Interesting; I hadn't heard of DreamerV2. From a quick look at the paper, it looks like one might describe it as a step on the way to something like EfficientZero. Does that sound roughly correct?
it would be great to see older models incorporated as well
We may extend this to older models in the future. But our goal right now is to focus on these models' public safety risks as standalone (or nearly standalone) systems. And prior to GPT-3, it's hard to find models whose public safety risks were meaningful on a standalone basis — while an earlier model could have been used as part of a malicious act, for example, it wouldn't be as central to such an act as a modern model would be.
Yeah, these are interesting points.
Isn't it a bit suspicious that the thing-that's-discontinuous is hard to measure, but the-thing-that's-continuous isn't? I mean, this isn't totally suspicious, because subjective experiences are often hard to pin down and explain using numbers and statistics. I can understand that, but the suspicion is still there.
I sympathize with this view, and I agree there is some element of truth to it that may point to a fundamental gap in our understanding (or at least in mine). But I'm not sure I entirely agree that disc... (read more)
I think what gwern is trying to say is that continuous progress on a benchmark like PTB appears (from what we've seen so far) to map to discontinuous progress in qualitative capabilities, in a surprising way which nobody seems to have predicted in advance. Qualitative capabilities are more relevant to safety than benchmark performance is, because while qualitative capabilities include things like "code a simple video game" and "summarize movies with emojis", they also include things like "break out of confinement and kill everyone". It's the latter capabil... (read more)
I think what gwern is trying to say is that continuous progress on a benchmark like PTB appears (from what we've seen so far) to map to discontinuous progress in qualitative capabilities, in a surprising way which nobody seems to have predicted in advance.
This is a reasonable thesis, and if indeed it's the one Gwern intended, then I apologize for missing it!
That said, I have a few objections,
Good catch! I didn't check the form. Yes you are right, the spoiler should say (1=Paul, 9=Eliezer) but the conclusion is the right way round.
(Not being too specific to avoid spoilers) Quick note: I think the direction of the shift in your conclusion might be backwards, given the statistics you've posted and that 1=Eliezer and 9=Paul.
Thanks for the kind words and thoughtful comments.
You're absolutely right that expected ROI ultimately determines scale of investment. I agree on your efficiency point too: scaling and efficiency are complements, in the sense that the more you have of one, the more it's worth investing in the other.
I think we will probably include some measure of efficiency as you've suggested. But I'm not sure exactly what that will be, since efficiency measures tend to be benchmark-dependent so it's hard to get apples-to-apples here for a variety of reasons. (e.g., diffe... (read more)
Gotcha. Well, that seems right—certainly in the limit case.
Thanks, that helps. So actually this objection says: "No, the biggest risk lies not in the trustworthiness of the Bob you use as the input to your scheme, but rather in the fidelity of your copying process; and this is true even if the errors in your copying process are being introduced randomly rather than adversarially. Moreover, if you actually do develop the technical capability to reduce your random copying-error risk down to around the level of your Bob-trustworthiness risk, well guess what, you've built yourself an AGI. But since this myopic copying... (read more)
This is a great thread. Let me see if I can restate the arguments here in different language:
Eliezer's counterargument is "You don't get a high-fidelity copy of Bob that can be iterated and recursed to do arbitrary amounts of work a Bob-army could do, the way Bob could do it, until many years after the world otherwise ends. The imitated Bobs are imperfect, and if they scale to do vast amounts of work, kill you."
Abstracting out one step: there is a rough general argument that human-imitating AI is, if not perfectly safe, then at least as safe as the humans it's imitating. In particular, if it's imitating humans working on alignment, then it's at least as likely as we are to come up with an aligned AI. Its prospects are no worse than our prospects are already. (And plausibly better, since the simulated humans may have more time to solve the problem.)
For full strength, this argument requires that:
I want to push back a little against the claim that the bootstrapping strategy ("build a relatively weak aligned AI that will make superhumanly fast progress on AI alignment") is definitely irrelevant/doomed/inferior. Specifically, I don't know whether this strategy is good or not in practice, but it serves as useful threshold for what level/kind of capabilities we need to align in order to solve AI risk.
Yeah, very much agree with all of this. I even think there's an argument to be made that relatively narrow-yet-superhuman theorem provers (or other resear... (read more)
Great catch. For what it's worth, it actually seems fine to me intuitively that any finite pattern would be an optimizing system for this reason, though I agree most such patterns may not directly be interesting. But perhaps this is a hint that some notion of independence or orthogonality of optimizing systems might help to complete this picture.
Here's a real-world example: you could imagine a universe where humans are minding their own business over here on Earth, while at the same time, over there in a star system 20 light-years away, two planets are hur... (read more)
Extremely interesting — thanks for posting. Obviously there are a number of caveats which you carefully point out, but this seems like a very reasonable methodology and the actual date ranges look compelling to me. (Though they also align with my bias in favor of shorter timelines, so I might not be impartial on that.)
One quick question about the end of this section:
The expected number of bits in original encoding per bits in the compression equals the entropy of that language.
Wouldn't this be the other way around? If your language has low entropy it shoul... (read more)
Thanks! I think this all makes sense.
Loved this post. This whole idea of using a deterministic dynamical system as a conceptual testing ground feels very promising.
A few questions / comments:
Very neat. It's quite curious that switching to L2 for the base optimizer doesn't seem to have resulted in the meta-initialized network learning the sine function. What sort of network did you use for the meta-learner? (It looks like the 4-layer network in your Methods refers to your base optimizer, but perhaps it's the same architecture for both?)
Also, do you know if you end up getting the meta-initialized network to learn the sine function eventually if you train for thousands and thousands of steps? Or does it just never learn no matter how hard you train it?
I see — perhaps I did misinterpret your earlier comment. It sounds like the transition you are more interested in is closer to (AI has ~free rein over the internet) => (AI invents nanotech). I don't think this is a step we should expect to be able to model especially well, but the best story/analogy I know of for it is probably the end part of That Alien Message. i.e., what sorts of approaches would we come up with, if all of human civilization was bent on solving the equivalent problem from our point of view?
If instead you're thinking more about a tran... (read more)
No problem, glad it was helpful!
And thanks for the APS-AI definition, I wasn't aware of the term.
Thanks! I agree with this critique. Note that Daniel also points out something similar in point 12 of his comment — see my response.
To elaborate a bit more on the "missing step" problem though:
See my response to point 6 of Daniel's comment — it's rather that I'm imagining competing hedge funds (run by humans) beginning to enter the market with this sort of technology.
Hey Daniel — thanks so much for taking the time to write this thoughtful feedback. I really appreciate you doing this, and very much enjoyed your "2026" post as well. I apologize for the delay and lengthy comment here, but wanted to make sure I addressed all your great points.
1. It would be great if you could pepper your story with dates, so that we can construct a timeline and judge for ourselves whether we think things are happening too quickly or not.
I've intentionally avoided referring to absolute dates, other than by indirect implication (e.g. "iOS 19... (read more)
I see. Okay, I definitely agree that makes sense under the "fails to generalize" risk model. Thanks Rohin!
Got it, thanks!
I find it plausible that the AI systems fail in only a special few exotic circumstances, which aren't the ones that are actually created by AGI.
This helps, and I think it's the part I don't currently have a great intuition for. My best attempt at steel-manning would be something like: "It's plausible that an AGI will generalize correctly to distributions which it is itself responsible for bringing about." (Where "correctly" here means "in a way that's consistent with its builders' wishes.") And you could plausibly argue that an AGI would hav... (read more)
I agree with pretty much this whole comment, but do have one question:
But it still seems plausible that in practice we never hit those exotic circumstances (because those exotic circumstances never happen, or because we've retrained the model before we get to the exotic circumstances, etc), and it's intent aligned in all the circumstances the model actually encounters.
Given that this is conditioned on us getting to AGI, wouldn't the intuition here be that pretty much all the most valuable things such a system would do would fall under "exotic circumstances... (read more)
But in the context of superhuman systems, I think we need to be more concerned by the possibility that it’s performance-uncompetitive to restrict your system to only take actions that can be justified entirely with human-understandable reasoning.
Interestingly, this is already a well known phenomenon in the hedge fund world. In fact, quant funds discovered about 25 years ago that the most consistently profitable trading signals are reliably the ones that are the least human-interpretable. It makes intuitive sense: any signal that can be understood by a huma... (read more)
One reason to favor such a definition of alignment might be that we ultimately need a definition that gives us guarantees that hold at human-level capability or greater, and humans are probably near the bottom of the absolute scale of capabilities that can be physically realized in our world. It would (imo) be surprising to discover a useful alignment definition that held across capability levels way beyond us, but that didn't hold below our own modest level of intelligence.
No problem! Glad it was helpful. I think your fix makes sense.
I'm not quite sure what the error was in the original proof of Lemma 3; I think it may be how I converted to and interpreted the vector representation.
Yeah, I figured maybe it was because the dummy variable was being used in the EV to sum over outcomes, while the vector was being used to represent the probabilities associated with those outcomes. Because and are similar it's easy to conflate their meanings, and if you apply to the wrong... (read more)
Thanks for writing this.
I have one point of confusion about some of the notation that's being used to prove Lemma 3. Apologies for the detail, but the mistake could very well be on my end so I want to make sure I lay out everything clearly.
First, is being defined here as an outcome permutation. Presumably this means that 1) for some , ; and 2) admits a unique inverse . That makes sense.
We also define lotteries over outcomes, presumably as, e.g., , where is ... (read more)
Update: having now thought more deeply about this, I no longer endorse my above comment.
While I think the reasoning was right, I got the definitions exactly backwards. To be clear, what I would now claim is:
Everything in the above comment then still goes through, except with these definitions reversed.
On the one hand, the "per... (read more)
I'm with you on this, and I suspect we'd agree on most questions of fact around this topic. Of course demarcation is an operation on maps and not on territories.
But as a practical matter, the moment one starts talking about the definition of something such as a mesa-objective, one has already unfolded one's map and started pointing to features on it. And frankly, that seems fine! Because historically, a great way to make forward progress on a conceptual question has been to work out a sequence of maps that give you successive degrees of approximation to th... (read more)
Yeah I agree this is a legitimate concern, though it seems like it is definitely possible to make such a demarcation in toy universes (like in the example I gave above). And therefore it ought to be possible in principle to do so in our universe.
To try to understand a bit better: does your pessimism about this come from the hardness of the technical challenge of querying a zillion-particle entity for its objective function? Or does it come from the hardness of the definitional challenge of exhaustively labeling every one of those zillion particles to make ... (read more)
I'm not sure what would constitute a clearly-worked counterexample. To me, a high reliance on an agent/world boundary constitutes a "non-naturalistic" assumption, which simply makes me think a framework is more artificial/fragile.
Oh for sure. I wouldn't recommend having a Cartesian boundary assumption as the fulcrum of your alignment strategy, for example. But what could be interesting would be to look at an isolated dynamical system, draw one boundary, investigate possible objective functions in the context of that boundary; then erase that first boundary... (read more)
I would further add that looking for difficulties created by the simplification seems very intellectually productive.
Yep, strongly agree. And a good first step to doing this is to actually build as robust a simplification as you can, and then see where it breaks. (Working on it.)
Ah I see! Thanks for clarifying.
Yes, the point about the Cartesian boundary is important. And it's completely true that any agent / environment boundary we draw will always be arbitrary. But that doesn't mean one can't usefully draw such a boundary in the real world — and unless one does, it's hard to imagine how one could ever generate a working definition of something like a mesa-objective. (Because you'd always be unable to answer the legitimate question: "the mesa-objective of what?")
Of course the right question will always be: "what is the whole unive... (read more)
which stems from the assumption that you are able to carve an environment up into an agent and an environment and place the "same agent" in arbitrary environments. No such thing is possible in reality, as an agent cannot exist without its environment
I might be misunderstanding what you mean here, but carving up a world into agent vs environment is absolutely possible in reality, as is placing that agent in arbitrary environments to see what it does. You can think of the traditional RL setting as a concrete example of this: on one side we have an agen... (read more)
If we wish, we could replace or re-define "capability robustness" with "inner robustness", the robustness of pursuit of the mesa-objective under distributional shift.
I strongly agree with this suggestion. IMO, tying capability robustness to the behavioral objective confuses a lot of things, because the set of plausible behavioral objectives is itself not robust to distributional shift.
One way to think about this from the standpoint of the "Objective-focused approach" might be: the mesa-objective is the thing the agent is revealed to be pursuing under arbit... (read more)
Ah yes, that's right. Yeah, I just wanted to make this part fully explicit to confirm my understanding. But I agree it's equivalent to just let ignore the extra (or whatever) component.
Thanks very much!
Late comment here, but I really liked this post and want to make sure I've fully understood it. In particular there's a claim near the end which says: if is not fixed, then we can build equivalent models , for which it is fixed. I'd like to formalize this claim to make sure I'm 100% clear on what it means. Here's my attempt at doing that:
For any pair of models , where , there exists a variable (of which is a subset) and a pair of models ... (read more)
That makes sense, though I'd also expect that LfLH benchmarks like BASALT could turn out to be a better fit for superscale models in general. (e.g. a BASALT analogue might do a better job of capturing the flexibility of GPT-N or DALL-E type models than current benchmarks do, though you'd probably need to define a few hundred tasks for that to be useful. It's also possible this has already been done and I'm unaware of it.)
Love this idea. From the linked post on the BAIR website, the idea of "prompting" a Minecraft task with e.g. a brief sequence of video frames seems especially interesting.
Would you anticipate the benchmark version of this would ask participants to disclose metrics such as "amount of task-specific feedback or data used in training"? Or does this end up being too hard to quantify because you're explicitly expecting folks to use a variety of feedback modalities to train their agents?
Great post.
I responded that for me, the whole point of the inner alignment problem was the conspicuous absence of a formal connection between the outer objective and the mesa-objective, such that we could make little to no guarantees based on any such connection.
Strong agree. In fact I believe developing the tools to make this connection could be one of the most productive focus areas of inner alignment research.
... (read more)What I'd like to have would be several specific formal definitions, together with several specific informal concepts, and strong stories connectin
Sure, makes sense! Though to be clear, I believe what I'm describing should apply to optimizers other than just gradient descent — including optimizers one might think of as reward-maximizing agents.
Great post. Thanks for writing this — it feels quite clarifying. I'm finding the diagram especially helpful in resolving the sources of my confusion.
I believe everything here is consistent with the definitions I proposed recently in this post (though please do point out any inconsistencies if you see them!), with the exception of one point.
This may be a fundamental confusion on my part — but I don't see objective robustness, as defined here, as being a separate concept at all from inner alignment. The crucial point, I would argue, is that we ought to be tr... (read more)
Really interesting!
I think there might be a minor typo in Section 2.2:
For transitivity, assume that for
I think this should be based on the indexing in the rest of the paragraph.
Thanks for the kind words, Adam! I'll follow up over DM about early drafts — I'm interested in getting feedback that's as broad as possible and really appreciate the kind offer here.
Typo is fixed — thanks for pointing it out!
... (read more)At first I wondered why you were taking the sum instead of just , but after thinking about it, the latter would probably converge to 0 almost all the time, because even with amazing optimization, the loss will stop being improved by a factor linear in T at some point. That might be interesting to put in the po
Thanks for the comment!
Not sure if I agree with your interpretation of the "real objective" - might be better served by looking for stable equilibria and just calling them as such.
I think this is a reasonable objection. I don't make this very clear in the post, but the "true objective" I've written down in the example indeed isn't unique: like any measure of utility or loss, it's only unique up to affine transformations with positive coefficients. And that could definitely damage the usefulness of these definitions, since it means that alignment factors, f... (read more)
Thanks for the clarification — definitely agree with this.
Yeah, you're right. Our thinking was that we'd be able to do this with future data points or by increasing the "density" of points within the post-GPT-3 era, but ultimately it will probably be necessary (and more compelling) to include somewhat older examples too.