George Ingebretsen's Shortform

When making safety cases for alignment, its important to remember that defense against single-turn attacks doesn't always imply defense against multi-turn attacks.

Our recent paper shows a case where breaking up a single turn attack into multiple prompts (spreading it out over the conversation) changes which models/guardrails are vulnerable to the jailbreak.

Robustness against the single-turn version didn't imply robustness against the multi-turn version of the attack, and robustness against the multi-turn version didn't imply robustness against the single-turn version of the attack.

I expect that within a year or two, there will be an enormous surge of people who start paying a lot of attention to AI.

This could mean that the distribution of who has influence will change a lot. (And this might be right when influence matters the most?)

I claim: your effect on AI discourse post-surge will be primarily shaped by how well you or your organization absorbs this boom.

The areas I've thought the most about this phenomena are:

1. AI safety university groups
2. Non agi lab research organizations
3. AI bloggers / X influencers

(But this applies to anyone who's impact primarily comes from spreading their ideas, which is a lot of people.)

I think that you or your organization should have an explicit plan to absorb this surge.

Unresolved questions:

• How much will explicitly planning for this actually help absorb the surge? (Regardless, it seems worth a google doc and a pomodoro session to at least see if there's anything you can do to prepare)
• How important is it to make every-day people informed about AI risks? Or is influence so long-tailed that it only really makes sense to build reputation with highly influential people? (Though- note that this surge isn't just for every day people — I expect that the entire memetic landscape will be totally reformed after AI becomes clearly a big deal, and that applies to big shot government officials along with your average joe)

I'd be curious to see how this looked with Covid: Did all the covid pandemic experts get an even 10x multiplier in following? Or were a handful of Covid experts highly elevated, while the rest didn't really see much of an increase in followers? If the latter, what did those experts do to get everyone to pay attention to them?

Should it be more tabooed to put the bottom line in the title?

Titles like "in defense of <bottom line>" or just "<bottom line>" seem to:

1. Unnecessarily make it really easy for people to select content to read based on the conclusion it comes to
2. Frame the post as having the goal of convincing you of <bottom line>, and setting up the readers expectation as such. This seems like it would either put you in pause critical thinking to defend My Team mode (if you agree with the title), or continuously search for counter-arguments mode (if you disagree with the title).

The scene in planecrash where Keltham gives his first lecture, as an attempt to teach some formal logic (and a whole bunch of important concepts that usually don't get properly taught in school), is something I'd highly recommend reading! As far as I can remember, you should be able to just pick it up right here, and follow the important parts of the lecture without understanding the story