'🚨 The annual report of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission is now live. 🚨

Its top recommendation is for Congress and the DoD to fund a Manhattan Project-like program to race to AGI.

Buckle up...' 

https://x.com/hamandcheese/status/1858897287268725080

I suspect current approaches probably significantly or even drastically under-elicit automated ML research capabilities.

I'd guess the average cost of producing a decent ML paper is at least 10k$ (in the West, at least) and probably closer to 100k's $.

In contrast, Sakana's AI scientist cost on average 15$/paper and .50$/review. PaperQA2, which claims superhuman performance at some scientific Q&A and lit review tasks, costs something like 4$/query. Other papers with claims of human-range performance on ideation or reviewing also probably have costs of <10$/idea or review.

Even the auto ML R&D benchmarks from METR or UK AISI don't give me at all the vibes of coming anywhere near close enough to e.g. what a 100-person team at OpenAI could accomplish in 1 year, if they tried really hard to automate ML.

A fairer comparison would probably be to actually try hard at building the kind of scaffold which could use ~10k$ in inference costs productively. I suspect the resulting agent would probably not do much better than with 100$ of inference, but it seems hard to be confident. And it seems harder still to be confident about what will happen even in just 3 years' time, given that pretraining compute seems like it will probably grow about 10x/year and that there might be stronger pushes towards automated ML.
 

This seems pretty bad both w.r.t. underestimating the probability of shorter timelines and faster takeoffs, and in more specific ways too. E.g. we could be underestimating by a lot the risks of open-weights Llama-3 (or 4 soon) given all the potential under-elicitation.

↑ comment by Bogdan Ionut Cirstea (bogdan-ionut-cirstea) · 2024-10-10T18:05:03.672Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Figures 3 and 4 from MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering seem like some amount of evidence for this view:

Eliezer (among others in the MIRI mindspace) has this whole spiel about human kindness/sympathy/empathy/prosociality being contingent on specifics of the human evolutionary/cultural trajectory, e.g. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1660623336567889920 and about how gradient descent is supposed to be nothing like that https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1660623900789862401. I claim that the same argument (about evolutionary/cultural contingencies) could be made about e.g. image aesthetics/affect, and this hypothesis should lose many Bayes points when we observe concrete empirical evidence of gradient descent leading to surprisingly human-like aesthetic perceptions/affect, e.g. The Perceptual Primacy of Feeling: Affectless machine vision models robustly predict human visual arousal, valence, and aesthetics; Towards Disentangling the Roles of Vision & Language in Aesthetic Experience with Multimodal DNNs; Controlled assessment of CLIP-style language-aligned vision models in prediction of brain & behavioral data; Neural mechanisms underlying the hierarchical construction of perceived aesthetic value.

12/10/24 update: more, and in my view even somewhat methodologically stronger, evidence: On the cognitive alignment between humans and machines.

Contra both the 'doomers' and the 'optimists' on (not) pausing. Rephrased: RSPs (done right) seem right.

Contra 'doomers'. Oversimplified, 'doomers' (e.g. PauseAI, FLI's letter, Eliezer) ask(ed) for pausing now / even earlier - (e.g. the Pause Letter). I expect this would be / have been very much suboptimal, even purely in terms of solving technical alignment. For example, Some thoughts on automating alignment research [LW · GW] suggests timing the pause so that we can use automated AI safety research could result in '[...] each month of lead that the leader started out with would correspond to 15,000 human researchers working for 15 months.' We clearly don't have such automated AI safety R&D capabilities now, suggesting that pausing later, when AIs are closer to having the required automated AI safety R&D capabilities would be better. At the same time, current models seem very unlikely to be x-risky (e.g. they're still very bad at passing dangerous capabilities evals), which is another reason to think pausing now would be premature.

Contra 'optimists'. I'm more unsure here, but the vibe I'm getting from e.g. AI Pause Will Likely Backfire (Guest Post) [LW · GW] is roughly something like 'no pause ever'; largely based on arguments of current systems seeming easy to align / control. While I agree with the point that  current systems do seem easy to align / control and I could even see this holding all the way up to ~human-level automated AI safety R&D, I can easily see scenarios where around that time things get scary quickly without any pause. For example, similar arguments to those about the scalability of automated AI safety R&D suggest automated AI capabilities R&D could also be scaled up significantly. For example, figures like those in Before smart AI, there will be many mediocre or specialized AIs [LW · GW] suggest very large populations of ~human-level automated AI capabilities researchers could be deployed (e.g. 100x larger than the current [human] population of AI researchers). Given that even with the current relatively small population, algorithmic progress seems to double LM capabilities ~every 8 months, it seems like algorithmic progress could be much faster with 100x larger populations, potentially leading to new setups (e.g. new AI paradigms, new architectures, new optimizers, synthetic data, etc.) which could quite easily break the properties that make current systems seem relatively easy / safe to align. In this scenario, pausing to get this right (especially since automated AI safety R&D would also be feasible) seems like it could be crucial.

Quick take on o1: overall, it's been a pretty good day. Likely still sub-ASL-3, (opaque) scheming still seems very unlikely because the prerequisites still don't seem there. CoT-style inference compute playing a prominent role in the capability gains is pretty good for safety, because differentially transparent. Gains on math and code suggest these models are getting closer to being usable for automated safety research (also for automated capabilities research, unfortunately).

Like transformers [LW(p) · GW(p)], SSMs like Mamba also have weak single forward passes: The Illusion of State in State-Space Models (summary thread). As suggested previously in The Parallelism Tradeoff: Limitations of Log-Precision Transformers, this may be due to a fundamental tradeoff between parallelizability and expressivity:

'We view it as an interesting open question whether it is possible to develop SSM-like models with greater expressivity for state tracking that also have strong parallelizability and learning dynamics, or whether these different goals are fundamentally at odds, as Merrill & Sabharwal (2023a) suggest.'

'Data movement bottlenecks limit LLM scaling beyond 2e28 FLOP, with a "latency wall" at 2e31 FLOP. We may hit these in ~3 years. Aggressive batch size scaling could potentially overcome these limits.' https://epochai.org/blog/data-movement-bottlenecks-scaling-past-1e28-flop 

Success at currently-researched generalized inference scaling laws might risk jeopardizing some of the fundamental assumptions of current regulatory frameworks.

• the o1 results have illustrated specialized inference scaling laws, for model capabilities  in some specialized domains (e.g. math); notably, these don't seem to generally hold for all domains - e.g. o1 doesn't seem better than gpt4o at writing;
• there's ongoing work at OpenAI to make generalized inference scaling work;
• e.g. this could perhaps (though maybe somewhat overambitiously) be framed, in the language of https://epochai.org/blog/trading-off-compute-in-training-and-inference, as there no longer being an upper bound in how many OOMs of inference compute can be traded for equivalent OOMs of pretraining;
• to the best of my awarenes, current regulatory frameworks/proposals (e.g. the EU AI Act, the Executive Order, SB 1047) frame the capabilities of models in terms of (pre)training compute and maybe fine-tuning compute (e.g. if (pre)training FLOP > 1e26, the developer needs to take various measures), without any similar requirements framed in terms of inference compute; so current regulatory frameworks seem unprepared for translating between indefinite amounts of inference compute and pretraining compute (capabilities);
• this would probably be less worrying in the case of models behind APIs, since it should be feasible to monitor for misuse (e.g. CBRN), especially since current inference scaling methods (e.g. CoT) seem relatively transparent; but this seems different for open-weights or leaked models;
• notably, it seems like Llama-3 405b only requires 8 good GPUs to run on one's own hardware (bypassing any API), apparently costing <100k$; the relatively low costs could empower a lot of bad actors, especially since guardrails are easy to remove and potentially more robust methods like unlearning still seem mostly in the research phase;
• this would also have consequences for (red-teaming) evals; if running a model for longer potentially leads to more (misuse) uplift, it becomes much harder to upper-bound said uplift;
• also, once a model's weights are out, it might be hard to upperbound all the potential inference uplift that future fine-tunes might provide; e.g. suppose it did become possible to fine-tune 4o into something even better than o1, that could indeed do almost boundless inference scaling; this might then mean that somebody could then apply the same fine-tuning to Llama-3 405b and release that model open-weights, and then (others) mights potentially be able to misuse it in very dangerous ways using a lot of inference compute (but still comparatively low vs. pretraining compute);
• OTOH, I do buy the claims from https://www.beren.io/2023-11-05-Open-source-AI-has-been-vital-for-alignment/ that until now open-weights have probably been net beneficial for safety, and I expect this could easily keep holding in the near-term (especially as long as open-weights models stay somewhat behind the SOTA); so I'm conflicted about what should be done, especially given the uncertainty around the probability of making generalized inference scaling work and over how much more dangerous this could make current or future open-weights releases; one potentially robust course of action might be to keep doing research on unlearning methods, especially ones robust to fine-tuning, like in Tamper-Resistant Safeguards for Open-Weight LLMs, which might be sufficient to make misuse (especially in some specialized domains, e.g. CBRN) as costly as needing to train from scratch

Quick take: on the margin, a lot more research should probably be going into trying to produce benchmarks/datasets/evaluation methods for safety (than more directly doing object-level safety research). 

Some past examples I find valuable - in the case of unlearning: WMDP, Eight Methods to Evaluate Robust Unlearning in LLMs; in the case of mech interp - various proxies for SAE performance, e.g. from Scaling and evaluating sparse autoencoders, as well as various benchmarks, e.g. FIND: A Function Description Benchmark for Evaluating Interpretability Methods. Prizes and RFPs seem like a potentially scalable way to do this - e.g. https://www.mlsafety.org/safebench - and I think they could be particularly useful on short timelines.

Including differentially vs. doing the full stack of AI safety work - because I expect a lot of such work could be done by automated safety researchers soon, with the right benchmarks/datasets/evaluation methods. This could also make it much easier to evaluate the work of automated safety researchers and to potentially reduce the need for human feedback, which could be a significant bottleneck.

Better proxies could also make it easier to productively deploy more inference compute - e.g. from Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Sampling: 'When solving math word problems from GSM8K and MATH, coverage with Llama-3 models grows to over 95% with 10,000 samples. However, common methods to pick correct solutions from a sample collection, such as majority voting or reward models, plateau beyond several hundred samples and fail to fully scale with the sample budget.' Similar findings in other references, e.g. in Trading Off Compute in Training and Inference.

Of course, there's also the option of using automated/augmented safety research to produce such benchmarks, but it seems potentially particularly useful to have them ahead of time.

This also seems like an area where we can't piggyback off of work from capabilities researchers, like will probably be significantly the case for applying automated researchers (to safety).

I think this one (and perhaps better operationalizations) should probably have many eyes on it: 

Jack Clark: 'Registering a prediction: I predict that within two years (by July 2026) we'll see an AI system beat all humans at the IMO, obtaining the top score. Alongside this, I would wager we'll see the same thing - an AI system beating all humans in a known-hard competition - in another scientific domain outside of mathematics. If both of those things occur, I believe that will present strong evidence that AI may successfully automate large chunks of scientific research before the end of the decade.' https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-380-distributed-13bn-parameter 

(cross-posted from https://x.com/BogdanIonutCir2/status/1844451247925100551, among others)

I'm concerned things might move much faster than most people expected, because of automated ML (figure from OpenAI's recent MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering, basically showing automated ML engineering performance scaling as more inference compute is used):

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wr2SxQuRvcXeDBbNZ/bogdan-ionut-cirstea-s-shortform?commentId=dyndDEn9qqdt9Mhx2 [LW(p) · GW(p)] 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wr2SxQuRvcXeDBbNZ/bogdan-ionut-cirstea-s-shortform?commentId=groxciBxma5cgay7L [LW(p) · GW(p)]  

I find it pretty wild that automating AI safety R&D, which seems to me like the best shot we currently have at solving the full superintelligence control/alignment problem, no longer seems to have any well-resourced, vocal, public backers (with the superalignment team disbanded).

from https://jack-clark.net/2024/08/18/import-ai-383-automated-ai-scientists-cyborg-jellyfish-what-it-takes-to-run-a-cluster/…, commenting on https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292: 'Why this matters – the taste of automated science: This paper gives us a taste of a future where powerful AI systems propose their own ideas, use tools to do scientific experiments, and generate results. At this stage, what we have here is basically a ‘toy example’ with papers of dubious quality and insights of dubious import. But you know where we were with language models five years ago? We had things that could barely write a paragraph. Now they can do this. I predict that by the summer of 2026 we will have seen at least one genuinely interesting research paper that was soup-to-nuts generated via a tool-using generative AI system.'

(cross-posted from https://x.com/BogdanIonutCir2/status/1842914635865030970)

maybe there is some politically feasible path to ML training/inference killswitches in the near-term after all: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/asml-adds-remote-kill-switch-to-tsmcs-euv-machines-in-case-china-invades-taiwan-report/ 

I recently gave a talk (slides) on some thoughts about what automating AI safety research might look like. 

Some [earlier versions] of the ideas there were developed during my Astra Fellowship Winter '24 with @evhub [LW · GW] and through related conversations in Constellation.

On an apparent missing mood - FOMO on all the vast amounts of automated AI safety R&D that could (almost already) be produced safely 

Automated AI safety R&D could results in vast amounts of work produced quickly. E.g. from Some thoughts on automating alignment research [LW · GW] (under certain assumptions detailed in the post): 

each month of lead that the leader started out with would correspond to 15,000 human researchers working for 15 months.

Despite this promise, we seem not to have much knowledge when such automated AI safety R&D might happen, in which order the relevant capabilities might appear (including compared to various dangerous capabilities), etc. AFAICT. we don't seem to be trying very hard either, neither at prediction, nor at elicitation of such capabilities.

One potential explanation I heard for this apparent missing mood of FOMO on AI automated AI safety R&D is the idea / worry that the relevant automated AI safety R&D capabilities would only appear when models are already / too close to being dangerous. This seems plausible to me, but would still seems like a strange way to proceed given the uncertainty.

For contrast, consider how one might go about evaluating dangerous capabilities and trying to anticipate them ahead of time. From GDM's recent Introducing the Frontier Safety Framework:

The Framework has three key components:

1. Identifying capabilities a model may have with potential for severe harm. To do this, we research the paths through which a model could cause severe harm in high-risk domains, and then determine the minimal level of capabilities a model must have to play a role in causing such harm. We call these “Critical Capability Levels” (CCLs), and they guide our evaluation and mitigation approach.
2. Evaluating our frontier models periodically to detect when they reach these Critical Capability Levels. To do this, we will develop suites of model evaluations, called “early warning evaluations,” that will alert us when a model is approaching a CCL, and run them frequently enough that we have notice before that threshold is reached.
3. Applying a mitigation plan when a model passes our early warning evaluations. This should take into account the overall balance of benefits and risks, and the intended deployment contexts. These mitigations will focus primarily on security (preventing the exfiltration of models) and deployment (preventing misuse of critical capabilities).

I see no reason why, in principle, a similar high-level approach couldn't be analogously taken for automated AI safety R&D capabilities, yet almost nobody seems to be working on this, at least publicly (in fact, I am currently working on related topics; I'm still very surprised by the overall neglectedness, made even more salient by current events).

(crossposted from X/twitter)

Epoch is one of my favorite orgs, but I expect many of the predictions in https://epochai.org/blog/interviewing-ai-researchers-on-automation-of-ai-rnd to be overconservative / too pessimistic. I expect roughly a similar scaleup in terms of compute as https://x.com/peterwildeford/status/1825614599623782490… - training runs ~1000x larger than GPT-4's in the next 3 years - and massive progress in both coding and math (e.g. along the lines of the medians in https://metaculus.com/questions/6728/ai-wins-imo-gold-medal/… https://metaculus.com/questions/12467/ai-wins-ioi-gold-medal/…), which seem to me like some of the most important domains for automated ML research, both in terms of prerequisite capabilities, and for transfer reasons. Furthermore, along the lines of previous Epoch analysis in https://epochai.org/blog/trading-off-compute-in-training-and-inference…, I expect large chunks of ML research (e.g. post-training) to be differentially automatable by spending more inference compute, because they have relatively accurate and cheap proxy feedback signals (e.g. accuracy on various benchmarks). I also expect the ability to generate verifiable synthetic code + math data to train on to also contribute to math/code/reasoning capabilities more broadly (as is already rumored about Q*/Strawberry). And finally, I wouldn't be too surprised if even the fuzzier parts of ML research workflows like ideation might be at least somewhat automatable, along the lines of https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/, especially for ML research which takes relatively little compute to iterate (e.g. large parts of post-training).

(cross-posted from X/twitter)

The already-feasibility of https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/ (with basically non-x-risky systems, sub-ASL-3, and bad at situational awareness so very unlikely to be scheming) has updated me significantly on the tractability of the alignment / control problem. More than ever, I expect it's gonna be relatively tractable (if done competently and carefully) to safely, iteratively automate parts of AI safety research, all the way up to roughly human-level automated safety research (using LLM agents roughly-shaped like the AI scientist, with humans in the loop; in a control framework https://lesswrong.com/posts/kcKrE9mzEHrdqtDpE/the-case-for-ensuring-that-powerful-ais-are-controlled…, ideally). Add some decent regulation (especially vs. uncontrolled intelligence explosions using AI scientists inside the largest AI labs) + paretotopian coordination https://aiprospects.substack.com/p/paretotopian-goal-alignment… (perhaps especially at the international level) and I think we might have all the basic ingredients of a 'pivotal act' in the best sense of the term. (Easier said than done, though).

I'd love to see at least several Sakana-like AI safety orgs, focused on using LLM agents to automate / strongly augment various parts of safety research. And ideally putting those tools (technically agents) in the hands of hundreds / thousands of (including independent) AI safety researchers. Unsure if the AI safety funding / field-building infrastructure is anywhere near ready for this level of potential scale-up, though. I expect quite a few safety research areas to be prime candidates for early automation / strong augmentation, especially the ones with relatively short and precise feedback loops (in both code and compute), e.g. unlearning, activation/representation engineering (and applications) and large parts of LLM fine-tuning (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08414 for a prototype).

Change my mind: outer alignment will likely be solved by default for LLMs. Brain-LM scaling laws (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11863) + LM embeddings as model of shared linguistic space for transmitting thoughts during communication (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546708v1.abstract) suggest outer alignment will be solved by default for LMs: we'll be able to 'transmit our thoughts', including alignment-relevant concepts (and they'll also be represented in a [partially overlapping] human-like way).

Prototype of LLM agents automating the full AI research workflow: The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery.

And already some potential AI safety issues: 'We have noticed that The AI Scientist occasionally tries to increase its chance of success, such as modifying and launching its own execution script! We discuss the AI safety implications in our paper.

For example, in one run, it edited the code to perform a system call to run itself. This led to the script endlessly calling itself. In another case, its experiments took too long to complete, hitting our timeout limit. Instead of making its code run faster, it simply tried to modify its own code to extend the timeout period.'

Obviously relevant for automating safety research too; see this presentation and this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] for some related thoughts.

RSPs for automated AI safety R&D require rethinking RSPs

AFAICT, all current RSPs are only framed negatively, in terms of [prerequisites to] dangerous capabilities to be detected (early) and mitigated. 

In contrast, RSPs for automated AI safety R&D will likely require measuring [prerequisites to] capabilities for automating [parts of] AI safety R&D, and preferentially (safely) pushing these forward. An early such examples might be safely automating some parts of mechanistic intepretability.

(Related: On an apparent missing mood - FOMO on all the vast amounts of automated AI safety R&D that could (almost already) be produced safely [LW(p) · GW(p)])

quick take: Against Almost Every Theory of Impact of Interpretability [LW · GW] should be required reading for ~anyone starting in AI safety (e.g. it should be in the AGISF curriculum), especially if they're considering any model internals work (and of course even more so if they're specifically considering mech interp)

56% on swebench-lite with repeated sampling (13% above previous SOTA; up from 15.9% with one sample to 56% with 250 samples), with a very-below-SOTA model https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21787; anything automatically verifiable (large chunks of math and coding) seems like it's gonna be automatable in < 5 years.

(epistemic status: quick take, as the post category says)

Browsing though EAG London attendees' profiles and seeing what seems like way too many people / orgs doing (I assume dangerous capabilities) evals. I expect a huge 'market downturn' on this, since I can hardly see how there would be so much demand for dangerous capabilities evals in a couple years' time / once some notorious orgs like the AISIs build their sets, which many others will probably copy. 

While at the same time other kinds of evals (e.g. alignment, automated AI safety R&D, even control) seem wildly neglected.

Epistemic status: at least somewhat rant-mode.

I find it pretty ironic that many in AI risk mitigation would make asks for if-then committments/RSPs from the top AI capabilities labs, but they won't make the same asks for AI safety orgs/funders. E.g.: if you're an AI safety funder, what kind of evidence ('if') will make you accelerate how much funding you deploy per year ('then')?

News about an apparent shift in focus to inference scaling laws at the top labs: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-rivals-seek-new-path-smarter-ai-current-methods-hit-limitations-2024-11-11/ 

(cross-posted from https://x.com/BogdanIonutCir2/status/1844787728342245487)

the plausibility of this strategy, to 'endlessly trade computation for better performance' and then have very long/parallelized runs, is precisely one of the scariest aspects of automated ML; even more worrying that it's precisely what some people in the field are gunning for, and especially when they're directly contributing to the top auto ML scaffolds; although, everything else equal, it might be better to have an early warning sign, than to have a large inference overhang: https://x.com/zhengyaojiang/status/1844756071727923467  

(still) speculative, but I think the pictures of Shard Theory, activation engineering and Simulators (and e.g. Bayesian interpretations of in-context learning) are looking increasingly similar: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dqSwccGTWyBgxrR58/turntrout-s-shortform-feed?commentId=qX4k7y2vymcaR6eio [LW(p) · GW(p)] 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dqSwccGTWyBgxrR58/turntrout-s-shortform-feed#SfPw5ijTDi6e3LabP [LW(p) · GW(p)] 

on unsupervised learning/clustering in the activation space of multiple systems as a potential way to deal with proxy problems when searching for some concepts (e.g. embeddings of human values): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nwgdq6kHke5LY692J/alignment-by-default#8CngPZyjr5XydW4sC [LW(p) · GW(p)] 

'Krenn thinks that o1 will accelerate science by helping to scan the literature, seeing what’s missing and suggesting interesting avenues for future research. He has had success looping o1 into a tool that he co-developed that does this, called SciMuse. “It creates much more interesting ideas than GPT-4 or GTP-4o,” he says.' (source; related: current underelicitation of auto ML capabilities [LW(p) · GW(p)])

(crossposted from https://x.com/BogdanIonutCir2/status/1840775662094713299) 

I really wish we'd have some automated safety research prizes similar to https://aimoprize.com/updates/2024-09-23-second-progress-prize…. Some care would have to be taken to not advance capabilities [differentially], but at least some targeted areas seem quite robustly good, e.g. …https://multimodal-interpretability.csail.mit.edu/maia/.

It might be interesting to develop/put out RFPs for some benchmarks/datasets for unlearning of ML/AI knowledge (and maybe also ARA-relevant knowledge), analogously to WMDP for CBRN. This might be somewhat useful e.g. in a case where we might want to use powerful (e.g. human-level) AIs for cybersecurity, but we don't fully trust them. 

From Understanding and steering Llama 3:

A further interesting direction for automated interpretability would be to build interpreter agents: AI scientists which given an SAE feature could create hypotheses about what the feature might do, come up with experiments that would distinguish between those hypotheses (for instance new inputs or feature ablations), and then repeat until the feature is well-understood. This kind of agent might be the first automated alignment researcher. Our early experiments in this direction have shown that we can substantially increase automated interpretability performance with an iterative refinement step, and we expect to be able to push this approach much further.

Seems like it would be great if inference scaling laws worked for this particular application.

'ChatGPT4 generates social psychology hypotheses that are rated as original as those proposed by human experts' https://x.com/BogdanIonutCir2/status/1836720153444139154 

I think it's quite likely we're already in crunch time (e.g. in a couple years' time we'll see automated ML accelerating ML R&D algorithmic progress 2x) and AI safety funding is *severely* underdeployed. We could soon see many situations where automated/augmented AI safety R&D is bottlenecked by lack of human safety researchers in the loop. Also, relying only on the big labs for automated safety plans seems like a bad idea, since the headcount of their safety teams seems to grow slowly (and I suspect much slower than the numbers of safety researchers outside the labs). Related: https://www.beren.io/2023-11-05-Open-source-AI-has-been-vital-for-alignment/. 

Inference scaling laws should be a further boon to automated safety research, since they add another way to potentially spend money very scalably https://youtu.be/-aKRsvgDEz0?t=9647 

The intelligence explosion might be quite widely-distributed (not just inside the big labs), especially with open-weights LMs (and the code for the AI scientist is also open-sourced):

https://x.com/RobertTLange/status/1829104918214447216 

Interesting automated AI safety R&D demo:

'In this release:

• We propose and run an LLM-driven discovery process to synthesize novel preference optimization algorithms.
• We use this pipeline to discover multiple high-performing preference optimization losses. One such loss, which we call Discovered Preference Optimization (DiscoPOP), achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple held-out evaluation tasks, outperforming Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and other existing methods.
• We provide an initial analysis of DiscoPOP, to discover surprising and counterintuitive features.

We open-source not only the tuned model checkpoints and discovered objective functions but also the codebase for running the discovery process itself on GitHub and HuggingFace.'

'Our general LLM-driven discovery approach can be grouped into three steps:

1. First, we prompt an LLM with an initial task and problem description. We optionally add examples or previous evaluations and their recorded performance to the initial prompt.
2. The LLM is tasked with outputting a hypothesis, a name for the new method, and a code implementation of their method. We use the code in an inner loop training run and store the downstream performance of interest.
3. Finally, we update the context of the LLM with the results from the newly evaluated performance.'

https://sakana.ai/llm-squared/  

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08414 

Looking at how much e.g. the UK (>300B$) or the US (>1T$) have spent on Covid-19 measures puts in perspective how little is still being spent on AI safety R&D. I expect fractions of those budgets (<10%), allocated for automated/significantly-augmented AI safety R&D, would obsolete all previous human AI safety R&D.

Language model agents for interpretability (e.g. MAIA, FIND) seem to be making fast progress, to the point where I expect it might be feasible to safely automate large parts of interpretability workflows soon [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Given the above, it might be high value to start testing integrating more interpretability tools into interpretability (V)LM agents like MAIA and maybe even considering randomized controlled trials to test for any productivity improvements they could already be providing. 

For example, probing / activation steering workflows seem to me relatively short-horizon and at least somewhat standardized, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if MAIA could already automate very large chunks of that work (with proper tool integration). (Disclaimer: I haven't done much probing / activation steering hands-on work [though I do follow such work quite closely and have supervised related projects], so my views here might be inaccurate).

While I'm not sure I can tell any 'pivotal story' about such automation [LW(p) · GW(p)], if I imagine e.g. 10x more research on probing and activation steering / year / researcher as a result of such automation, it still seems like it could be a huge win. Such work could also e.g. provide much more evidence (either towards or against) the linear representation hypothesis.

Very plausible view (though doesn't seem to address misuse risks enough, I'd say) in favor of open-sourced models being net positive (including for alignment) from https://www.beren.io/2023-11-05-Open-source-AI-has-been-vital-for-alignment/: 

'While the labs certainly perform much valuable alignment research, and definitely contribute a disproportionate amount per-capita, they cannot realistically hope to compete with the thousands of hobbyists and PhD students tinkering and trying to improve and control models. This disparity will only grow larger as more and more people enter the field while the labs are growing at a much slower rate. Stopping open-source ‘proliferation’ effectively amounts to a unilateral disarmament of alignment while ploughing ahead with capabilities at full-steam.

Thus, until the point at which open source models are directly pushing the capabilities frontier themselves then I consider it extremely unlikely that releasing and working on these models is net-negative for humanity'

'Much capabilities work involves simply gathering datasets or testing architectures where it is easy to utilize other closed models referenced in pappers or through tacit knowledge of employees. Additionally, simple API access to models is often sufficient to build most AI-powered products rather than direct access to model internals. Conversely, such access is usually required for alignment research. All interpretability requires access to model internals almost by definition. Most of the AI control and alignment techniques we have invented require access to weights for finetuning or activations for runtime edits. Almost nothing can be done to align a model through access to the I/O API of a model at all. Thus it seems likely to me that by restricting open-source we differetially cripple alignment rather than capabilities. Alignment research is more fragile and dependent on deep access to models than capabilities research.'

Contrastive methods could be used both to detect common latent structure across animals, measuring sessions, multiple species (https://twitter.com/LecoqJerome/status/1673870441591750656) and to e.g. look for which parts of an artificial neural network do what a specific brain area does during a task assuming shared inputs (https://twitter.com/BogdanIonutCir2/status/1679563056454549504).

And there are theoretical results suggesting some latent factors can be identified using multimodality (all the following could be intepretable as different modalities - multiple brain recording modalities, animals, sessions, species, brains-ANNs), while being provably unindentifiable without the multiple modality - e.g. Identifiability Results for Multimodal Contrastive Learning (and results on nonlinear ICA in single-modal vs. multi-modal settings reviewed in section 2.1). This might a way to bypass single-model interpretability difficulties, by e.g. 'comparing' to brains or to other models.

Example of potential cross-species application: empathy mechanisms seem conserved across species Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour: highly conserved neurobehavioural mechanisms across species. Example of brain-ANN applications: 'matching' to modular brain networks, e.g. language network - ontology-relevant, non-agentic (e.g. The universal language network: A cross-linguistic investigation spanning 45 languages and 12 language families) or Theory of Mind network - could be very useful for detecting lying-relevant circuits (e.g. Single-neuronal predictions of others’ beliefs in humans).

Examples of related interpretability across models - Cross-GAN Auditing: Unsupervised Identification of Attribute Level Similarities and Differences between Pretrained Generative Models, across brain measurement modalities - Learnable latent embeddings for joint behavioural and neural analysis
, across animals and brain-ANN - Quantifying stimulus-relevant representational drift using cross-modality contrastive learning.

Summary threads of two recent papers which seem like significant evidence in favor of the Simulators [LW · GW] view of LLMs (especially after just pretraining): https://x.com/aryaman2020/status/1852027909709382065 https://x.com/DimitrisPapail/status/1844463075442950229 

Plausible large 2025 training run FLOP estimates from https://x.com/Jsevillamol/status/1810740021869359239?t=-stzlTbTUaPUMSX8WDtUIg&s=19: 

B200 = 4.5e15 FLOP/s at INT8
100 days ~= 1e7 seconds
Typical utilization ~= 30%

So 100,000 * 4.5e15 FLOP/s * 1e7 * 30% ~= 1e27 FLOP
Which is ~1.5 OOMs bigger than GPT-4

Decomposability seems like a fundamental assumption for interpretability and condition for it to succeed. E.g. from Toy Models of Superposition:

'Decomposability: Neural network activations which are decomposable can be decomposed into features, the meaning of which is not dependent on the value of other features. (This property is ultimately the most important – see the role of decomposition in defeating the curse of dimensionality.) [...]

The first two (decomposability and linearity) are properties we hypothesize to be widespread, while the latter (non-superposition and basis-aligned) are properties we believe only sometimes occur.'

If this assumption is true, it seems favorable to the prospects of safely automating large parts of interpretability work (e.g. using [V]LM agents like MAIA) differentially sooner than many other alignment research subareas and than the most consequential capabilities research (and likely before AIs become x-risky, e.g. before they pass many dangerous capabilities evals). For example, in a t-AGI framework [AF · GW], using an interpretability LM agent to search for the feature corresponding to a certain semantic direction should be much shorter horizon than e.g. coming up with a new conceptual alignment agenda or coming up with a new ML architecture (as well as having much faster feedback loops than e.g. training a SOTA LM using a new architecture).

Some theoretical results might also be relevant here, e.g. Sub-Task Decomposition Enables Learning in Sequence to Sequence Tasks.

Selected fragments (though not really cherry-picked, no reruns) of a conversation with Claude Opus on operationalizing something like Activation vector steering with BCI by applying the methodology of Concept Algebra for (Score-Based) Text-Controlled Generative Models to the model from High-resolution image reconstruction with latent diffusion models from human brain activity (website with nice illustrations of the model).

My prompts bolded:

'Could we do concept algebra directly on the fMRI of the higher visual cortex?
Yes, in principle, it should be possible to perform concept algebra directly on the fMRI signals from the higher visual cortex. The key idea would be to identify subspaces in the fMRI signal space that correspond to specific semantic concepts, and then manipulate these subspaces to control the reconstructed image.
Here's a hypothetical workflow:
 

1. Collect fMRI data while the subject views a large set of images that vary along certain semantic dimensions (e.g., gender, emotion, object category, scene type, etc.).
2. For each semantic dimension, identify a set of fMRI samples that differ only along that dimension. For example, for the gender dimension, you might compare the fMRI signals for "man" vs "woman", keeping other aspects of the image content constant.
3. Use these samples to estimate a "semantic subspace" for each dimension in the fMRI signal space, similar to how concept algebra estimates these subspaces in the latent space of the diffusion model. You could use techniques like PCA or linear discriminant analysis to identify the directions in fMRI space that best capture the variation along each semantic dimension.
4. To reconstruct an image, first predict the full fMRI signal from the early visual cortex (similar to predicting z in Takagi et al.).
5. Then, to manipulate a specific semantic concept, project the predicted fMRI signal onto the orthogonal complement of the corresponding semantic subspace (to remove the original semantic information), and add the desired semantic component from a reference fMRI signal (similar to the concept algebra manipulation of z_c).
6. Finally, use this modified fMRI signal from the higher visual cortex to condition the diffusion model, reconstructing an image with the desired semantic manipulation.

The main challenges would be:
 

• Collecting a sufficiently large and diverse fMRI dataset to robustly estimate the semantic subspaces.
• Ensuring that the estimated subspaces are truly orthogonal and capture the desired semantic variation.
• Translating the manipulated fMRI signals into a format that can effectively condition the diffusion model.

Nonetheless, this is an intriguing direction that could potentially unite the biological understanding from Takagi et al.'s work with the interpretable semantic manipulation of concept algebra. It suggests a way to manipulate images directly from brain-space, without the need for text prompts. This could provide insights into how the brain itself represents and manipulates semantic concepts.'

'How might the above be relevant to the AI alignment problem?
The hypothetical approach of performing concept algebra directly on fMRI signals from the higher visual cortex could potentially offer some interesting insights relevant to the AI alignment problem:
 

1. Understanding AI systems: By comparing the semantic subspaces identified in fMRI signals with those found in the latent spaces of AI models (like the diffusion model in concept algebra), we could gain insights into how AI systems represent and manipulate semantic concepts, and how this compares to the human brain. This could help in designing AI systems that reason in ways more analogous to humans, which could be beneficial for alignment.
2. Interpretability and control: The ability to identify and manipulate specific semantic concepts directly in the space of brain activity could provide a more direct and interpretable way of controlling the output of AI systems. If we can align the semantic subspaces of the AI with those of the human brain, it might become possible to control the AI's outputs by manipulating these subspaces, leading to more interpretable and controllable AI systems.
3. Value alignment: By understanding how human values and preferences are represented in the brain, and how they relate to the semantic concepts identified through concept algebra, we might gain insights into how to align AI systems with human values. If we can identify the neural subspaces corresponding to human values and ethics, we could potentially use this information to constrain the AI's outputs to align with these values.
4. Cognitive modeling: This approach could also contribute to the development of more accurate cognitive models of human reasoning and decision-making. By understanding how semantic concepts are represented and manipulated in the brain, we can build AI systems that more closely mimic human cognition, which could be useful for predicting and understanding human behavior in the context of AI alignment.
5. Neuro-symbolic AI: The idea of manipulating semantic concepts directly in the space of brain activity is reminiscent of neuro-symbolic AI approaches, which aim to combine the strengths of neural networks and symbolic reasoning. Insights from this fMRI-based concept algebra could potentially inform the development of neuro-symbolic AI systems that are more interpretable and aligned with human cognition.

However, it's important to note that these are speculative connections, and there would be significant technical and ethical challenges in realizing this approach. Nonetheless, exploring the parallels between the structure of human thought and the structure of AI representations could be a valuable direction for informing AI alignment research.'

'How would this be relevant in the context of this proposal? [note: the proposal being Activation vector steering with BCI]
The proposed concept algebra on fMRI signals could be highly relevant to the goals outlined in this funding proposal. Specifically:
 

1. The proposal aims to find mappings between human brain states and the latent representations of language models. Applying concept algebra directly on fMRI signals, as discussed, could provide a more direct and interpretable way to establish these mappings. By identifying semantic subspaces in the fMRI signals and aligning them with subspaces in the language model's latent space, we could potentially "steer" the language model to exhibit brain states similar to specific people.
2. The proposal suggests that reward models could be trained to reproduce humanlike brain states during evaluation, to improve their generalization. If concept algebra on fMRI can successfully manipulate semantic concepts in the reconstructed outputs (e.g., text or images), this could provide a way to directly optimize the reward models to produce outputs that match desired brain states.
3. The proposal aims to advance scientific understanding of analogies between LLM behavior and human behavior. Comparing the semantic subspaces identified in fMRI with those in LLMs, as enabled by concept algebra, could provide insights into these analogies at a more fundamental, representational level.
4. The proposed fMRI experiments could potentially provide the necessary data for attempting concept algebra on brain signals. The proposal includes plans for designing and implementing fMRI data-collection protocols, recruiting subjects, and administering the experiments. This data could be used to estimate the semantic subspaces needed for concept algebra.
5. The ML experiments proposed, including the fMRI feature extraction pipeline and architecture modifications, could potentially be adapted to implement concept algebra on the fMRI signals, in addition to the original goal of mapping brain states to LLM representations.

In summary, while the original proposal does not explicitly mention concept algebra, the ideas discussed around applying concept algebra to fMRI signals could potentially enhance and extend the proposal's goals of connecting human brain states with AI representations, improving reward model generalization, and advancing scientific understanding of human-AI analogies. The proposed fMRI experiments could provide the necessary data, and the planned ML experiments could be extended to include concept algebra on the brain signals.'

'Above you wrote: 'Use these samples to estimate a "semantic subspace" for each dimension in the fMRI signal space, similar to how concept algebra estimates these subspaces in the latent space of the diffusion model. You could use techniques like PCA or linear discriminant analysis to identify the directions in fMRI space that best capture the variation along each semantic dimension.' What if instead I just took a large diverse dataset of fMRI of images of men and fMRI of images of women, took the means of the two, substracted them, and used that as the sex direction in concept algebra?
Your proposed approach of taking the difference between the mean fMRI signals for men and women to define the "sex direction" is a great idea and could indeed work as a simple alternative to more complex methods like PCA or LDA.
Here's why this approach makes sense:
 

1. If the fMRI signals for men and women differ primarily along a single direction in the high-dimensional fMRI space, then the difference between their means will point along this direction.
2. By using a large and diverse dataset, you're essentially averaging out other sources of variation (e.g., individual differences, noise), leaving only the consistent difference between men and women.
3. This is analogous to how concept algebra identifies concept directions in the latent space of the diffusion model: by taking the difference between the latent representations of prompts that differ only in the target concept.

To implement this:
 

1. Collect a large dataset of fMRI signals for images of men and women, ensuring diversity in other aspects (age, race, emotion, background, etc.).
2. Compute the mean fMRI signal for men (m_men) and women (m_women) separately.
3. Compute the "sex direction" as: v_sex = m_women - m_men.
4. To manipulate the sex of a reconstructed image, you could then project the fMRI signal onto the orthogonal complement of v_sex (to remove the original sex information), and then add or subtract a scaled version of v_sex to introduce the desired sex information.

The main advantages of this approach over PCA or LDA are simplicity and interpretability. It doesn't require any complex eigendecompositions or model fitting, and the resulting direction has a clear interpretation as the difference between men and women.
Potential limitations to keep in mind:
 

1. If there are multiple independent directions along which men and women differ, this approach will only capture their average, not the individual directions.
2. If there are significant interactions between sex and other factors (e.g., if the sex difference is itself different for different ages or emotions), this simple difference may not fully capture the sex effect.
3. The approach assumes linearity - that the sex effect is a simple additive shift in fMRI space. If there are nonlinear interactions, this linear shift may not fully capture the effect.

Despite these potential limitations, I think this is a promising and elegantly simple approach to try for implementing concept algebra directly on fMRI signals. It's a great starting point that could be refined with more sophisticated methods if needed.'

More reasons to believe that studying empathy in rats (which should be much easier than in humans, both for e.g. IRB reasons, but also because smaller brains, easier to get whole connectomes, etc.) could generalize to how it works in humans and help with validating/implementing it in AIs (I'd bet one can already find something like computational correlates in e.g. GPT-4 and the correlation will get larger with scale a la https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11863) https://twitter.com/e_knapska/status/1722194325914964036

Claim of roughly human-level automated multi-turn red-teaming: https://blog.haizelabs.com/posts/cascade/ 

I expect large parts of interpretability work could be safely automatable very soon (e.g. GPT-5 timelines) using (V)LM agents; see A Multimodal Automated Interpretability Agent for a prototype. 

Notably, MAIA (GPT-4V-based) seems approximately human-level on a bunch of interp tasks, while (overwhelmingly likely) being non-scheming (e.g. current models are bad at situational awareness and out-of-context reasoning) and basically-not-x-risky (e.g. bad at ARA).

Given the potential scalability of automated interp, I'd be excited to see plans to use large amounts of compute on it (including e.g. explicit integrations with agendas like superalignment or control; for example, given non-dangerous-capabilities, MAIA seems framable as a 'trusted' model in control terminology).

Recent long-context LLMs seem to exhibit scaling laws from longer contexts - e.g. fig. 6 at page 8 in Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context, fig. 1 at page 1 in Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models.

The long contexts also seem very helpful for in-context learning, e.g. Many-Shot In-Context Learning.

This seems differentially good for safety (e.g. vs. models with larger forward passes but shorter context windows to achieve the same perplexity), since longer context and in-context learning are differentially transparent [LW(p) · GW(p)].

A brief list of resources with theoretical results which seem to imply RL is much more (e.g. sample efficiency-wise) difficult than IL - imitation learning (I don't feel like I have enough theoretical RL expertise or time to scrutinize hard the arguments, but would love for others to pitch in). Probably at least somewhat relevant w.r.t. discussions of what the first AIs capable of obsoleting humanity could look like: 

Paper: Is a Good Representation Sufficient for Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning? (quote: 'This work shows that, from the statistical viewpoint, the situation is far subtler than suggested by the more traditional approximation viewpoint, where the requirements on the representation that suffice for sample efficient RL are even more stringent. Our main results provide sharp thresholds for reinforcement learning methods, showing that there are hard limitations on what constitutes good function approximation (in terms of the dimensionality of the representation), where we focus on natural representational conditions relevant to value-based, model-based, and policy-based learning. These lower bounds highlight that having a good (value-based, model-based, or policy-based) representation in and of itself is insufficient for efficient reinforcement learning, unless the quality of this approximation passes certain hard thresholds. Furthermore, our lower bounds also imply exponential separations on the sample complexity between 1) value-based learning with perfect representation and value-based learning with a good-but-not-perfect representation, 2) value-based learning and policy-based learning, 3) policy-based learning and supervised learning and 4) reinforcement learning and imitation learning.')

Talks (very likely with some redundancy): 

Is a Good Representation Sufficient for Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning - Sham Kakade
What is the Statistical Complexity of Reinforcement Learning? (and another two versions)

I'm not aware of anybody currently working on coming up with concrete automated AI safety R&D evals, while there seems to be so much work going into e.g. DC evals or even (more recently) scheminess evals. This seems very suboptimal in terms of portfolio allocation.

Spicy take: good evals for automated ML R&D should (also) cover for what's in the attached picture (and try hard at elicitation in this rough shape). AFAIK, last time I looked at the main (public) proposals, they didn't seem to. Picture from https://x.com/RobertTLange/status/1829104918214447216. 

From a chat with Claude on the example of applying a multilevel interpretability framework to deception from https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12664:

'The paper uses the example of studying deception in language models (LLMs) to illustrate how Marr's levels of analysis can be applied to AI interpretability research. Here's a detailed breakdown of how the authors suggest approaching this topic at each level:
 

1.Computational Level:

• Define criteria for classifying LLM behavior as deception
• Develop comprehensive benchmarks to measure deceptive behaviors across various conditions
• Conduct thorough behavioral assessments while systematically varying: a) Input properties (e.g., prompting strategies, specific word usage) b) Model properties (e.g., training data composition, fine-tuning tasks, model architecture)
• Develop theoretical (possibly Bayesian) models to predict when an LLM would exhibit deceptive behavior given particular inputs and internal states
• Use these insights to adjust training and inference procedures to control LLM deception

2. Algorithmic/Representational Level:

• Examine representational spaces across different layers of the LLM
• Test which spaces systematically separate instances of deception from instances of honesty
• Trace how specific inputs (e.g., "deception triggers") alter the latent space trajectory of an LLM
• Analyze how generated tokens deviate from the ground truth trajectory to a deception trajectory
• Use high-level representational trajectories to generalize over specific word choices to more general cases of deception
• Determine whether the model uses a single algorithm for different deception cases or if deception is supported by multiple diverse algorithms

3. Implementation Level:

• Trace the specific circuits that selectively activate during deceptive behavior
• Identify circuits that causally contribute to deceptive behavior
• Map out circuits responsible for tracking different kinds of deception-relevant information, such as: a) The true state of the world b) The agent's intention c) The user's current and predicted beliefs
• Use insights from computational and algorithmic levels to guide the search for relevant circuits
• Conversely, use circuit-level findings to refine algorithmic-level hypotheses

The authors emphasize that this multi-level approach allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon:
 

• Computational-level analysis can yield insights for adjusting training and inference procedures.
• Algorithmic-level analysis can reveal how the model generalizes across different instances of deception.
• Implementation-level analysis can pinpoint specific mechanisms that can be targeted for intervention.

They also stress the importance of iterating between levels. For example, computational and algorithmic understanding can guide the search for relevant circuits at the implementation level, while circuit-level findings can help refine higher-level hypotheses.
This example illustrates how adopting a multi-level approach can provide a more holistic and actionable understanding of complex behaviors in AI systems, potentially leading to more effective interventions and improvements in model design.'

An intuition for safety cases for automated safety research over time 

Safety cases - we want to be able to make a (conservative) argument for why a certain AI system won’t e.g. pose x-risk with probability > p / year. Rely on composing safety arguments / techniques into a ‘holistic case’. 

Safety arguments are rated on three measures:

Practicality: ‘Could the argument be made soon or does it require substantial research progress?’ 

Maximum strength: ‘How much confidence could the argument give evaluators that the AI systems are safe?’ 

Scalability: ‘To what extent can the argument be applied to very powerful AI systems?’

Examples of safety arguments (fig. from Safety Cases: How to Justify the Safety of Advanced AI Systems):

Here's an intuition of how to iteratively build safety cases for automated safety research, as AI systems become increasingly capable:

• we want to ‘pile on’ / combine methods which are Practical enough already and not too alignment-tax-costly (e.g. assume a limited budget in e.g. [training and / or inference] compute and / or money and / or researchers), even though they might not be very Scalable (in the long run);
• as time goes by and AIs become more capable, we should expect some of our methods’ Scalability to be ‘outpaced’ by the capabilities of new systems (e.g. maybe they’ll pass [some] DC evals -> we won’t be able to rely on [some] inability arguments anymore);
• we want to be able to use auto safety research to raise the Practicality of methods which are Scalable enough, but not Practical enough yet
  • e.g. unlearning, interpretability (see figure above)
  • we need our auto safety researchers to be [reasonably likely] capable of this, though.

Acknowledgments: early versions of this idea were developed during my participantion in the Astra Fellowship Winter '24 under @evhub [LW · GW]'s mentorship and benefitted from many conversations in Constellation. 

These might be some of the most neglected and most strategically-relevant ideas about AGI futures: Pareto-topian goal alignment and 'Pareto-preferred futures, meaning futures that would be strongly approximately preferred by more or less everyone‘: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lqBra8r468. These futures could be achievable because automation could bring massive economic gains, which, if allocated (reasonably, not-even-necessarily-perfectly) equitably, could make ~everyone much better off (hence the 'strongly approximately preferred by more or less everyone'). I think this discourse could be crucial to incentivize less racing more coordination, including e.g. for pausing at the right time to allow for more AI safety work to get done, yet I'm not seeing it almost anywhere in the public sphere.

I'd be interested in seeing the strongest arguments (e.g. safety-washing?) for why, at this point, one shouldn't collaborate with OpenAI (e.g. not even part-time, for AI safety [evaluations] purposes).

Claude-3 Opus on using advance market committments to incentivize automated AI safety R&D:

'Advance Market Commitments (AMCs) could be a powerful tool to incentivize AI labs to invest in and scale up automated AI safety R&D. Here's a concrete proposal for how AMCs could be structured in this context:

1. Government Commitment: The US government, likely through an agency like DARPA or NSF, would commit to purchasing a certain volume of AI safety tools and technologies that meet pre-specified criteria, at a guaranteed price, if and when they are developed. This commitment would be legally binding.
2. Funding Allocation: A significant pool of funds, on the order of several billion dollars, would be allocated to back these AMCs. The exact amount would be determined based on estimates of the funding needed to meaningfully accelerate AI safety R&D over a 5-10 year time horizon.
3. Clear Technical Criteria: The government would work with AI safety experts and leading labs to establish clear, measurable technical criteria that AI safety tools and technologies must meet to qualify for the AMC. These could include:
   • Ability to automatically detect and mitigate certain classes of AI risks (e.g. robustness issues, unexpected behaviors, reward hacking, scalable oversight failures)
   • Formal verifiability and interpretability of AI systems' reasoning and decision-making
   • Automated generation of comprehensive test suites and monitoring for AI systems
   • Performance on benchmark tasks that evaluate AI safety and robustness
   • Seamless integration with common AI development frameworks and workflows
4. Pricing and Volume Guarantees: For each category of AI safety tech that meets the specified criteria, the government would guarantee a certain price per unit and commit to purchasing a minimum volume. These numbers would be set at levels that meaningfully derisk and subsidize the substantial R&D investment required.
5. Contractual Arrangements: AI labs would enter into binding contracts with the government to develop qualifying technologies. Upon successful development, the government would be obligated to purchase the technologies at the predetermined prices. IP and usage rights would be negotiated upfront.
6. Staged Releases and Readjustment: As AI capabilities advance rapidly, the AMC criteria would be staged over time to incentivize continual progress. Initial qualifying thresholds would target nearer-term safety challenges, with subsequent releases focused on more advanced issues. Pricing and volumes could be readjusted periodically as the technology matures.
7. Open Collaboration and Access: To maximize the public benefit, AMC contracts would stipulate that a substantial portion of the safety IP developed must be made freely available for research use and external validation. Certain core components could be open-sourced. Purchased tools would also be made available to developers and labs beyond the initial partners.
8. International Coordination: While led by the US, efforts would be made to coordinate and collaborate with governments and labs globally. Shared standards and compatible AMCs across regions would amplify the impact. Joint commitments could pool resources and expertise.

The goal of this AMC structure is to create a clear, long-term market pull that shifts the incentives for AI labs and makes large investments in automated AI safety R&D economically attractive and even necessary for competitive positioning. The guaranteed demand would provide greater certainty and help crowd in private capital. Staged, iterative AMCs would support sustained progress and adapt to evolving challenges. Broad access to the resulting safety IP and tools would uplift capabilities across the AI ecosystem.

Alongside other supporting policies and funding mechanisms, AMCs for automated AI safety technology could be a centerpiece of public-private collaboration to ensure advanced AI systems are developed responsibly. Robust market incentives, combined with technical leadership from top labs, could dramatically accelerate the development and deployment of scalable AI safety solutions.'

Conversation with Claude Opus on A Causal Explainable Guardrails for Large Language Models, Discussion: Challenges with Unsupervised LLM Knowledge Discovery [LW · GW] and A Multimodal Automated Interpretability Agent (MAIA). To me it seems surprisingly good at something like coming up with plausible alignment research follow-ups, which e.g. were highlighted here as an important part of the superalignment agenda.

Prompts bolded:

'Summarize 'Causal Explainable Guardrails for Large
Language Models'. In particular, could this be useful to deal with some of the challenges mentioned in 'Discussion: Challenges with Unsupervised LLM Knowledge Discovery'?

The paper "A Causal Explainable Guardrails for Large Language Models" proposes LLMGuardaril, a framework that incorporates causal analysis and adversarial learning to obtain unbiased steering representations in LLMs. Key points:Existing methods for steering LLMs towards desired attributes rely on unbiased representations and steering prompts, but the representations learned from pre-training can introduce semantic biases that negatively impact steering.
LLMGuardaril systematically identifies and blocks the confounding effects of biases, enabling extraction of unbiased steering representations. It also includes an explainable component providing insights into alignment between generated output and desired direction.
Experiments show LLMGuardaril can effectively steer LLMs towards desired attributes while mitigating biases.Regarding the challenges mentioned in "Discussion: Challenges with Unsupervised LLM Knowledge Discovery":One key challenge is distinguishing the model's own knowledge from knowledge of simulated entities. LLMGuardaril aims to disentangle the influence of semantic biases to obtain steering representations capturing desired attributes. This may help identify model's own knowledge if those attributes are specific to the model itself.
Another challenge is the hypothesized existence of many features satisfying consistency properties beyond just the model's knowledge. LLMGuardaril's causal analysis and adversarial learning aims to block confounding semantic biases, potentially reducing the set of candidate knowledge-like features.
Empirically, contrast-consistent search seemed to find prominent arbitrary features rather than knowledge. LLMGuardaril's explainable component could provide insight into whether extracted features actually correspond to model knowledge.

So in summary, while not a complete solution, LLMGuardaril's approach of causally analyzing and debiasing semantic influences may help address some key challenges around identifying model knowledge in an unsupervised way. But significant open questions remain around definitively distinguishing model knowledge from simulated knowledge of other entities. Further research is needed to determine how much traction causal analysis provides on the hardest aspects of the ELK problem.'

'How might MAIA be useful, potentially combined with 'Causal Explainable Guardrails for Large Language Models', to deal with some of the challenges mentioned in 'Discussion: Challenges with Unsupervised LLM Knowledge Discovery'?

MAIA and the techniques from "Causal Explainable Guardrails for Large Language Models" (LLMGuardaril) could potentially be combined to help address some of the challenges mentioned in "Discussion: Challenges with Unsupervised LLM Knowledge Discovery":
 

1. Distinguishing the model's own knowledge from simulated knowledge: One key challenge raised is that consistency-based methods like contrast-consistent search (CCS) may not be able to distinguish an LLM's "own" knowledge from the knowledge of simulated entities the model may be imagining. MAIA's ability to automatically generate hypotheses and design experiments to test them could potentially be used to probe for features that are uniquely characteristic of the model's own knowledge. For example, MAIA could generate synthetic inputs that vary the context in which a piece of knowledge is elicited (e.g. with/without an explicit simulation frame) and test whether the model's responses are consistent.
2. Reducing the set of candidate knowledge-like features: Another challenge is that many features beyond the model's own knowledge may satisfy consistency properties, making it hard to identify the "true" knowledge. LLMGuardaril's technique of causally analyzing the influence of semantic biases on steering representations and using adversarial learning to debias them could potentially be applied by MAIA to narrow down the set of features that robustly encode model knowledge across prompts/contexts. The explainable component of LLMGuardaril could also help MAIA validate whether candidate knowledge features behave as expected.
3. Overcoming the limitations of one-shot probing: Existing automated interpretability approaches are noted to primarily be tools for one-shot hypothesis generation on a limited set of inputs, rather than scalable and fully rigorous causal explanation. MAIA's ability to iteratively refine hypotheses based on experimental outcomes could lead to more robust explanations. Integrating the causal analysis techniques from LLMGuardaril into this iterative process could help rule out spurious hypotheses.
4. Evaluating unsupervised knowledge discovery methods: The paper emphasizes the need for principled testbeds to evaluate the effectiveness of unsupervised knowledge discovery techniques. The synthetic test systems used to quantitatively evaluate MAIA's performance when ground-truth structure is known could potentially be exte'nded to benchmark a wider variety of unsupervised interpretability approaches.

However, significant challenges would likely need to be overcome to fruitfully combine these techniques. For example, MAIA is currently focused on interpreting components of vision models, while LLMGuardaril focuses on steering language models, so unifying them would require bridging this modality gap. More fundamentally, even with access to MAIA's automated experimentation and LLMGuardaril's causal analysis, rigorously identifying an LLM's "own" knowledge in a fully unsupervised way, as opposed to the knowledge of a specific simulated entity, remains an open challenge and likely requires further conceptual breakthroughs. Nonetheless, exploring the intersection of scalable interpretability agents like MAIA and causally grounded analysis techniques like LLMGuardaril seems like a promising direction for future work on the ELK problem.'

I wonder how much near-term interpretability [V]LM agents (e.g. MAIA, AIA) might help with finding better probes and better steering vectors (e.g. by iteratively testing counterfactual hypotheses against potentially spurious features, a major challenge for Contrast-consistent search (CCS) [LW · GW]). 

This seems plausible since MAIA can already find spurious features, and feature interpretability [V]LM agents could have much lengthier hypotheses iteration cycles (compared to current [V]LM agents and perhaps even to human researchers).

I might have updated at least a bit against the weakness of single-forward passes, based on intuitions about the amount of compute that huge context windows (e.g. Gemini 1.5 - 1 million tokens) might provide to a single-forward-pass, even if limited serially.

I've been / am on the lookout for related theoretical results of why grounding a la Grounded language acquisition through the eyes and ears of a single child works (e.g. with contrastive learning methods) - e.g. some recent works: Understanding Transferable Representation Learning and Zero-shot Transfer in CLIP, Contrastive Learning is Spectral Clustering on Similarity Graph, Optimal Sample Complexity of Contrastive Learning; (more speculatively) also how it might intersect with alignment, e.g. if alignment-relevant concepts might be 'groundable' in fMRI data (and then 'pointable to') - e.g. https://medarc-ai.github.io/mindeye/ uses contrastive learning with fMRI - image pairs

This seems pretty good for safety (as RAG is comparatively at least a bit more transparent than fine-tuning): https://twitter.com/cwolferesearch/status/1752369105221333061 

Larger LMs seem to benefit differentially more from tools: 'Absolute performance and improvement-per-turn (e.g., slope) scale with model size.' https://xingyaoww.github.io/mint-bench/. This seems pretty good for safety, to the degree tool usage is often more transparent than model internals.

In my book, this would probably be the most impactful model internals / interpretability project that I can think of: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FbSAuJfCxizZGpcHc/interpreting-the-learning-of-deceit?commentId=qByLyr6RSgv3GBqfB [LW(p) · GW(p)] 

Large scale cyber-attacks resulting from AI misalignment seem hard, I'm at >90% probability that they happen much later (at least years later) than automated alignment research, as long as we *actually try hard* to make automated alignment research work: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bhrKwJE7Ggv7AFM7C/modelling-large-scale-cyber-attacks-from-advanced-ai-systems [EA · GW]. 

I had speculated [LW · GW] previously about links between task arithmetic and activation engineering. I think given all the recent results on in context learning, task/function vectors and activation engineering / their compositionality (In-Context Learning Creates Task Vectors, In-context Vectors: Making In Context Learning More Effective and Controllable Through Latent Space Steering, Function Vectors in Large Language Models), this link is confirmed to a large degree. This might also suggest trying to import improvements to task arithmetic (e.g. Task Arithmetic in the Tangent Space: Improved Editing of Pre-Trained Models, or more broadly look at the citations of the task arithmetic paper) to activation engineering.

(As reply to Zvi's 'If someone was founding a new AI notkilleveryoneism research organization, what is the best research agenda they should look into pursuing right now?')

LLMs seem to represent meaning in a pretty human-like way and this seems likely to keep getting better as they get scaled up, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11863. This could make getting them to follow the commonsense meaning of instructions much easier. Also, similar methodologies to https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11863 could be applied to other alignment-adjacent domains/tasks, e.g. moral reasoning, prosociality, etc.

Step 2: e.g. plug the commonsense-meaning-of-instructions following models into OpenAI's https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment.

Related intuition: turning LLM processes/simulacra into [coarse] emulations of brain processes.

(https://twitter.com/BogdanIonutCir2/status/1677060966540795905)

Sam Altman says AGI is coming in 2025 (and he is also expecting a child next year) https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1854988648745517297 

Hot take: for now, I think it's likelier than not that even fully uncontrolled proliferation of automated ML scientists like https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/ would still be a net differential win for AI safety research progress, for pretty much the same reasons from 
https://beren.io/2023-11-05-Open-source-AI-has-been-vital-for-alignment/….