Senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy. Recently completed a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. Opinions my own.
I agree that AIs only optimizing for good human ratings on the episode (what I call "reward-on-the-episode seekers") have incentives to seize control of the reward process, that this is indeed dangerous, and that in some cases it will incentivize AIs to fake alignment in an effort to seize control of the reward process on the episode (I discuss this in the section on "non-schemers with schemer-like traits"). However, I also think that reward-on-the-episode seekers are also substantially less scary than schemers in my sense, for reasons I discuss here (i.e., reasons to do with what I call "responsiveness to honest tests," the ambition and temporal scope of their goals, and their propensity to engage in various forms of sandbagging and what I call "early undermining"). And this especially for reward-on-the-episode seekers with fairly short episodes, where grabbing control over the reward process may not be feasible on the relevant timescales.
Agree that it would need to have some conception of the type of training signal to optimize for, that it will do better in training the more accurate its picture of the training signal, and that this provides an incentive to self-locate more accurately (though not necessary to degree at stake in e.g. knowing what server you're running on).
The question of how strongly training pressures models to minimize loss is one that I isolate and discuss explicitly in the report, in section 1.5, "On 'slack' in training" -- and at various points the report references how differing levels of "slack" might affect the arguments it considers. Here I was influenced in part by discussions with various people, yourself included, who seemed to disagree about how much weight to put on arguments in the vein of: "policy A would get lower loss than policy B, so we should think it more likely that SGD selects policy A than policy B."
(And for clarity, I don't think that arguments of this form always support expecting models to do tons of reasoning about the training set-up. For example, as the report discusses in e.g. Section 4.4, on "speed arguments," the amount of world-modeling/instrumental-reasoning that the model does can affect the loss it gets via e.g. using up cognitive resources. So schemers -- and also, reward-on-the-episode seekers -- can be at some disadvantage, in this respect, relative to models that don't think about the training process at all.)
Agents that end up intrinsically motivated to get reward on the episode would be "terminal training-gamers/reward-on-the-episode seekers," and not schemers, on my taxonomy. I agree that terminal training-gamers can also be motivated to seek power in problematic ways (I discuss this in the section on "non-schemers with schemer-like traits"), but I think that schemers proper are quite a bit scarier than reward-on-the-episode seekers, for reasons I describe here.
Rohin is correct. In general, I meant for the report's analysis to apply to basically all of these situations (e.g., both inner and outer-misaligned, both multi-polar and unipolar, both fast take-off and slow take-off), provided that the misaligned AI systems in question ultimately end up power-seeking, and that this power-seeking leads to existential catastrophe.
It's true, though, that some of my discussion was specifically meant to address the idea that absent a brain-in-a-box-like scenario, we're fine. Hence the interest in e.g. deployment decisions, warning shots, and corrective mechanisms.
Hi Koen,
Glad to hear you liked section 4.3.3. And thanks for pointing to these posts -- I certainly haven't reviewed all the literature, here, so there may well be reasons for optimism that aren't sufficiently salient to me.
Re: black boxes, I do think that black-box systems that emerge from some kind of evolution/search process are more dangerous; but as I discuss in 4.4.1, I also think that the bare fact that the systems are much more cognitively sophisticated than humans creates significant and safety-relevant barriers to understanding, even if the system has been designed/mechanistically understood at a different level.
Re: “there is a whole body of work which shows that evolved systems are often power-seeking” -- anything in particular you have in mind here?
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for taking the time to clarify.
One other factor for me, beyond those you quote, is the “absolute” difficulty of ensuring practical PS-alignment, e.g. (from my discussion of premise 3):
Part of this uncertainty has to do with the “absolute” difficulty of achieving practical PS-alignment, granted that you can build APS systems at all. A system’s practical PS-alignment depends on the specific interaction between a number of variables -- notably, its capabilities (which could themselves be controlled/limited in various ways), its objectives (including the time horizon of the objectives in question), and the circumstances it will in fact exposed to (circumstances that could involve various physical constraints, monitoring mechanisms, and incentives, bolstered in power by difficult-to-anticipate future technology, including AI technology). I expect problems with proxies and search to make controlling objectives harder; and I expect barriers to understanding (along with adversarial dynamics, if they arise pre-deployment) to exacerbate difficulties more generally; but even so, it also seems possible to me that it won’t be “that hard” (by the time we can build APS systems at all) to eliminate many tendencies towards misaligned power-seeking (for example, it seems plausible to me that selecting very strongly against (observable) misaligned power-seeking during training goes a long way), conditional on retaining realistic levels of control over a system’s post-deployment capabilities and circumstances (though how often one can retain this control is a further question).
My sense is that relative to you, I am (a) less convinced that ensuring practical PS-alignment will be “hard” in this absolute sense, once you can build APS systems at all (my sense is that our conceptions of what it takes to “solve the alignment problem” might be different), (b) less convinced that practically PS-misaligned systems will be attractive to deploy despite their PS-misalignment (whether because of deception, or for other reasons), (c) less convinced that APS systems becoming possible/incentivized by 2035 implies “fast take-off” (it sounds like you’re partly thinking: those are worlds where something like the scaling hypothesis holds, and so you can just keep scaling up; but I don’t think the scaling hypothesis holding to an extent that makes some APS systems possible/financially feasible implies that you can just scale up quickly to systems that can perform at strongly superhuman levels on e.g. ~any task, whatever the time horizons, data requirements, etc), and (d) more optimistic about something-like-present-day-humanity’s ability to avoid/prevent failures at a scale that disempower ~all of humanity (though I do think Covid, and its policitization, an instructive example in this respect), especially given warning shots (and my guess is that we do get warning shots both before or after 2035, even if APS systems become possible/financially feasible before then).
Re: nuclear winter, as I understand it, you’re reading me as saying: “in general, if a possible and incentivized technology is dangerous, there will be warning shots of the dangers; humans (perhaps reacting to those warning shots) won’t deploy at a level that risks the permanent extinction/disempowerment of ~all humans; and if they start to move towards such disempowerment/extinction, they’ll take active steps to pull back.” And your argument is: “if you get to less than 10% doom on this basis, you’re going to give too low probabilities on scenarios like nuclear winter in the 20th century.”
I don’t think of myself as leaning heavily on an argument at that level of generality (though maybe there’s a bit of that). For example, that statement feels like it’s missing the “maybe ensuring practical PS-alignment just isn’t that hard, especially relative to building practically PS-misaligned systems that are at least superficially attractive to deploy” element of my own picture. And more generally, I expect to say different things about e.g. biorisk, climate change, nanotech, etc, depending on the specifics, even if generic considerations like “humans will try not to all die” apply to each.
Re: nuclear winter in particular, I’d want to think a bit more about what sort of probability I’d put on nuclear winter in the 20th century (one thing your own analysis skips is the probability that a large nuclear conflict injects enough smoke into the stratosphere to actually cause nuclear winter, which I don’t see as guaranteed -- and we’d need to specify what level of cooling counts). And nuclear winter on its own doesn’t include a “scaling to the permanent disempowerment/extinction of ~all of humanity” step -- a step that, FWIW, I see as highly questionable in the nuclear winter case, and which is important to my own probability on AI doom (see premise 5). And there are various other salient differences: for example, mutually assured destruction seems like a distinctly dangerous type of dynamic, which doesn’t apply to various AI deployment scenarios; nuclear weapons have widespread destruction as their explicit function, whereas most AI systems won’t; and so on. That said, I think comparisons in this vein could still be helpful; and I’m sympathetic to points in the vein of “looking at the history of e.g. climate, nuclear risk, BSL-4 accidents, etc the probability that humans will deploy technology that risks global catastrophe, and not stop doing so even after getting significant evidence about the risks at stake, can’t be that low” (I talk about this a bit in 4.4.3 and 6.2).
(Partly re-hashing my response from twitter.)
I'm seeing your main argument here as a version of what I call, in section 4.4, a "speed argument against schemers" -- e.g., basically, that SGD will punish the extra reasoning that schemers need to perform.
(I’m generally happy to talk about this reasoning as a complexity penalty, and/or about the params it requires, and/or about circuit-depth -- what matters is the overall "preference" that SGD ends up with. And thinking of this consideration as a different kind of counting argument *against* schemers seems like it might well be a productive frame. I do also think that questions about whether models will be bottlenecked on serial computation, and/or whether "shallower" computations will be selected for, are pretty relevant here, and the report includes a rough calculation in this respect in section 4.4.2 (see also summary here).)
Indeed, I think that maybe the strongest single argument against scheming is a combination of
My sense is that I'm less confident than you in both (1) and (2), but I think they're both plausible (the report, in particular, argues in favor of (1)), and that the combination is a key source of hope. I'm excited to see further work fleshing out the case for both (including e.g. the sorts of arguments for (2) that I took you and Nora to be gesturing at on twitter -- the report doesn't spend a ton of time on assessing how much path-dependence to expect, and of what kind).
Re: your discussion of the "ghost of instrumental reasoning," "deducing lots of world knowledge 'in-context,' and "the perspective that NNs will 'accidentally' acquire such capabilities internally as a convergent result of their inductive biases" -- especially given that you only skimmed the report's section headings and a small amount of the content, I have some sense, here, that you're responding to other arguments you've seen about deceptive alignment, rather than to specific claims made in the report (I don't, for example, make any claims about world knowledge being derived "in-context," or about models "accidentally" acquiring flexible instrumental reasoning). Is your basic thought something like: sure, the models will develop flexible instrumental reasoning that could in principle be used in service of arbitrary goals, but they will only in fact use it in service of the specified goal, because that's the thing training pressures them to do? If so, my feeling is something like: ok, but a lot of the question here is whether using the instrumental reasoning in service of some other goal (one that backchains into getting-reward) will be suitably compatible with/incentivized by training pressures as well. And I don't see e.g. the reversal curse as strong evidence on this front.
Re: "mechanistically ungrounded intuitions about 'goals' and 'tryingness'" -- as I discuss in section 0.1, the report is explicitly setting aside disputes about whether the relevant models will be well-understood as goal-directed (my own take on that is in section 2.2.1 of my report on power-seeking AI here). The question in this report is whether, conditional on goal-directedness, we should expect scheming. That said, I do think that what I call the "messyness" of the relevant goal-directedness might be relevant to our overall assessment of the arguments for scheming in various ways, and that scheming might require an unusually high standard of goal-directedness in some sense. I discuss this in section 2.2.3, on "'Clean' vs. 'messy' goal-directedness," and in various other places in the report.
Re: "long term goals are sufficiently hard to form deliberately that I don't think they'll form accidentally" -- the report explicitly discusses cases where we intentionally train models to have long-term goals (both via long episodes, and via short episodes aimed at inducing long-horizon optimization). I think scheming is more likely in those cases. See section 2.2.4, "What if you intentionally train the model to have long-term goals?" That said, I'd be interested to see arguments that credit assignment difficulties actively count against the development of beyond-episode goals (whether in models trained on short episodes or long episodes) for models that are otherwise goal-directed. And I do think that, if we could be confident that models trained on short episodes won't learn beyond-episode goals accidentally (even irrespective of mundane adversarial training -- e.g., that models rewarded for getting gold coins on the episode would not learn a goal that generalizes to caring about gold coins in general, even prior to efforts to punish it for sacrificing gold-coins-on-the-episode for gold-coins-later), that would be a significant source of comfort (I discuss some possible experimental directions in this respect in section 6.2).