RobertM

LessWrong dev & admin as of July 5th, 2022.

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I am not covering training setups where we purposefully train an AI to be agentic and autonomous. I just think it's not plausible that we just keep scaling up networks, run pretraining + light RLHF, and then produce a schemer.[2]

Like Ryan, I'm interested in how much of this claim is conditional on "just keep scaling up networks" being insufficient to produce relevantly-superhuman systems (i.e. systems capable of doing scientific R&D better and faster than humans, without humans in the intellectual part of the loop).  If it's "most of it", then my guess is that accounts for a good chunk of the disagreement.

Curated.

The reasons I like this post:

"That being said, I do think there are some cases where gradient hacking might be quite easy, e.g. cases where we give the model access to a database where it can record its pre-commitments or direct access to its own weights and the ability to modify them.")

  • it has direct, practical implications for e.g. regulatory proposals
  • it points out the critical fact that we're missing the ability to evaluate for alignment given current techniques

Arguably missing is a line or two that backtracks from "we could try to get robust understanding via a non-behavioral source such as mechanistic interpretability evaluated throughout the course of training" to (my claim) "it may not be safe to perform capability evaluations via fine-tuning on sufficiently powerful models before we can evaluate them for alignment, and we don't actually know when we're going to hit that threshold", but that might be out of scope.