LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I read most of this paper, albeit somewhat quickly and skipped a few sections. I appreciate how clear the writing is, and I want to encourage more AI risk proponents to write papers like this to explain their views. That said, I largely disagree with the conclusion and several lines of reasoning within it.

Here are some of my thoughts (although these not my only disagreements):

• I think the definition of "disempowerment" is vague in a way that fails to distinguish between e.g. (1) "less than 1% of world income goes to humans, but they have a high absolute standard of living and are generally treated well" vs. (2) "humans are in a state of perpetual impoverishment and oppression due to AIs and generally the future sucks for them".
  • These are distinct scenarios with very different implications (under my values) for whether what happened is bad or good
  • I think (1) is OK and I think it's more-or-less the default outcome from AI, whereas I think (2) would be a lot worse and I find it less likely.
  • By not distinguishing between these things, the paper allows for a motte-and-bailey in which they show that one (generic) range of outcomes could occur, and then imply that it is bad, even though both good and bad scenarios are consistent with the set of outcomes they've demonstrated
• I think this quote is pretty confused and seems to rely partially on a misunderstanding of what people mean when they say that AGI cognition might be messy: "Second, even if human psychology is messy, this does not mean that an AGI’s psychology would be messy. It seems like current deep learning methodology embodies a distinction between final and instrumental goals. For instance, in standard versions of reinforcement learning, the model learns to optimize an externally specified reward function as best as possible. It seems like this reward function determines the model’s final goal. During training, the model learns to seek out things which are instrumentally relevant to this final goal. Hence, there appears to be a strict distinction between the final goal (specified by the reward function) and instrumental goals."
  • Generally speaking, reinforcement learning shouldn't be seen as directly encoding goals into models and thereby making them agentic, but should instead be seen as a process used to select models for how well they get reward during training. 
  • Consequently, there's no strong reason why reinforcement learning should create entities that have a clean psychological goal structure that is sharply different from and less messy than human goal structures. c.f. Models don't "get reward" [LW · GW]. 
  • But I agree that future AIs could be agentic if we purposely intend for them to be agentic, including via extensive reinforcement learning. 
• I think this quote potentially indicates a flawed mental model of AI development underneath: "Moreover, I want to note that instrumental convergence is not the only route to AI capable of disempowering humanity which tries to disempower humanity. If sufficiently many actors will be able to build AI capable of disempowering humanity, including, e.g. small groups of ordinary citizens, then some will intentionally unleash AI trying to disempower humanity."
  • I think this type of scenario is very implausible because AIs will very likely be developed by large entities with lots of resources (such as big corporations and governments) rather than e.g. small groups of ordinary citizens. 
  • By the time small groups of less powerful citizens have the power to develop very smart AIs, we will likely already be in a world filled with very smart AIs. In this case, either human disempowerment already happened, or we're in a world in which it's much harder to disempower humans, because there are lots of AIs who have an active stake in ensuring this does not occur.
  • The last point is very important, and follows from a more general principle that the "ability necessary to take over the world" is not constant, but instead increases with the technology level. For example, if you invent a gun, that does not make you very powerful, because other people could have guns too. Likewise, simply being very smart does not make you have any overwhelming hard power against the rest of the world if the rest of the world is filled with very smart agents.
• I think this quote overstates the value specification problem and ignores evidence from LLMs that this type of thing is not very hard: "There are two kinds of challenges in aligning AI. First, one needs to specify the goals the model should pursue. Second, one needs to ensure that the model robustly pursues those goals.^Footnote12 The first challenge has been termed the ‘king Midas problem’ (Russell 2019). In a nutshell, human goals are complex, multi-faceted, diverse, wide-ranging, and potentially inconsistent. This is why it is exceedingly hard, if not impossible, to explicitly specify everything humans tend to care about."
  • I don't think we need to "explicitly specify everything humans tend to care about" into a utility function. Instead, we can have AIs learn human values by having them trained on human data.
  • This is already what current LLMs do. If you ask GPT-4 to execute a sequence of instructions, it rarely misinterprets you in a way that would imply improper goal specification. The more likely outcome is that GPT-4 will simply not be able to fulfill your request, not that it will execute a mis-specified sequence of instructions that satisfies the literal specification of what you said at the expense of what you intended.
  • Note that I'm not saying that GPT-4 merely understands what you're requesting. I am saying that GPT-4 generally literally executes your instructions how you intended (an action, not a belief).
• I think the argument about how instrumental convergence implies disempowerment proves too much. Lots of agents in the world don't try to take over the world despite having goals that are not identical to the goals of other agents. If your claim is that powerful agents will naturally try to take over the world unless they are exactly aligned with the goals of the rest of the world, then I don't think this claim is consistent with the existence of powerful sub-groups of humanity (e.g. large countries) that do not try to take over the world despite being very powerful.
  • You might reason, "Powerful sub-groups of humans are aligned with each other, which is why they don't try to take over the world". But I dispute this hypothesis:
    • First of all, I don't think that humans are exactly aligned with the goals of other humans. I think that's just empirically false in almost every way you could measure the truth of the claim. At best, humans are generally partially (not totally) aligned with random strangers -- which could also easily be true of future AIs that are pretrained on our data.
    • Second of all, I think the most common view in social science is that powerful groups don't constantly go to war and predate on smaller groups because there are large costs to war, rather than because of moral constraints. Attempting takeover is generally risky and not usually better in expectation than trying to trade, negotiate and compromise and accumulate resources lawfully (e.g. a violent world takeover would involves a lot of pointless destruction of resources). This is distinct from the idea that human groups don't try to take over the world because they're aligned with human values (which I also think is too vague to evaluate meaningfully, if that's what you'd claim).
    • You can't easily counter by saying "no human group has the ability to take over the world" because it is trivial to carve up subsets of humanity that control >99% of wealth and resources, which could in principle take control of the entire world if they became unified and decided to achieve that goal. These arbitrary subsets of humanity don't attempt world takeover largely because they are not coordinated as a group, but AIs could similarly not be unified and coordinated around a such a goal too.

Thanks for sharing, very helpful (I lurk and almost never post)! 

Reading the rave reviews on the app site also reinforces how effective the app can be for people with your (our) disposition. 

Have you tried using focusmate? It is the one app the that has helped me deal with similar issues of procrastination but of course I have repeatedly failed the meta-game of applying it consistently. Using forfeit for this problem seems like an obvious solution. 

Also, if you don't mind me asking, what is the commitment you most often fail? Is it time spent on twitter and youtube? 

Thanks again!

This is really cool!

• I did some tests on random features for interpretability, and found them to be interpretable. However, one would need to do a detailed comparison with SAEs trained on an L1 penalty to properly understand whether this loss function impacts interpretability. For what it’s worth, the distribution of feature sparsities suggests that we should expect reasonably interpretable features.

One cheap and lazy approach is to see how many of your features have high cosine similarity with the features of an existing L1-trained SAE (e.g. "900 of the 2048 features detected by the  $L_{approx}^0$-trained model had cosine sim > 0.9 with one of the 2048 features detected by the L1-trained model"). I'd also be interested to see individual examinations of some of the features which consistently appear across multiple training runs in the $L_{approx}^0$-trained model but don't appear in an L1-trained SAE on the training dataset.

Thanks! This is much closer to the amount of ethanol you'd get eating 50 bananas a day. That's at least one sanity check it fails then, even under these ideal conditions since, as you noted, there is probably a larger bacteria population than what was measured there.

I'm definitely not claiming that it is likely we will manage to catch AIs doing such egregiously bad actions, but I think if we did catch them, this would provide an adequate warning shot.

I think if an effective control approach [? · GW] is employed, early transformatively useful AIs are dangerously misaligned, and these early misaligned AIs are unwilling or unable to punt to a later generation of AIs, then catching AIs red-handed [LW · GW] is pretty likely relative to other ways of ensuring safety. I think all of these assumptions I stated as conditions are pretty plausible.

There are weaker versions of these that would probably not provide great warning shots.

I think for some of these cases, it should be possible to heavily study what happened and then determine whether this was actually due to very problematic behavior. You can try to determine what features of the input were important etc. You can even setup sting operations or tripwires based on what you learn.

E.g., in the vulnerability case, you can pretend it actually made it into the code base, but actually it is just used as a tripwire and when the AI tries to take advantage, we catch it then.

More generally, you can always try to play out more steps of a give egregious action which failed.

In contrast, without this context, I don't think that "we caught an AI model copying its weights" would necessarily be a warning shot for USG/natsec folks.

It seems worth noting that in the cases that Peter mentioned, you might be able to "play out" the self-exfiltration attempt much further than the point of failure. I think this might make the warning shot much, much more compelling. (Though perhaps the "warning shots" you mentioned will come earlier and be more compelling regardless.)

E.g., if you caught it using monitoring systems or using some sort of fake vulnerability which is a tripwire, then you could pretend it got much further and fake a bunch of its IO etc. You could plausibly play this out until you see what actions AIs would do in the wild.

(There are some issues due to inputs being hard to fake, but I bet you can play out the exfiltration attempt very far in practice.)

I think it would be extremely compelling if you can play out an AI escaping and then see it try to manufacture and deploy bioweapons. Especially if the attempt is credible.

Does it? I see:

We would still recommend brushing your teeth. We don't yet know whether this strain does anything for gum disease or bad breath.

Emphasis mine.

Interesting. I took Lumina around December and have noticed no change, though I don't think I've actually been hungover during that time period. I definitely didn't notice any difference in the AMOUNT needed to produce a hangover; I drunk a substantial amount and didn't get hangovers any more easily.

The Alcohol Flushing Response: An Unrecognized Risk Factor for Esophageal Cancer from Alcohol Consumption - PMC (nih.gov)

There are a lot of studies to regarding the assocation between ALDH2 deficiency and oral cancer risk. I think part of the issue is that

1. AFR people are less likely to become alcoholics, or to drink alcohol at all.
2. Japanese in particular have a high proportion of ALDH2 polymorphism, leading to subclinical but still biologically significant levels of acetaldehyde increase after drinking among the non-AFR group.
3. Drinking even small amounts of alcohol when you have AFR is really really bad for cancer risk.
4. Note that ALDH2 deficiency homozygotes would have the highest levels of post-drinking acetaldehyde but have the lowest levels of oral cancer because almost none of them drink. As in, out of ~100 homozygotes, only 2 were recorded as light drinkers, and none as heavy drinkers. This may be survival bias as the definition of heavy drinking may literally kill them. 
5. The source for #4 looks like a pretty good meta-study, but some of the tables are off by one for some reason. Might just be on my end.
6. ADH polymorphism is also pretty common in Asian populations, generally in the direction of increased activity. This results in faster conversion of ethanol to acetaldehyde, but often isn't included in these studies. This isn't really relevant for this discussion though.

As always, biostatistics is hard! If X causes less drinking, drinking contributes to cancer, and X increases drinking's effects on cancer, X may have positive, neutral, or negative overall correlation with cancer. Most studies I've looked at had a pretty string correlation between ALDH2 deficiency and cancer though, especially after you control for alcohol consumption.

It also looks like most researchers in the field think the relationship is causal, with plausible mechanisms.