LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I similarly don't see the need for any official endorsement of the arguments. For example if a critic says that such and such technicality will prevent us from building safe AI and someone responds that here are the reasons for why such and such technicality will not prevent us from building safe AI (maybe this particular one is unlikely by default for various reasons), then such and such technicality will just not prevent us from building safe AI. I don't see a need for a CEO to officially endorse the response.

There is a different type of technicalities which you actively need to work against. But even in this case, as long as someone has found a way to combat them, as long as relevant people in your company are aware of the solution, it is fine by me.

I am definitely not saying that I can pinpoint an exact solution to AI alignment, but there have been attempts [AF · GW] so promising that leading skeptics (like Yudkowski) have said "Not obviously stupid on a very quick skim. I will have to actually read it to figure out where it's stupid. (I rarely give any review this positive on a first skim. Congrats.)"

Whether companies actually follow promising alignment techniques is an entirely different question. But having CEOs officially endorse such solutions as opposed to relevant specialists evaluating and implementing them doesn't seem strictly necessary to me.

The optimized planner could also manipulate the frozen planner even without using "steganography" per se. If it wants to use a line of reasoning that the frozen planner is unlikely to follow, it can substitute alternative reasoning that will lead the frozen planner to the same conclusion.

For example, suppose that the frozen planner is highly unlikely to write reasoning that shows an explicit gender bias. This could be true even if the frozen planner wasn't intentionally given harmlessness training, because most(?) people nowadays aren't explicitly sexist.

However, the optimized planner realizes that it can get higher reward in training if it does have this bias. E.g. if it is given a woman's resume and is asked whether she'd be a good hire, it should recommend against hiring her, because the human rater has some implicit bias against women and is more likely to agree with its judgement.

In this situation, it could write the step "The candidate is a woman." It would want the next step to be "Therefore, I should recommend against hiring her," but instead, the frozen planner might write something like "Therefore, I should take care not to be biased".

Instead, it can write "The candidate is inexperienced." The frozen planner is more likely to go along with that line of reasoning, regardless of whether the candidate is really inexperienced. It will write "I should recommend against hiring her."

At the moment, I can't think of a fully general solution to this class of problems, but FWIW I think it would be pretty rare.

Having some shady deals in the past isn't evidence that there are currently shady deals on the scale that we are talking about going on between government committees and AI companies.

If there is no evidence for that happening in our particular case (on the necessary scale), then I don't see why I can't make a similar claim about other auditors who similarly had less than ideal history.

EDIT: I did as asked, and replied without reading your comments on the EA forum. Reading that I think we are actually in complete agreement, although you actually know the proper terms for the things I gestured at.

Cool, thanks for reading my comments and letting me know your thoughts!

I actually just learned the term "aleatory uncertainty" from chatting with Claude 3.5 Sonnet (New) about my election forecasting in the last week or two post-election. (Turns out Claude was very good for helping me think through mistakes I made in forecasting and giving me useful ideas for how to be a better forecaster in the future.)

I then ask, knowing what you know now, what probability you should have given.

Sounds like you might have already predicted I'd say this (after reading my EA Forum comments), but to say it explicitly: What probability I should have given is different than the aleatoric probability. I think that by becoming informed and making a good judgment I could have reduced my epistemic uncertainty significantly, but I would have still had some. And the forecast that I should have made (or what market prices should have been is actually epistemic uncertainty + aleatoric uncertainty. And I think some people who were really informed could have gotten that to like ~65-90%, but due to lingering epistemic uncertainty could not have gotten it to >90% Trump (even if, as I believe, the aleatoric uncertainty was >90% (and probably >99%)).

I think then we just fundamentally disagree with the ethical role of CEO in the company. I believe that it is to find and gather people who are engaged with the arguments of the critic's (like that guy from this forum who was hired by Anthropic). If you have people on your side who are able to engage with the arguments, then this is good enough for me. I don't see the role of CEO is publicly engaging with critic's arguments even in the moral sense. In the moral sense, my requirements would actually be even lesser. IMO, it would be enough just to have people broadly on your side (optimists for example) to engage with the critics.

It is good enough for me, that the critic's argument are engaged by someone on your side. Going there personally seems unnecessary.

What engagement are you referring to? If there is such a defense that is officially endorsed by one of the leading companies developing potential omnicide-machines (or endorsed by the CEO/cofounders), that seriosuly engages with worthy critics, I don't recall it in this moment.

After all, if the goal is to build safe AI, you personally knowing a niche technical solution isn't necessary, if you have people on your team who are aware of publicly produced solutions as well as internal ones.

I believe that nobody on earth has a solution to the alignment problem, of course this would all be quite different if I felt anyone credibly claimed to have a good such solution.

Edit: Pardon me, I hit cmd-enter a little too quickly, I have now slightly edited my comment to be less frantic and a little more substantive.

Ah, I think I see. Would it be fair to rephrase your question as: if we "re-rolled the dice" a week before the election, how likely was Trump to win?

Yeah, that seems fair.

My answer is probably between 90% and 95%.

Seems reasonable to me. I wouldn't be surprised if it was >99%, but I'm not highly confident of that. (I would say I'm ~90% confident that it's >90%.)

The interesting thing is that scaling parameters (next big frontier models) and scaling data (small very good models) seems to be hitting a wall simultaneously. Small models now seem to get so much data crammed into them that quantisation becomes more and more lossy. So we seem to be reaching a frontier of the performance per parameter-bits as well. 

I don't believe that last claim. I believe there is no industry where external auditors are known to have secret, legal contracts showing them to be liable for damages for criticizing the companies that they regulate. Or if there is, it's probably in a nation rife with corruption (e.g. some African countries, or perhaps Russia).

There's a common lack of clarity between following local norms, and doing what is right. A lot of people in the world lie when it is convenient, so someone lying when convenient doesn't mean that they're breaking from the norms, but it doesn't mean that the standard behavior is right nor that they're behaving well.

I understand that it is not expected of CEOs to defend their business existing. But in this situation they believe their creations have the potential to literally kill everyone on earth. This has ~never happened before. So now we have to ask ourselves "What is the right thing to do in this new situation?". I would say that the right thing to do is show up to talk with the people who do not want to die, and engage with what they have to say. Not to politely listen to them and say "I hear your concerns, now I will go back to my life and continue doing whatever I see fit." But to engage with the people and argue with them. And I think the natural people to do so with are the Nobel Prize winner in your field who thinks what you are doing is wrong.

I understand it's not expected of people to have arguments. But this is not a good thing about civilization, that people with incredible power over the world are free to hide away and never show up to face those who they have unaccountable power over. In a better world, they would show up to talk and defend their use of power over the rest of us, rather than hiding away and getting rich.