher here and see if I can get MILA/Bengio to do some things for reducing x-risk.
Not long after I moved here, Hinton started talking about AI risk too, and he's in Toronto which is not too far from Montreal. I'm trying to figure out the best way I could leverage Canada's heavyweights and government to make progress on reducing AI risk, but it seems like there's a lot mor...
I gave talk about my Accelerating Alignment with LLMs agenda about 1 month ago (which is basically a decade in AI tools time). Part of the agenda covered (publicly) here.
I will maybe write an actual post about the agenda soon, but would love to have some people who are willing to look over it. If you are interested, send me a message.
Someone should create a “AI risk arguments” flowchart that serves as a base for simulating a conversation with skeptics or the general public. Maybe a set of flashcards to go along with it.
I want to have the sequence of arguments solid enough in my head so that I can reply concisely (snappy) if I ever end up in a debate, roundtable or on the news. I’ve started collecting some stuff since I figured I should take initiative on it.
Text-to-Speech tool I use for reading more LW posts and papers
I use Voice Dream Reader. It's great even though the TTS voice is still robotic. For papers, there's a feature that let's you skip citations so the reading is more fluid.
I've mentioned it before, but I was just reminded that I should share it here because I just realized that if you load the LW post with "Save to Voice Dream", it will also save the comments so I can get TTS of the comments as well. Usually these tools only include the post, but that's annoying because there's a lot of good stuff...
I honestly feel like some software devs should probably still keep their high-paying jobs instead of going into alignment and just donate a bit of time and programming expertise to help independent researchers if they want to start contributing to AI Safety.
I think we can probably come up with engineering projects that are interesting and low-barrier-to-entry for software engineers.
I also think providing “programming coaching” to some independent researchers could be quite useful. Whether that’s for getting them better at coding up projects efficiently or ...
I've been ruminating on an idea ever since I read the section on deception in "The Core of the Alignment Problem is..." from my colleagues in SERI MATS.
Here's the important part:
...When an agent interacts with the world, there are two possible ways the agent makes mistakes:
- Its values were not aligned with the outer objective, and so it does something intentionally wrong,
- Its world model was incorrect, so it makes an accidental mistake.
Thus, the training process of an AGI will improve its values or its world model, and since i
More information about alleged manipulative behaviour of Sam Altman
Text from article (along with follow-up paragraphs):
...Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.” Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the p
On generating ideas for Accelerating Alignment
There's this Twitter thread that I saved a while ago that is no longer up. It's about generating ideas for startups. However, I think the insight from the thread carries over well enough to thinking about ideas for Accelerating Alignment. Particularly, being aware of what is on the cusp of being usable so that you can take advantage of it as soon as becomes available (even do the work beforehand).
For example, we are surprisingly close to human-level text-to-speech (have a look at Apple's new model for audiobook...
Should EA / Alignment offices make it ridiculously easy to work remotely with people?
One of the main benefits of being in person is that you end up in spontaneous conversations with people in the office. This leads to important insights. However, given that there's a level of friction for setting up remote collaboration, only the people in those offices seem to benefit.
If it were ridiculously easy to join conversations for lunch or whatever (touch of a button rather than pulling up a laptop and opening a Zoom session), then would it allow for a stronger cr...
In the ROME paper, when you prompt the language model with "The Eiffel Tower is located in Paris", you have the following:
Once a model has seen a subject token(s) (e.g. Eiffel Tower), it will retrieve a whole bunch of factual knowledge (not just one thing since it doesn’t know you will ask for something like location after the subject token) from the MLPs and 'write' into to the residual stream for the attention modules at the final...
Note: I'm at the crackpot idea stage of thinking about how model editing could be useful for alignment.
One worry with deception is that the AI will likely develop a sufficiently good world model to understand it is in a training loop before it has fully aligned inner values.
The thing is, if the model was aligned, then at some point we'd consider it useful for the model to have a good enough world model to recognize that it is a model. Well, what if you prevent the model from bei...