Response to Blake Richards: AGI, generality, alignment, & loss functions

post by Steven Byrnes (steve2152) · 2022-07-12T13:56:00.885Z · LW · GW · 9 comments

Contents

  1. Two mental images for thinking about an AI. Or: My lips say “human-level”, but my heart says “a fancier version of GPT or AlphaFold”
  2. We need a term for the right-column thing, and “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) seems about as good as any.
  3. Blake’s “specialization” argument against AGI
    3.1 “Something that can truly do anything you want” is less crazy than it initially sounds, under right-column thinking
    3.2 Cranking up our example beyond John von Neumann
  4. AGI accidents and the alignment problem
    4.1 The out-of-control-AGI-accidents problem can be a real problem, and the AI misuse problem can also simultaneously be a real problem. It’s not either/or!
    4.2 The AGI alignment problem: not only a real problem, but a problem that Blake himself is unusually well suited to work on!
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9 comments

Blake Richards is a neuroscientist / AI researcher with appointments at McGill & MiLA. Much of his recent work has involved making connections between machine learning algorithms and the operating principles of the cortex and hippocampus, including theorizing about how the neocortex might accomplish something functionally similar to backprop. (Backprop itself is not biologically plausible.) I have read lots of his papers; they're always very interesting!

Anyway, Blake recently gave a nice interview on Michaël Trazzi’s podcast “The Inside View”. Episode and transcript at: https://theinsideview.ai/blake.

Blake said a lot of things in the interview that I wholeheartedly agree with; for example, I would echo pretty much everything Blake said about scaling. But Blake & I strongly part ways on the subject of (what I call) artificial general intelligence (AGI). (Blake doesn’t like the term “AGI”, more on which below.) So that’s what I’ll talk about in this post.

1. Two mental images for thinking about an AI. Or: My lips say “human-level”, but my heart says “a fancier version of GPT or AlphaFold”

I’ll jump right into a key issue that I think is lurking below the surface. Here are two mental images for thinking about an AI system (I’ll be returning to this table throughout the post)

Throughout the interview, even while Blake was saying things like “as general as a human”, I got a strong feeling that what he was imagining was the thing in the left column. But if it was actually as general as a human, it would look like the thing in the right column. For example, if an AI is actually as general as a (very competent) human, and you ask it to fold proteins, and it doesn’t know how, then it downloads AlphaFold. Or if AlphaFold doesn’t exist, it starts reading papers and textbooks, and goes about inventing AlphaFold!

(In Section 3 below, I’ll go over an example of one of the many things Blake said, in the interview, that gave me the strong impression that he was engaging in left-column thinking. If I’m wrong, then so much the better—we can just skip to the next section!)

Anyway, left-column thinking is extremely natural, because that’s what ML looks like today. But we know that it’s technically possible to make AIs that require right-column thinking—Blake and I are in full agreement that anything the human brain can do, an AI can do too.

A further question is, even if the right-column AIs are technically possible, will humans actually create them? It seems to me that we should have quite high credence on “Yes”. After all, how do you prevent anyone, anywhere on earth, from solving a scientific problem and implementing the corresponding algorithm, forever and ever?? Remember when the USA tried to ban people from talking about a certain algorithm? It was not a permanent solution, to say the least! And of course, Blake himself is one of the many people devoting their professional lives to knocking down the technical barriers that prevent us from building right-column AIs.

Thus, it seems to me that we will, sooner or later, have right-column AIs. And those future AIs are the thing that I want to talk about in this post.

2. We need a term for the right-column thing, and “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) seems about as good as any.

That brings us to the term "AGI" for talking about the thing in the right column of the table above. Blake (like Yann LeCun) does not like the term “AGI”, but I’m going to use it anyway in this post, and here I’ll explain why.

The thing I feel strongest about is that we need some term—any term—for the thing in the right column. Because it’s a thing we need to talk about. I don’t feel very strongly that this term has to be “AGI” in particular. But something.

Consider: If all organisms have a “niche”, then the “human niche” includes living on every continent, walking on the moon, inventing computers and nuclear weapons, and unraveling the secrets of the universe. What happens when we make AI systems that can occupy that same niche? Think about AI systems that can do literally every aspect of my job. Think about AI systems which, when motivated to invent a better solar cell, are able to think to themselves, “Y'know, I'd be able to proceed much faster if I had more compute for my semiconductor simulations. Can I rent some? Oh, I need money. What if I steal it?” What happens if and when we bring these systems into the world?

This is an important conversation, and in order to have that conversation, a prerequisite is to have a jargon term with which we can refer to right-column AI systems. And the most common such term is “Artificial General Intelligence” (“AGI”).

I happen to think that “AGI” is a perfectly fine term to refer to this thing, as long as it's understood that:

I’m poking fun at this Yann LeCun tweet. (Image sources: 1,2)

Other people don’t like the term “AGI”, and talk about the same concept using a different term. It seems to me that none of the options is particularly great:

For the purpose of this post, following common usage, I’ll use “AGI” to talk about that thing in the right column above. If that bothers you, you can use a browser extension to replace “AGI” with the term of your choice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Incidentally, I don’t claim that there’s a sharp line between the “AIs” in the left column, and the “AGIs” in the right column. But there are systems that are definitely in the right column, and for reasons described above, I expect that someday we will build them.

3. Blake’s “specialization” argument against AGI

Here’s an excerpt from Blake’s argument on the podcast:

We know from the no free lunch theorem that you cannot have a learning algorithm that outperforms all other learning algorithms across all tasks. It’s just an impossibility. So necessarily, any learning algorithm is going to have certain things that it’s good at and certain things that it’s bad at. Or alternatively, if it’s truly a Jack of all trades, it’s going to be just mediocre at everything. Right? So with that reality in place, you can say concretely that if you take AGI to mean literally good at anything, it’s just an impossibility, it cannot exist. And that’s been mathematically proven.

Now, all that being said, the proof for the no free lunch theorem, refers to all possible tasks. And that’s a very different thing from the set of tasks that we might actually care about. Right?

Because the set of all possible tasks will include some really bizarre stuff that we certainly don’t need our AI systems to do. And in that case, we can ask, “Well, might there be a system that is good at all the sorts of tasks that we might want it to do?” Here, we don’t have a mathematical proof, but again, I suspect Yann’s intuition is similar to mine, which is that you could have systems that are good at a remarkably wide range of things, but it’s not going to cover everything you could possibly hope to do with AI or want to do with AI.

At some point, you’re going to have to decide where your system is actually going to place its bets as it were. And that can be as general as say a human being. So we could, of course, obviously humans are a proof of concept that way. We know that an intelligence with a level of generality equivalent to humans is possible and maybe it’s even possible to have an intelligence that is even more general than humans to some extent. I wouldn’t discount it as a possibility, but I don’t think you’re ever going to have something that can truly do anything you want, whether it be protein folding, predictions, managing traffic, manufacturing new materials, and also having a conversation with you about your [grandma’s] latest visit that can’t be… There is going to be no system that does all of that for you.

3.1 “Something that can truly do anything you want” is less crazy than it initially sounds, under right-column thinking

Again, here’s Blake in the interview:

…I don’t think you’re ever going to have something that can truly do anything you want, whether it be protein folding, predictions, managing traffic, manufacturing new materials, and also having a conversation with you about your [grandma’s] latest visit…

Now let’s try this modification, where we switch from left-column thinking to right-column thinking:

…I don’t think you’re ever going to have something that can truly do anything you want, whether it be building a system for protein folding, building a system for predictions, building a system for managing traffic, building a system for manufacturing new materials, and also building a system for having a conversation with you about your [grandma’s] latest visit…

Now it’s not so obvious that such an AI can’t exist, right?

For example, let’s take young adult John von Neumann, give him complete access to the ML and biology and chemistry and physics literature, and a compute cluster, and 30 years to work on the problem. Could he build a state-of-the-art system that takes amino acids and calculates folded proteins? I dunno! But maybe! It hardly seems an outlandish thing to expect.

OK, next, let’s take the same young adult John von Neumann, give him complete access to the ML and robotics and transportation engineering literature, and a compute cluster, and a robotics lab, and money to hire technicians, and 30 years to work on the problem. Could he build a state-of-the-art robot traffic guard? Again, I dunno! But maybe!

Now take the same young adult John von Neumann, give him complete access to the chemistry and chemical engineering and finance and management literature, along with a big pot of money to buy land and hire people, and 30 years to work on the problem. Could he build a state-of-the-art factory for manufacturing new materials? Maybe!

You get the idea.

Anyway, I grant that expertise in the downstream tasks here (folding proteins, directing traffic, producing chemicals) would not seem to have any overlap. But expertise in the upstream tasks (figuring out what kind of system would solve these tasks, and then building it) seem like they have quite a bit in common. For example, just go ask any successful startup founder to list everything they’ve had to figure out how to do.

And whatever is happening in John von Neumann’s brain that enables him to figure out how to do all those different things, we can make an AI that can run all the same calculations, and thus figure out all those same things.

3.2 Cranking up our example beyond John von Neumann

As impressed as we should be by John von Neumann’s ability to figure things out, this is not by any means the limit of what we should expect from future AIs. Here are four examples of how an AI can do better:

First, cloning. Future AGIs will be able to instantly clone themselves. So if our John von Neumann AGI has its hands full doing chemical simulations, it can spin off a whole team of copies, and one can start hiring employees, while another starts picking a plot of land, and so on. See The Duplicator: Instant Cloning Would Make the World Economy Explode.

Second, teams more generally. Maybe you think it’s eternally beyond John von Neumann’s capability to figure out some particular thing—let’s say, how to write good advertising copy. It’s just not what his brain is good at.

If that’s what you think, then you’re slipping back into left-column thinking!

In fact, if our John-von-Neumann-like AGI needs good advertising copy, and can’t figure out how to create it, then he could go ahead and train up a David-Oglivy-like AGI and ask it for help!

Actually, Blake brought this up in his interview:

To some extent you could argue that our society at large is like that, right? … Some people who are specialized at art, some people who are specialized at science and we call upon those people differently for different tasks. And then the result is that the society as a whole is good at all those things, to some extent. So in principle, that’s obviously a potential strategy. I think an interesting question that way is basically, “To what extent you would actually call that an AGI?”

My answer to the last question is: “Yes I would absolutely 100% call that an AGI”.

I think this is another instance of left-column-thinking versus right-column-thinking. In my (right-column) book, an AI that can call upon a wide variety of tools and resources (including other AIs), as the situation demands—and which can also go find and build more tools and resources (and AIs) when its existing ones are insufficient—is exactly the prototypical thing that we should be thinking of when we hear the word “AGI”!

So consider the entire human R&D enterprise—every human, at every university, every private-sector R&D lab, every journal editor, etc. This enterprise is running hundreds of thousands of laboratory experiments simultaneously, it’s publishing millions of papers a year, it’s synthesizing brilliant new insights in every field all at once. A single future AGI could do all that. Seems pretty “general” to me, right?

Third, speed. I expect that sooner or later, we’ll have an AGI that can not only figure out anything that John von Neumann can figure out, but that can “think” 100× faster than he could—such that normal humans look like this video. After all, we’re working with silicon chips that are 10,000,000× faster than the brain, so we can get a 100× speedup even if we’re a whopping 100,000× less skillful at parallelizing brain algorithms than the brain itself.

Fourth, “quality”. As discussed above, I claim that there’s a core set of right-column capabilities that we can loosely describe as “understanding problems, and designing systems that can solve them, including by inventing new technology”. Just as an adult John von Neumann clone is much “better” at these core capabilities than I am, I imagine that there are future AGI algorithms that would be far “better” at these capabilities than John von Neumann (or any human) would be. Not just faster, but actually better!

For example, given our finite number of cortical neurons, there’s only so much complexity of an idea that can be held in working memory. Beyond that, pieces need to be chunked and cached and explored serially, at some cost in the ability to notice connections (a.k.a. “insight”). Humans only have so many cortical neurons, but we can (and, I presume, eventually will) make an AGI that runs neocortex-like algorithms, but with a factor-of-100 scale-up (with appropriately adjusted architecture, hyperparameters, etc.).

Practically every time we try scaling up ML algorithms, we wind up surprised and impressed by the new capabilities it unlocks. I don’t see why that wouldn’t be true for the neocortex learning algorithm too.

(And I won’t even talk about the whole universe of possible algorithms that are more drastically different than the neocortex.)

Summary: Even if you discard the more speculative fourth point, I conclude that we should absolutely expect future AI systems that any reasonable person would describe as “radically superintelligent”, and that can trounce any human in any cognitive task just as soundly as AlphaZero can trounce humans in Go.

4. AGI accidents and the alignment problem

Here’s Blake again on the podcast:

I think if anything, what I fear far more than AI doing its own bad thing is human beings using AI for bad purposes and also potentially AI systems that reflect other bad things about human society back to us and potentially amplify them. But ultimately, I don’t fear so much the AI becoming a source of evil itself as it were. I think it will instead always reflect our own evils to us.

First I need to address the suggestion that there’s an either/or competition between worrying about out-of-control-AGI accidents versus worrying about AI misuse and related issues. Then I’ll talk about the former on its own terms. I won’t dive into the latter in this post, because it seems that Blake and I are already in agreement on that topic: we both think that there are real and serious problems related to AI misuse, weaponization, surveillance, exacerbation of inequality, and so on.

4.1 The out-of-control-AGI-accidents problem can be a real problem, and the AI misuse problem can also simultaneously be a real problem. It’s not either/or!

In addition to the quote above, here’s Blake on Twitter:

I find it kinda funny to worry about the threat of super intelligent AI in the future when we face the much more immediate and real threat of dumb AI with super power over people's lives.

And in replies:

…There is a fourth possibility, which motivated my tweet:

The probability of super intelligence this century is sufficiently low, and the probability of irresponsible use of dumb AI is sufficiently high, that the latter is much more worrying than the former.

Another reply:

I think half of the appeal of hand-wringing over super intelligent AI is precisely that it allows one (particularly tech ppl) to avoid asking hard questions about the here-and-now.

Now consider the following:

But what the heck?? It’s the same argument! (For more on this, see my later post: “X distracts from Y” as a thinly-disguised fight over group status / politics [LW · GW])

More explicitly: a priori, the various problems arising from dumb AI might or might not be real problems—we need to figure it out. Likewise, a priori, the problem of future hyper-competent misaligned AGIs getting out of control and wiping out humanity might or might not be a real problem—we need to figure it out. But these are two different topics of investigation. There’s no reason to view them as zero-sum.

If anything, we should expect a positive correlation between the seriousness of these two problems, because they do in fact have a bit of structural overlap. As one of many examples, both social media recommendation algorithm issues and out-of-control-AGI issues are exacerbated by the fact that huge trained ML models are very difficult to interpret and inspect. See The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian for much more on the overlap between near-term and long-term AI issues.

Anyway, there are many a priori plausible arguments that we shouldn’t worry about superintelligent AGI. I’m just claiming that the existence of AI misuse is not one of those arguments, any more than the existence of heart disease is.[1] Instead, we need to just talk directly about superintelligent AGI, and address that topic on its merits. That brings us to the next section:

4.2 The AGI alignment problem: not only a real problem, but a problem that Blake himself is unusually well suited to work on!

So, how about superintelligent AGI? When might it arrive (if ever)? What consequences should we expect? Isn’t it premature to be thinking about that right now?

For the long answer to these questions, I will shamelessly plug my blog-post series Intro to Brain-Like AGI Safety [? · GW]! Here’s the summary:

  1. We know enough neuroscience to say concrete things about what “brain-like AGI” would look like (Posts #1 [LW · GW]–#9 [LW · GW]);
  2. In particular, while “brain-like AGI” would be different from any known algorithm, its safety-relevant aspects would have much in common with actor-critic model-based reinforcement learning with a multi-dimensional value function (Posts #6 [LW · GW], #8 [LW · GW], #9 [LW · GW]);
  3. “Understanding the brain well enough to make brain-like AGI” is a dramatically easier task than “understanding the brain” full stop—if the former is loosely analogous to knowing how to train a ConvNet, then the latter would be loosely analogous to knowing how to train a ConvNet, and achieving full mechanistic interpretability of the resulting trained model, and understanding every aspect of integrated circuit physics and engineering, etc. Indeed, making brain-like AGI should not be thought of as a far-off sci-fi hypothetical, but rather as an ongoing project which may well reach completion within the next decade or two (Posts #2 [LW · GW]–#3 [LW · GW]);
  4. In the absence of a good technical plan for avoiding accidents, researchers experimenting with brain-like AGI algorithms will probably accidentally create out-of-control AGIs, with catastrophic consequences up to and including human extinction (Posts #1 [LW · GW], #3 [LW · GW], #10 [LW · GW], #11 [LW · GW]);
  5. Right now, we don’t have any good technical plan for avoiding out-of-control AGI accidents (Posts #10 [LW · GW]–#14 [LW · GW]);
  6. Creating such a plan seems neither to be straightforward, nor to be a necessary step on the path to creating powerful brain-like AGIs—and therefore we shouldn’t assume that such a plan will be created in the future “by default” (Post #3 [LW · GW]);
  7. There’s a lot of work that we can do right now to help make progress towards such a plan (Posts #12 [LW · GW]–#15 [LW · GW]);
  8. There is funding available to do this work (Post #15 [LW · GW]).

So check out that series [? · GW] for my very long answer.

For a much shorter answer, I would turn to Blake’s own research. As far as I understand, Blake holds the firm belief that the right starting point for thinking about the cortex is that the cortex runs a within-lifetime learning algorithm, adjusting parameters to minimize some loss function(s). I strongly agree, and would go further by claiming that well over 90% of human brain volume (including the whole cortex [including hippocampus], striatum, amygdala, and cerebellum) is devoted to running within-lifetime learning algorithms, whereas the other <10% (mainly brainstem & hypothalamus) are more-or-less hardcoded by the genome. (See Post #2 of my series [AF · GW] for various details and caveats on that.)

Blake and his students and colleagues spend their days trying to understand the nuts and bolts of the brain's various within-lifetime learning algorithms.

The question I would pose is: What if they succeed? What if they and others eventually come to understand the operating principles of the brain’s within-lifetime learning algorithms (and associated neural architecture etc.)—maybe not every last detail, but enough to build ML models that aren’t missing any big critical learning or inference tricks that the brain uses. Then what?

Then I claim there would be essentially nothing stopping future researchers from building real-deal right-column human-level AGI. (Some caveats on that here [AF · GW] and here [AF · GW].)

But would it be human-like AGI, with human-like inclinations to friendship, norm-following, laziness, tribal loyalty, etc.? No! Not unless those learning algorithms also had human-like loss functions![2]

Recall, a funny thing about learning algorithms is that they can be pointed at almost anything, depending on the loss function. With one reward function, AlphaZero learns to play chess; with a different reward function, AlphaZero would learn to play suicide chess—achieving the exact opposite goal with superhuman skill.

In humans, I claim that “loss functions”[2] loosely correspond to “innate drives” (details here [AF · GW]), and are intimately related to circuitry in the hypothalamus and brainstem (i.e. the <10% of the human brain that I claim [AF · GW] is not devoted to within-lifetime learning).

Now, when future researchers build AGIs, they will be able to put in any innate drives / loss functions that they want.

But there is no scientific theory such that you can tell me what you want an AGI to do, and then I respond by telling you what loss functions to put into your AGI, such that it will actually try to do that.

For example, I want to ask the following question:

Nobody knows the answer!

…But let’s not get ahead of ourselves!! Here’s an easier question:

That’s a much lower bar! But we don’t know the answer to that one either!! (And it’s much trickier than it sounds—see this post [AF · GW].)

OK, here’s another question, indirectly related but probably more tractable.

See my post Symbol Grounding & Human Social Instincts [AF · GW] for why this is a delightfully tricky puzzle. If we solve it, we would have a recipe for loss functions that make AGIs with similar moral intuitions as humans have. Granted, I've met a human or two, and that's not the most reassuring thing. (More discussion here [AF · GW].) But maybe it's a starting point that we can build off of.

I find (to my chagrin) that the most algorithmically-minded, AI-adjacent neuroscientists are spending their time and talent on discovering how brain loss functions affect brain learning algorithms, while basically ignoring the question of exactly what the human brain loss functions are in the first place.[2] As it happens, Blake has not only deep knowledge of the brain’s major within-lifetime learning algorithms in the telencephalon, but also past experience studying the brainstem! So I encourage him to spend some of his considerable talents going back to his roots, by figuring out what the human brain loss functions are, how they're calculated in the hypothalamus and brainstem, and how they lead to things like friendship and envy [AF · GW]. It's a fascinating puzzle, there's funding available, and as a cherry on top, maybe he’d be helping avert the AGI apocalypse! :)

(Thanks Adam Shimi, Justis Mills, & Alex Turner for critical comments on a draft.)

  1. ^

    One could object that I’m being a bit glib here. Tradeoffs between cause areas do exist. If someone decides to donate 10% of their income to charity, and they spend it all on climate change, then they have nothing left for heart disease, and if they spend it all on heart disease, then they have nothing left for climate change. Likewise, if someone devotes their career to reducing the risk of nuclear war, then they can’t also devote their career to reducing the risk of catastrophic pandemics and vice-versa, and so on. So tradeoffs exist, and decisions have to be made. How? Well, for example, you could just try to make the world a better place in whatever way seems most immediately obvious and emotionally compelling to you. Lots of people do that, and I don’t fault them for it. But if you want to make the decision in a principled, other-centered [EA · GW] way, then you need to dive into the field of Cause Prioritization [? · GW], where you (for example) try to guess how many expected QALYs could be saved by various possible things you can do with your life / career / money, and pick one at or near the top of the list. Cause Prioritization involves (among other things) a horrific minefield of quantifying various awfully-hard-to-quantify things like “what’s my best-guess probability distribution for when AGI will arrive?”, or “exactly how many suffering chickens are equivalently bad to one suffering human?”, or “how do we weigh better governance in Spain against preventing malaria deaths?”. Well anyway, I’d be surprised if Blake has arrived at his take here via one of these difficult and fraught Cause-Prioritization-type analyses. And I note that there are people out there who do try to do Cause Prioritization, and AFAICT they very often wind up putting AGI Safety right near the top of their lists.

    I wonder whether Blake’s intuitions point in a different direction than Cause Prioritization analyses because of scope neglect? As an example of what I’m referring to: suppose (for the sake of argument) that out-of-control AGI accidents have a 10% chance of causing 8 billion deaths in the next 20 years, whereas dumb AI has 100% chance of exacerbating income inequality and eroding democratic norms in the next 1 year. A scope-sensitive, risk-neutral Cause Prioritization analysis would suggest prioritizing the former, but the latter might feel intuitively more panic-inducing.

    Then maybe Blake would respond: “No you nitwit, it’s not that I have scope-neglect, it’s that your hypothetical is completely bonkers. Out-of-control AGI accidents do not have a 10% chance of causing 8 billion deaths in the next 20 years; instead, they have a 1-in-a-gazillion chance of causing 8 billion deaths in the next 20 years.” And then I would respond: “Bingo! That’s the crux of our disagreement! That’s the thing we need to hash out—is it more like 10% or 1-in-a-gazillion?” And this question is unrelated to the topic of bad actors misusing dumb AI.

    [For the record: The 10% figure was just an example. For my part, if you force me to pick a number, my best guess would be much higher than 10%.]

  2. ^

    Everyone agrees that sensory prediction error is one of the loss functions, but I’m talking about the less obvious and more safety-relevant loss functions, i.e. the ones related to “reward”, which help determine a person’s motivations / goals / drives. (See §4.7 here [AF · GW] for why self-supervised learning is not adequate for training appropriate actions and decisions, if that isn’t obvious.)

9 comments

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comment by Logan Zoellner (logan-zoellner) · 2022-07-13T14:15:57.014Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What loss function(s), when sent into a future AI’s brain-like configuration of neocortex / hippocampus / striatum / etc.-like learning algorithms, will result in an AGI that is definitely not trying to literally exterminate humanity?

 

Specifying a correct loss functions is not [LW · GW] the right way to think about the Alignment Problem.  A system's architecture matters much more than its loss function for determining whether or not it is dangerous.  In fact, there probably isn't even a well-defined loss function that would remain aligned under infinite optimization pressure.

Replies from: steve2152
↑ comment by Steven Byrnes (steve2152) · 2022-07-13T15:17:12.094Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Where we probably agree:

  • I enthusiastically endorse keeping in mind the possibility that the correct answer to the question you excerpted is “Haha trick question, there is no such loss function.”
  • I enthusiastically endorse having an open mind to any good ideas that we can think of to steer our future AGIs in a good direction, including things unrelated to loss functions, and including that are radically different from anything in the human brain. For example in this post [LW · GW] I talk about lots of things that are not “choosing the right loss function”.

Specifying a correct loss functions is not [LW · GW] the right way to think about the Alignment Problem.

As for your link, I disagree that “specifying the right loss function” is equivalent to “writing down the correct utility function”. I’m not sure it makes sense to say that humans have a utility function at all, and if they do, it would be full of learned abstract concepts like “my children will have rich fulfilling lives”. But we definitely have loss functions in our brain, and they have to be specified by genetically-hardcoded circuitry that (I claim [LW · GW]) cannot straightforwardly refer to complicated learned abstract concepts like that.

A system's architecture matters much more than its loss function for determining whether or not it is dangerous.

I’m not quite sure what you mean here.

If “architecture” means 96 transformer layers versus 112 transformer layers, then I don’t care at all. I claim that the loss function is much more important than that for whether the system is dangerous.

Or if “architecture” means “There’s a world-model updated by self-supervised learning, and then there’s actor-critic reinforcement learning, blah blah blah” [AF · GW], then yes this is very important, but it’s not unrelated to loss functions—the world-model’s loss function would be sensory prediction error, the critic’s loss function would be reward prediction error, etc. Right?

In fact, there probably isn't even a well-defined loss function that would remain aligned under infinite optimization pressure.

I think I would say “maybe” where you say “probably”. I think it’s an important open question. I would be very interested to know one way or the other.

I think humans are an interesting case study. Almost all humans do not want to literally exterminate humanity. If a human were much “smarter”, but had the same life experience and social instincts, would they reliably develop a motivation to exterminate humanity? I’m skeptical. But mainly I don’t know. I talk about it a bit in §12.4.4 here [LW · GW]. Different people seem to have different intuitions on this topic.

See also §9.5 here [LW · GW] for my argument against the proposition that brain-like AGIs will make decisions to maximize future rewards.

Replies from: logan-zoellner
↑ comment by Logan Zoellner (logan-zoellner) · 2022-07-13T19:44:09.681Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I’m not quite sure what you mean here.

 

In the standard picture of a reinforcement learner, suppose you get to specify the reward function and i get to specify the "agent".  No matter what reward function you choose, I claim I can make an agent that both: 1) gets a huge reward compared to some baseline implementation 2) destroys the world.  In fact, I think most "superintelligent" systems have this property for any reward function you could specify using current ML techniques.

Now switch the order, I design the agent first and ask you for an arbitrary reward function.  I claim that there exist architectures which are: 1) useful, given the correct reward function 2) never, under any circumstances destroy the world.

Replies from: steve2152
↑ comment by Steven Byrnes (steve2152) · 2022-07-13T21:02:27.974Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think it’s impossible to try to reason about what an RL agent would do solely on the basis of knowing its reward function, without knowing anything else about how the RL agent works, e.g. whether it’s model-based vs model-free, etc. 

(RL is a problem statement, not an algorithm. Not only that, but RL is “(almost) the most general problem statement possible”!)

I think we’re in agreement on that point.

But that point doesn’t seem to be too relevant in this context. After all, I specified “neocortex / hippocampus / striatum / etc.-like learning algorithms”. My previous reply linked an extensive discussion [AF · GW] of what I think that actually means. So I’m not sure how we wound up on this point. Oh well.

In your second paragraph:

  • If I interpret “useful” in the normal sense (“not completely useless”), then your claim seems true and trivial. Just make it a really weak agent (but not so weak that it’s 100% useless).
  • If I interpret “useful” to mean “sufficiently powerful as to reach AGI”, then you would seem to be claiming a complete solution to AGI safety, and I would reply that I’m skeptical, and interested to see details.
comment by Algon · 2022-07-12T20:27:31.160Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Who else are you thinking of when you talk about "algorithmically-minded, AI-adjacent neuroscientists"? A lot of scientific research seems done nowadays online, so I'm wondering whether I need to know the relevant twitter accounts/forums/whatever if I want to keep up with this research.

Also, I feel like people misinterpret the no-free lunch theorem. (One of) the theorems states that for any algorithms A and B, there are approximately as many prior functions on which A outperforms B as vice versa. But like, we don't care about most prior functions, we care about kolmogorov complexity relative to us. So what if an AGI algorithm fails on tonnes of priors that are alien to ours?

Replies from: steve2152
↑ comment by Steven Byrnes (steve2152) · 2022-07-12T20:56:17.545Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Who else are you thinking of when you talk about "algorithmically-minded, AI-adjacent neuroscientists"?

For example, off the top of my head, Tim Behrens, Jeff Hawkins, Josh Tenenbaum, Konrad Kording, Peter Dayan, Randall O'Reilly, every neuroscientist at DeepMind, many many others. The “Brain Inspired” podcast is good, it focuses on this area.

Also, I feel like people misinterpret the no-free lunch theorem…

Yes, but note that Blake does not make that particular mistake: “Now, all that being said, the proof for the no free lunch theorem, refers to all possible tasks. And that’s a very different thing from the set of tasks that we might actually care about. Right? Because the set of all possible tasks will include some really bizarre stuff that we certainly don’t need our AI systems to do.”

In an earlier draft, I had a section echoing what you’re saying, but decided it was a bit off-topic, since again Blake is making a different argument. So I deleted it. Eliezer has also written up that argument at https://arbital.com/p/nofreelunch_irrelevant/ & https://intelligence.org/2017/12/06/chollet/.

UPDATE: I resurrected my aforementioned off-topic deleted section, and published it as a brief self-contained explainer: The No Free Lunch theorem for dummies [LW · GW]. 

Replies from: Algon
↑ comment by Algon · 2022-07-12T22:10:53.178Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes, but note that Blake does not make that particular mistake

Yeah, good point. I think I was blindly pattern matching the consecutive mentions of "no free lunch" and "can't get much better than humanity" to mean they believe the former strongly implies the latter. Probably because I don't have a good model of his views, so I just interpert them as having whatever model fits some of his statements. 

Thanks for the recommendations.

comment by faul_sname · 2022-07-15T06:42:29.770Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For me at least, I mentally model the right column as something "a better GPT" could probably describe how to do, if given the correct prompt. For example, let's say that I have just sequenced a sample of Equine herpesvirus 1, and I want to know what the protein encoded by ORF-46 does. I feed GPT the following

Our team identified the likely function of the protein encoded by ORF46 of the Equine herpesvirus 1 (EHV-11) through the use of machine-learning based tools. Specifically, we

and then GPT spits out

used the protein sequence of ORF46 to predict its function using the programs ProtParam and PFAM. ProtParam predicted that ORF46 is a protein with a molecular weight of 9.5 kDa and an isoelectric point of 5.5. PFAM predicted that ORF46 is a protein domain with the PFAM ID PFam:PF02336. This PFAM ID is associated with the family of proteins known as the "G-protein coupled receptors."

G-protein coupled receptors are a large family of proteins that play a role in many cellular processes, including signal transduction, cell proliferation,

ProtParam and PFAM are in fact existing tools used for determining the structure and function of polypeptides. Now obviously GPT does not actually use these tools, so we would need to identify when GPT is confabulating and then actually do the things and substitute in the results of doing the thing. However, I think only the step of "actually use the tool" is a thing that GPT is flatly unable to do at all rather than simply bad at doing. For example, it knows how to

  1. Identify which tools are being used
  2. Figure out what google search you would use to find the documentation of that tool.
  3. Say how one would invoke a given tool on the command line to accomplish a task, given some examples

Now this certainly is not a very satisfying general AI architecture, but I personally would not be all that surprised if "GPT but bigger and with more training specifically around how to use tools, and some clever prompts structures that only need to be discovered once" does squeak over the threshold of "being general".

Basically my mental model is that if "general intelligence" is something possessed by an unmotivated undergrad who just wants to finish their project with minimal effort, who will try to guess the teacher's password without having to actually understand anything if that's possible, it's something that a future GPT could also have with no further major advances.

Honestly, I kind of wonder if the crux of disagreement comes from some people who have and successfully use problem-solving methods that don't look like "take a method you've seen used successfully on a similar problem, and try to apply it to this problem, and see if that works, and if not repeat". That would also explain all of the talk about the expectation that an AI will, at some point, be able to generalize outside the training distribution. That does not sound like a thing I can do with very much success -- when I need to do something that is outside of what I've seen in my training data, my strategy is to obtain some training data, train on it, and then try to do the thing (and "able to notice I need more training data and then obtain that training data" is, I think, the only mechanism by which I even am a general intelligence). But maybe it is just a skill I don't have but some people do, and the ones who don't have it are imagining AIs that also don't have it, and the ones who do have the skill are imagining a "general" AI that can actually do the thing, and then the two groups are talking past each other.

And if that's the case, the whole "some people are able to generalize far from the training distribution, and we should figure out what's going on with them" might be the load-bearing thing to communicate.

Replies from: steve2152
↑ comment by Steven Byrnes (steve2152) · 2022-07-15T18:03:25.106Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for your comment! I think it’s slightly missing the point though. Let me explain.

One silly argument would be: “GPT-3 is pretty ‘general’, so we should we should call it ‘AGI’. And GPT-3 is not dangerous. Ergo ‘AGI’ is not dangerous”.

This is a silly argument because it’s just semantics. Agent-y-John-von-Neumann-AGI is possible, and it’s dangerous (i.e. prone to catastrophic out-of-control-misaligned-AGI accidents), and by default sooner or later somebody is going to build it (because it’s scientifically exciting, and there are many actors all over the world who can do so, etc.). That’s a real problem. Whether or not GPT-3 qualifies as “general” has nothing to do with that problem!

In right-column-vs-left-column terms, I claim there are systems (e.g. agent-y-John-von-Neumann-AGI) that are definitely firmly 100% in the right column in every respect, and I claim that such systems are super-dangerous, and that people will nevertheless presumably start messing around with them anyway at some point. Meanwhile, in other news, we can also imagine systems that are both safe and arguably have certain right-column aspects. Maybe language models are an example. OK sure, that’s possible. But those aren’t the systems I want to talk about here.

OK, then a more sophisticated argument would be: “Future language models will be both safe and super-duper-powerful, indeed so powerful that they will change the world, and indeed they’ll change it so much that it’s no use thinking ahead further than that step. Instead, we can basically delegate the problem of ‘what is to be done about people making dangerous agent-y-John-von-Neumann-AGI’ to our AI-empowered descendants [or AI-empowered future selves, depending on your preferred timelines]. Let them figure it out!”

A priori, this could be true, but I happen to think it’s false, for reasons that I won’t get into here. Instead, I think future language models will be moderately useful for future humans—just as computers and zoom and arxiv and github and so on are moderately useful for current humans. (Language models might be useful for AGI safety research even today, for all I know. I personally found GPT-3-assisted-brainstorming to be unhelpful when I tried it, but I didn’t try very hard, and that was a whole year ago, i.e. ancient history by language model standards.]) I don’t think future language models will be so radically transformative as to significantly change our overall situation with respect to the problem of future people building agent-y-John-von-Neumann-AGIs.

(Or if they do get that radically transformative, I think it would be because future programmers, with new insights, found a way to turn language models into something more like an agent-y-John-von-Neumann-AGI—and in particular, something comparably dangerous to agent-y-John-von-Neumann-AGI.)