LessWrong 2.0 Reader

GPT-4 is rumored to be a 2e25 FLOPs model. With 20K H100s that were around as clusters for more than a year, 4 months at 40% utilization gives 8e25 BF16 FLOPs. Llama 3 405B is 4e25 FLOPs. The 100K H100s clusters that are only starting to come online in the last few months give 4e26 FLOPs in 4 months, and 1 gigawatt 500K B200s training systems that are currently being built will give 4e27 FLOPs in 4 months.

So lack of scaling-related improvement in deployed models since GPT-4 is likely the result of only seeing the 2e25-8e25 FLOPs range of scale so far. The rumors about the new models being underwhelming are less concrete, and they are about the very first experiments in the 2e26-4e26 FLOPs range. Only by early 2025 will there be multiple 2e26+ FLOPs models from different developers to play with, the first results of the experiment in scaling considerably past GPT-4.

And in 2026, once the 300K-500K B200s clusters train some models, we'll be observing the outcomes of scaling to 2e27-8e27 FLOPs. Only after passing that point will there be a significant chance of a scaling plateau that lasts for years, since scaling further would need $100 billion training systems which won't get built without sufficient success, with AI accelerators improving much slower than the current rate of funding-fueled scaling.

Some people I know are much more pessimistic about the polls this cycle, due to herding. For example, nonresponse bias might just be massive for Trump voters (across demographic groups), so pollsters end up having to make a series of unprincipled choices with their thumbs on the scales. 

I don't get why you think this is true? EG, it seems like almost no insights about how to train faithful CoT would transfer to systems speaking pure neuralese. It seems to me that what little safety/alignment we have for LLMs is largely a byproduct of how language-focused they are (which gives us a weak sort of interpretability, a very useful safety resource which we are at risk of losing soon).

To put it a different way: human imitation is a relatively safe outer-optimization target, so we should be concerned to the extent that the industry is moving away from it. It sounds like you think safety lessons from the human-imitation regime generalize beyond the human-imitation regime. Maybe I agree that we can derive some abstract lessons like "RL with really dense feedback can avoid instrumental convergence", but we're moving away from the regime where such dense feedback is available, so I don't see what lessons transfer.

I don't get why you think actively training the model to be deceptive is "worth the cost". The deceptive behavior can generalize to other cases, and make the system overall much harder to shape in ways you want (because it is actively hiding things from you so your RL is less accurate). It seems like a choice between two bad options: actively deceptive CoT or actively deceptive Face.

--...but the reward process (RLHF, RLAIF, whatever) gets to see the outputs of the Face but not the Shoggoth.
--So, the hope is that skills and propensities towards deception and dishonesty will accumulate in the Face rather than the Shoggoth.

It seems pretty important to put some incentives on the CoT to avoid steganography, though. The division of labor here seems aimed at not actively incentivizing instrumentally useful thoughts to get hidden. However, the pre-trained LLM will already be responsive to some steganographic patterns, in addition to the human-readable patterns. So, there is still an incentive optimizing the non-human-readable patterns in the CoT to be as useful as possible, in addition to the human-readable patterns. 

However, with this naive approach, the paraphrasings will probably still consistently contain certain kinds of noise from the initial thought. For instance, maybe the paraphraser never replaces an exclamation point with a period, even though this end-of-sentence punctuation doesn't really change the meaning. By modulating whether the step ends with a period or an exclamation point, the model can encode one bit of information per step, despite the paraphraser.

One way to solve this problem is to map every piece of text with a given meaning onto the same "canonical paraphrasing." For instance, we'd want a paraphraser that, given many texts with approximately-identical meanings (like "I own a large home!" "My house is spacious!" and "I possess a sizable dwelling."), maps them all onto a single "canonical" text (like "I have a big house.").

I don't think this proposal improves the thing you claim it improves.

If the initial paraphraser doesn't change between '!' and '.', then learning a canonical-paraphraser from that initial paraphraser won't do it either. 

I think what canonical-paraphrasing does is help with cases where the paraphraser stochastically removes specific information, but in an information-theoretically leaky way. For example, if the paraphraser changes between '!' and '.' with only 10% probability, then steganography can use error-correcting codes to still get through. 

Turning a paraphraser into a canonical-paraphraser probably does something like force details into "always removed" vs "never removed" based on a threshhold; if '!' and '.' are swapped with 10% probability in the initial paraphraser, then they're always swapped in the final paraphraser; if they're swapped with only 1% probability in the initial paraphraser, then they are never swapped in the final paraphraser. 

(Of course this oversimplifies things a lot, and depends completely on how the training to turn paraphrasers into canonical-paraphrasers works.)

I think the only solution to the '.' vs '!' problem, fundamentally, is to train the paraphraser to modify those patterns. If the initial paraphraser doesn't ever change specific details, then those details can be used for steganography. If the paraphraser does change those details, then it is already hard to use them for steganography. So the canonical-paraphrasing idea helps somewhat, but fundamentally, the better the paraphraser (the more closely it captures the human notion of semantic equivalence), the better the anti-steganography guarantee we can get.

Fair enough, I guess? For context, I wrote this for my own blog and then decided I might as well cross-post to LW. In doing so, I actually softened the language of that section a little bit. But maybe I should've softened it more, I'm not sure.

[Edit: in response to your comment, I've further softened the language.]

OpenAI models are seemingly trained on huge amounts of chess data [LW(p) · GW(p)], perhaps 1-4% of documents are chess (though chess documents are short, so the fraction of tokens which are chess is smaller than this).

A bunch of very interesting emails between Elon, Sam Altman, Ilya and Greg were released (I think in some legal proceedings, but not sure). It would IMO be cool for someone to gather them all and do some basic analysis of them. 

https://x.com/TechEmails/status/1857456137156669765 

https://x.com/TechEmails/status/1857285960997712356 

I like this! Especially the Past, Present, Future framing. I usually split along epistemic and instrumental lines. So my fundamental questions were:
1. Epistemic: What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?
2. Instrumental: What are you trying to protect, and how are you trying to protect it?

I've had some notion of a third thing, but now I've got a better handle on it, thanks!