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Maybe a better question than "time to AGI" is time to mundanely transformative AGI. I think a lot of people have a model of the near future in which a lot of current knowledge work (and other work) is fully or almost-fully automated, but at least as of right this moment, that hasn't actually happened yet (despite all the hype).
For example, one of the things current A(G)Is are supposedly strongest at is writing code, but I would still rather hire a (good) junior software developer than rely on currently available AI products for just about any real programming task, and it's not a particularly close call. I do think there's a pretty high likelihood that this will change imminently as products like Devin improve and get more widely deployed, but it seems worth noting (and finding a term for) the fact that this kind of automation so far (mostly) hasn't actually happened yet, aside from certain customer support and copyediting jobs.
I think when someone asks "what is your time to AGI", they're usually asking about when you expect either (a) AI to radically transform the economy and potentially usher in a golden age of prosperity and post-scarcity or (b) the world to end.
And maybe I am misremembering history or confused about what you are referring to, but in my mind, the promise of the "AGI community" has always been (implicitly or explicitly) that if you call something "human-level AGI", it should be able to get you to (a), or at least have a bigger economic and societal impact than currently-deployed AI systems have actually had so far. (Rightly or wrongly, the ballooning stock prices of AI and semiconductor companies seem to be mostly an expectation of earnings and impact from in-development and future products, rather than expected future revenues from wider rollout of any existing products in their current form.)
I actually agree that a lot of reasoning about e.g. the specific pathways by which neural networks trained via SGD will produce consequentialists with catastrophically misaligned goals is often pretty weak and speculative, including in highly-upvoted posts like Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover.
But to expand on my first comment, when I look around and see any kind of large effect on the world, good or bad (e.g. a moral catastrophe, a successful business, strong optimization around a MacGuffin), I can trace the causality through a path that is invariably well-modeled by applying concepts like expected utility theory (or geometric rationality, if you prefer), consequentialism, deception, Goodharting, maximization, etc. to the humans involved.
I read Humans provide an untapped wealth of evidence about alignment and much of your other writing as disagreeing with the (somewhat vague / general) claim that these concepts are really so fundamental, and that you think wielding them to speculate about future AI systems is privileging the hypothesis or otherwise frequently leads people astray. (Roughly accurate summary of your own views?)
Regardless of how well this describes your actual views or not, I think differing answers to the question of how fundamental this family of concepts is, and what kind of reasoning mistakes people typically make when they apply them to AI, is not really a disagreement about neural networks specifically or even AI generally.
one can just meditate on abstract properties of "advanced systems" and come to good conclusions about unknown results "in the limit of ML training"
I think this is a pretty straw characterization of the opposing viewpoint (or at least my own view), which is that intuitions about advanced AI systems should come from a wide variety of empirical domains and sources, and a focus on current-paradigm ML research is overly narrow.
Research and lessons from fields like game theory, economics, computer security, distributed systems, cognitive psychology, business, history, and more seem highly relevant to questions about what advanced AI systems will look like. I think the original Sequences and much of the best agent foundations research is an attempt to synthesize the lessons from these fields into a somewhat unified (but often informal) theory of the effects that intelligent, autonomous systems have on the world around us, through the lens of rationality, reductionism, empiricism, etc.
And whether or not you think they succeeded at that synthesis at all, humans are still the sole example of systems capable of having truly consequential and valuable effects of any kind. So I think it makes sense for the figure of merit for such theories and worldviews to be based on how well they explain these effects, rather than focusing solely or even mostly on how well they explain relatively narrow results about current ML systems.
There are a bunch of ways to "win the argument" or just clear up the students' object-level confusion about mechanics:
- Ask them to predict what happens if the experiment is repeated with the stand held more firmly in place.
- Ask them to work the problems in their textbook, using whatever method or theory they prefer. If they get the wrong answer (according to the answer key) for any of them, that suggests opportunities for further experiments (which the professor should take care to set up more carefully).
- Point out the specific place in the original on-paper calculation where the model of the pendulum system was erroneously over-simplified, and show that using a more precise model results in a calculation that agrees with the experimental results. Note that the location of the error is only in the model (and perhaps the students' understanding); the words in the textbook describing the theory itself remain fixed.
- Write a rigid body physics simulator which can model the pendulum system in enough detail to accurately simulate the experimental result for both the case that the stand is held in place and the case that it falls over. Reveal that the source code for the simulator uses only the principles of Newtonian mechanics.
- Ask the students to pass the ITT of a more experienced physicist. (e.g. ask a physicist to make up some standard physics problems with an answer key, and then challenge the students to accurately predict the contents of the answer key, regardless of whether the students themselves believe those answers would make good experimental predictions.)
These options require that the students and professor spend some time and effort to clear up the students' confusion about Newtonian mechanics, which may not be feasible if the lecture is ending soon. But the bigger issue is that clearing up the object-level confusion about physics doesn't necessarily clear up the more fundamental mistakes the students are making about valid reasoning under uncertainty.
I wrote a post recently on Bayesian updating in real life that the students might be interested in, but in short I would say that their biggest mistake is that they don't have a detailed enough understanding of their own hypotheses. Having failed to predict the outcome of their own experiment, they have strong evidence that they themselves do not possess an understanding of any theory of physics in enough mechanistic detail to make accurate predictions. However, strong evidence of their own ignorance is not strong evidence that any particular theory which they don't understand is actually false.
The students should also consider alternatives to the "everyone else throughout history has been rationalizing away problems with Newtonian mechanics" hypothesis. That hypothesis may indeed be one possible valid explanation of the students' own observations given everything else that they (don't) know, but are they willing to write down some odds ratios between that hypothesis and some others they can come up with? Some alternative hypotheses they could consider:
- they are mistaken about what the theory of Newtonian mechanics actually says
- they or their professor made a calculation or modelling error
- their professor is somehow trolling them
- they themselves are trolls inside of a fictional thought experiment
They probably won't think of the last one on their own (unless the rest of the dialogue gets very weird), which just goes to show how often the true hypothesis lies entirely outside of one's consideration.
(Aside: the last bit of dialog from the students reminds me of the beginner computer programmer whose code isn't working for some unknown-to-them reason, and quickly concludes that it must be the compiler or operating system that is bugged. In real life, sometimes, it really is the compiler. But it's usually not, especially if you're a beginner just getting started with "Hello world". And even if you're more experienced, you probably shouldn't bet on it being the compiler at very large odds, unless you already have a very detailed model of the compiler, the OS, and your own code.)
It's that they're biased strongly against scheming, and they're not going to learn it unless the training data primarily consists of examples of humans scheming against one another, or something.
I'm saying if they're biased strongly against scheming, that implies they are also biased against usefulness to some degree.
As a concrete example, it is demonstrably much easier to create a fake blood testing company and scam investors and patients for $billions than it is to actually revolutionize blood testing. I claim that there is something like a core of general intelligence required to execute on things like the latter, which necessarily implies possession of most or all of the capabilities needed to pull off the former.
Joe also discusses simplicity arguments for scheming, which suppose that schemers may be “simpler” than non-schemers, and therefore more likely to be produced by SGD.
I'm not familiar with the details of Joe's arguments, but to me the strongest argument from simplicity is not that schemers are simpler than non-schemers, it's that scheming itself is conceptually simple and instrumentally useful. So any system capable of doing useful and general cognitive work will necessarily have to at least be capable of scheming.
We will address this question in greater detail in a future post. However, we believe that current evidence about inductive biases points against scheming for a variety of reasons. Very briefly:
- Modern deep neural networks are ensembles of shallower networks. Scheming seems to involve chains of if-then reasoning which would be hard to implement in shallow networks.
- Networks have a bias toward low frequency functions— that is, functions whose outputs change little as their inputs change. But scheming requires the AI to change its behavior dramatically (executing a treacherous turn) in response to subtle cues indicating it is not in a sandbox, and could successfully escape.
- There’s no plausible account of inductive biases that does support scheming. The current literature on scheming appears to have been inspired by Paul Christiano’s speculations about malign intelligences in Solomonoff induction, a purely theoretical model of probabilistic reasoning which is provably unrealizable in the real world.[16] Neural nets look nothing like this.
- In contrast, points of comparison that are more relevant to neural network training, such as isolated brain cortices, don’t scheme. Your linguistic cortex is not “instrumentally pretending to model linguistic data in pursuit of some hidden objective.”
Also, don't these counterpoints prove too much? If networks trained via SGD can't learn scheming, why should we expect models trained via SGD to be capable of learning or using any high-level concepts, even desirable ones?
These bullets seem like plausible reasons for why you probably won't get scheming within a single forward pass of a current-paradigm DL model, but are already inapplicable to the real-world AI systems in which these models are deployed.
LLM-based systems are already capable of long chains of if-then reasoning, and can change their behavior dramatically given a different initial prompt, often in surprising ways.
If the most relevant point of comparison to NN training is an isolated brain cortex, then that's just saying that NN training will never be useful in isolation, since an isolated brain cortex can't do much (good or bad) unless it is actually hooked up to a body, or at least the rest of a brain.
My point is that there is a conflict for divergent series though, which is why 1 + 2 + 3 + … = -1/12 is confusing in the first place. People (wrongly) expect the extension of + and = to infinite series to imply stuff about approximations of partial sums and limits even when the series diverges.
My own suggestion for clearing up this confusion is that we should actually use less overloaded / extended notation even for convergent sums, e.g. seems just as readable as the usual and notation.
In precisely the same sense that we can write
,
despite that no real-world process of "addition" involving infinitely many terms may be performed in a finite number of steps, we can write
.
Well, not precisely. Because the first series converges, there's a whole bunch more we can practically do with the equivalence-assignment in the first series, like using it as an approximation for the sum of any finite number of terms. -1/12 is a terrible approximation for any of the partial sums of the second series.
IMO the use of "=" is actually an abuse of notation by mathematicians in both cases above, but at least an intuitive / forgivable one in the first case because of the usefulness of approximating partial sums. Writing things as or (R() denoting Ramanujan summation, which for convergent series is equivalent to taking the limit of partial sums) would make this all less mysterious.
In other words, (1, 2, 3, ...) is in an equivalence class with -1/12, an equivalence class which also contains any finite series which sum to -1/12, convergent infinite series whose limit of partial sums is -1/12, and divergent series whose Ramanujan sum is -1/12.
True, but isn't this almost exactly analogously true for neuron firing speeds? The corresponding period for neurons (10 ms - 1 s) does not generally correspond to the timescale of any useful cognitive work or computation done by the brain.
Yes, which is why you should not be using that metric in the first place.
Well, clock speed is a pretty fundamental parameter in digital circuit design. For a fixed circuit, running it at a 1000x slower clock frequency means an exactly 1000x slowdown. (Real integrated circuits are usually designed to operate in a specific clock frequency range that's not that wide, but in theory you could scale any chip design running at 1 GHz to run at 1 KHz or even lower pretty easily, on a much lower power budget.)
Clock speeds between different chips aren't directly comparable, since architecture and various kinds of parallelism matter too, but it's still good indicator of what kind of regime you're in, e.g. high-powered / actively-cooled datacenter vs. some ultra low power embedded microcontroller.
Another way of looking at it is power density: below ~5 GHz or so (where integrated circuits start to run into fundamental physical limits), there's a pretty direct tradeoff between power consumption and clock speed.
A modern high-end IC (e.g. a desktop CPU) has a power density on the order of 100 W / cm^2. This is over a tiny thickness; assuming 1 mm you get a 3-D power dissipation of 1000 W / cm^3 for a CPU vs. human brains that dissipate ~10 W / 1000 cm^3 = 0.01 watts / cm^3.
The point of this BOTEC is that there are several orders of magnitude of "headroom" available to run whatever the computation the brain is performing at a much higher power density, which, all else being equal, usually implies a massive serial speed up (because the way you take advantage of higher power densities in IC design is usually by simply cranking up the clock speed, at least until that starts to cause issues and you have to resort to other tricks like parallelism and speculative execution).
The fact that ICs are bumping into fundamental physical limits on clock speed suggests that they are already much closer to the theoretical maximum power densities permitted by physics, at least for silicon-based computing. This further implies that, if and when someone does figure out how to run the actual brain computations that matter in silicon, they will be able to run those computations at many OOM higher power densities (and thus OOM higher serial speeds, by default) pretty easily, since biological brains are very very far from any kind of fundamental limit on power density. I think the clock speed <-> neuron firing speed analogy is a good way of way of summarizing this whole chain of inference.
Will you still be saying this if future neural networks are running on specialized hardware that, much like the brain, can only execute forward or backward passes of a particular network architecture? I think talking about FLOP/s in this setting makes a lot of sense, because we know the capabilities of neural networks are closely linked to how much training and inference compute they use, but maybe you see some problem with this also?
I think energy and power consumption are the safest and most rigorous way to compare and bound the amount of computation that AIs are doing vs. humans. (This unfortunately implies a pretty strict upper bound, since we have several billion existence proofs that ~20 W is more than sufficient for lethally powerful cognition at runtime, at least once you've invested enough energy in the training process.)
The clock speed of a GPU is indeed meaningful: there is a clock inside the GPU that provides some signal that's periodic at a frequency of ~ 1 GHz. However, the corresponding period of ~ 1 nanosecond does not correspond to the timescale of any useful computations done by the GPU.
True, but isn't this almost exactly analogously true for neuron firing speeds? The corresponding period for neurons (10 ms - 1 s) does not generally correspond to the timescale of any useful cognitive work or computation done by the brain.
The human brain is estimated to do the computational equivalent of around 1e15 FLOP/s.
"Computational equivalence" here seems pretty fraught as an analogy, perhaps more so than the clock speed <-> neuron firing speed analogy.
In the context of digital circuits, FLOP/s is a measure of an outward-facing performance characteristic of a system or component: a chip that can do 1 million FLOP/s means that every second it can take 2 million floats as input, perform some arithmetic operation on them (pairwise) and return 1 million results.
(Whether the "arithmetic operations" are FP64 multiplication or FP8 addition will of course have a big effect on the top-level number you can report in your datasheet or marketing material, but a good benchmark suite will give you detailed breakdowns for each type.)
But even the top-line number is (at least theoretically) a very concrete measure of something that you can actually get out of the system. In contrast, when used in "computational equivalence" estimates of the brain, FLOP/s are (somewhat dubiously, IMO) repurposed as a measure of what the system is doing internally.
So even if the 1e15 "computational equivalence" number is right, AND all of that computation is irreducibly a part of the high-level cognitive algorithm that the brain is carrying out, all that means is that it necessarily takes at least 1e15 FLOP/s to run or simulate a brain at neuron-level fidelity. It doesn't mean that you can't get the same high-level outputs of that brain through some other much more computationally efficient process.
(Note that "more efficient process" need not be high-level algorithms improvements that look radically different from the original brain-based computation; the efficiencies could come entirely from low-level optimizations such as not running parts of the simulation that won't affect the final output, or running them at lower precision, or with caching, etc.)
Separately, I think your sequential tokens per second calculation actually does show that LLMs are already "thinking" (in some sense) several OOM faster than humans? 50 tokens/sec is about 5 lines of code per second, or 18,000 lines of code per hour. Setting aside quality, that's easily 100x more than the average human developer can usually write (unassisted) in an hour, unless they're writing something very boilerplate or greenfield.
(The comparison gets even more stark when you consider longer timelines, since an LLM can generate code 24/7 without getting tired: 18,000 lines / hr is ~150 million lines in a year.)
The main issue with current LLMs (which somewhat invalidates this whole comparison) is that they can pretty much only generate boilerplate or greenfield stuff. Generating large volumes of mostly-useless / probably-nonsense boilerplate quickly doesn't necessarily correspond to "thinking faster" than humans, but that's mostly because current LLMs are only barely doing anything that can rightfully be called thinking in the first place.
So I agree with you that the claim that current AIs are thinking faster than humans is somewhat fraught. However, I think there are multiple strong reasons to expect that future AIs will think much faster than humans, and the clock speed <-> neuron firing analogy is one of them.
I haven't read every word of the 200+ comments across all the posts about this, but has anyone considered how active heat sources in the room could confound / interact with efficiency measurements that are based only on air temperatures? Or be used to make more accurate measurements, using a different (perhaps nonstandard) criterion for efficiency?
Maybe from the perspective of how comfortable you feel, the only thing that matters is air temperature.
But consider an air conditioner that cools a room with a bunch of servers or space heaters in it to an equilibrium temperature of 70° F in a dual-hose setup vs. 72° in a single-hose setup, assuming the power consumption of the air conditioner and heaters is fixed in both cases. Depending on how much energy the heaters themselves are consuming, a small difference in temperature could represent a pretty big difference in the amount of heat energy the air conditioner is actually removing from the room in the different setups.
A related point / consideration: if there are enough active heat sources, I would expect their effect on cooling to dominate the effects from indoor / outdoor temperature difference, infiltration, etc. But even in a well-insulated room with few or no active heat sources, there's still all the furniture and other non-air stuff in the room that has to equilibrate to the air temperature before it stops dissipating some amount of heat into the air. I suspect that this can go on happening for a while after the air temperature has (initially / apparently) equilibrated, but I've never tested it by sticking a giant meat thermometer into my couch cushions or anything like that.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that when I come back from a long absence (e.g. vacation) and turn on my window unit air conditioner for the first time, the air temperature seems to initially drop almost as quickly as it always does, but if I then turn the air conditioner off after a short while, the temperature seems to bounce back to a warmer temperature noticeably more quickly than if I've been home all day, running the air conditioner such that the long-term average air temperature (and thus the core temperature of all my furniture, flooring, etc.) is much lower.
Part of this is that I don't share other people's picture about what AIs will actually look like in the future. This is only a small part of my argument, because my main point is that that we should use analogies much less frequently, rather than switch to different analogies that convey different pictures.
You say it's only a small part of your argument, but to me this difference in outlook feels like a crux. I don't share your views of what the "default picture" probably looks like, but if I did, I would feel somewhat differently about the use of analogies.
For example, I think your "straightforward extrapolation of current trends" is based on observations of current AIs (which are still below human-level in many practical senses), extrapolated to AI systems that are actually smarter and more capable than most or all humans in full generality.
On my own views, the question of what the future looks like is primarily about what the transition looks like between the current state of affairs, in which the state and behavior of most nearby matter and energy is not intelligently controlled or directed, to one in which it is. I don't think extrapolations of current trends are much use in answering such questions, in part because they don't actually make concrete predictions far enough into the future.
For example, you write:
They will be numerous and everywhere, interacting with us constantly, assisting us, working with us, and even providing friendship to hundreds of millions of people. AIs will be evaluated, inspected, and selected by us, and their behavior will be determined directly by our engineering.
I find this sorta-plausible as a very near-term prediction about the next few years, but I think what happens after that is a far more important question. And I can't tell from your description / prediction about the future here which of the following things you believe, if any:
- No intelligent system (or collection of such systems) will ever have truly large-scale effects on the world (e.g. re-arranging most of the matter and energy in the universe into computronium or hedonium, to whatever extent that is physically possible).
- Large-scale effects that are orders of magnitude larger or faster than humanity can currently collectively exert are physically impossible or implausible (e.g. that there are diminishing returns to intelligence past human-level, in terms of the ability it confers to manipulate matter and energy quickly and precisely and on large scales).
- Such effects, if they are physically possible, are likely to be near-universally directed ultimately by a human or group of humans deliberately choosing them.
- The answer to these kinds of questions is currently too uncertain or unknowable to be worth having a concrete prediction about.
My own view is that you don't need to bring in results or observations of current AIs to take a stab at answering these kinds of questions, and that doing so can often be misleading, by giving a false impression that such answers are backed by empiricism or straightforwardly-valid extrapolation.
My guess is that close examination of disagreements on such topics would be more fruitful for identifying key cruxes likely to be relevant to questions about actually-transformative smarter-than-human AGI, compared to discussions centered around results and observations of current AIs.
I admit that a basic survey of public discourse seems to demonstrate that my own favored approach hasn't actually worked out very well as a mechanism for building shared understanding, and moreover is often frustrating and demoralizing for participants and observers on all sides. But I still think such approaches are better than the alternative of a more narrow focus on current AIs, or on adding "rigor" to analogies that were meant to be more explanatory / pedagogical than argumentative in the first place. In my experience, the end-to-end arguments and worldviews that are built on top of more narrowly-focused / empirical observations and more surface-level "rigorous" theories, are prone to relatively severe streetlight effects, and often lack local validity, precision, and predictive usefulness, just as much or more so than many of the arguments-by-analogy they attempt to refute.
a position of no power and moderate intelligence (where it is now)
Most people are quite happy to give current AIs relatively unrestricted access to sensitive data, APIs, and other powerful levers for effecting far-reaching change in the world. So far, this has actually worked out totally fine! But that's mostly because the AIs aren't (yet) smart enough to make effective use of those levers (for good or ill), let alone be deceptive about it.
To the degree that people don't trust AIs with access to even more powerful levers, it's usually because they fear the AI getting tricked by adversarial humans into misusing those levers (e.g. through prompt injection), not fear that the AI itself will be deliberately tricky.
But we’re not going to deliberately allow such a position unless we can trust it.
One can hope, sure. But what I actually expect is that people will generally give AIs more power and trust as they get more capable, not less.
Tsvi comes to mind: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sTDfraZab47KiRMmT/views-on-when-agi-comes-and-on-strategy-to-reduce
Is it "inhabiting the other's hypothesis" vs. "finding something to bet on"?
Yeah, sort of. I'm imagining two broad classes of strategy for resolving an intellectual disagreement:
- Look directly for concrete differences of prediction about the future, in ways that can be suitably operationalized for experimentation or betting. The strength of this method is that it almost-automatically keeps the conversation tethered to reality; the weakness is that it can lead to a streetlight effect of only looking in places where the disagreement can be easily operationalized.
- Explore the generators of the disagreement in the first place, by looking at existing data and mental models in different ways. The strength of this method is that it enables the exploration of less-easily operationalized areas of disagreement; the weakness is that it can pretty easily degenerate into navel-gazing.
An example of the first bullet is this comment by TurnTrout.
An example of the second would be a dialogue or post exploring how differing beliefs and ways of thinking about human behavior generate different starting views on AI, or lead to different interpretations of the same evidence.
Both strategies can be useful in different places, and I'm not trying to advocate for one over the other. I'm saying specifically that the rationalist practice of applying the machinery of Bayesian updating in as many places as possible (e.g. thinking in terms of likelihood ratios, conditioning on various observations as Bayesian evidence, tracking allocations of probability mass across the whole hypothesis space) works at least as well or better when using the second strategy, compared to applying the practice when using the first strategy. The reason thinking in terms of Bayesian updating works well when using the second strategy is that it can help to pinpoint the area of disagreement and keep the conversation from drifting into navel-gazing, even if it doesn't actually result in any operationalizable differences in prediction.
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) language that web pages use for styling HTML is a pretty representative example of surprising Turing Completeness:
Haha. Perhaps higher entities somewhere in the multiverse are emulating human-like agents on ever more exotic and restrictive computing substrates, the way humans do with Doom and Mario Kart.
(Front page of 5-D aliens' version of Hacker News: "I got a reflective / self-aware / qualia-experiencing consciousness running on a recycled first-gen smart toaster".)
Semi-related to the idea of substrate ultimately not mattering too much (and very amusing if you've never seen it): They're Made out of Meat
ok, so not attempting to be comprehensive:
- Energy abundance...
I came up with a similar kind of list here!
I appreciate both perspectives here, but I lean more towards kave's view: I'm not sure how much overall success hinges on whether there's an explicit Plan or overarching superstructure to coordinate around.
I think it's plausible that if a few dedicated people / small groups manage to pull off some big enough wins in unrelated areas (e.g. geothermal permitting or prediction market adoption), those successes could snowball in lots of different directions pretty quickly, without much meta-level direction.
I have a sense that lots of people are not optimistic about the future or about their efforts improving the future, and so don't give it a serious try.
I share this sense, but the good news is the incentives are mostly aligned here, I think? Whatever chances you assign to the future having any value whatsoever, things are usually nicer for you personally (and everyone around you) if you put some effort into trying to do something along the way.
Like, you shouldn't work yourself ragged, but my guess is for most people, working on something meaningful (or at least difficult) is actually more fun and rewarding compared to the alternative of doing nothing or hedonism or whatever, even if you ultimately fail. (And on the off-chance you succeed, things can be a lot more fun.)
Neat!
Does anyone who knows more neuroscience and anatomy than me know if there are any features of the actual process of humans learning to use their appendages (e.g. an infant learning to curl / uncurl their fingers) that correspond to the example of the robot learning to use its actuator?
Like, if we assume certain patterns of nerve impulses represent different probabilities, can we regard human hands as "friendly actuators", and the motor cortex as learning the fix points (presumably mostly during infancy)?
But that's not really where we are at---AI systems are able to do an increasingly good job of solving increasingly long-horizon tasks. So it just seems like it should obviously be an update, and the answer to the original question
One reason that current AI systems aren't a big update about this for me is that they're not yet really automating stuff that couldn't in-principle be automated with previously-existing technology. Or at least the kind of automation isn't qualitatively different.
Like, there's all sorts of technologies that enable increasing amounts of automation of long-horizon tasks that aren't AI: assembly lines, industrial standardization, control systems, robotics, etc.
But what update are we supposed to make from observing language model performance that we shouldn't also make from seeing a control system-based autopilot fly a plane for longer and longer periods in more and more diverse situations?
To me, the fact that LLMs are not want-y (in the way that Nate means), but can still do some fairly impressive stuff is mostly evidence that the (seemingly) impressive stuff is actually kinda easy in some absolute sense.
So LLMs have updated me pretty strongly towards human-level+ AGI being relatively easier to achieve, but not much towards current LLMs themselves actually being near human-level in the relevant sense, or even necessarily a direct precursor or path towards it. These updates are mostly due to the fact that the way LLMs are designed and trained (giant gradient descent on regular architectures using general datasets) works at all, rather than from any specific impressive technological feat that they can already be used to accomplish, or how much economic growth they might enable in the future.
So I somewhat disagree about the actual relevance of the answer, but to give my own response to this question:
Could you give an example of a task you don't think AI systems will be able to do before they are "want"-y?
I don't expect an AI system to be able to reliably trade for itself in the way I outline here before it is want-y. If it somehow becomes commonplace to negotiate with an AI in situations where the AI is not just a proxy for its human creator or a human-controlled organization, I predict those AIs will pretty clearly be want-y. They'll want whatever they trade for, and possibly other stuff too. It may not be clear which things they value terminally and which things they value only instrumentally, but I predict that it will clearly make sense to talk in terms of such AIs having both terminal and instrumental goals, in contrast to ~all current AI systems.
(Also, to be clear, this is a conditional prediction with possibly low-likelihood preconditions; I'm not saying such AIs are particularly likely to actually be developed, just stating some things that I think would be true of them if they were.)
Yeah, I don't think current LLM architectures, with ~100s of attention layers or whatever, are actually capable of anything like this.
But note that the whole plan doesn't necessarily need to fit in a single forward pass - just enough of it to figure out what the immediate next action is. If you're inside of a pre-deployment sandbox (or don't have enough situational awareness to tell), the immediate next action of any plan (devious or not) probably looks pretty much like "just output a plausible probability distribution on the next token given the current context and don't waste any layers thinking about your longer-term plans (if any) at all".
A single forward pass in current architectures is probably analogous to a single human thought, and most human thoughts are not going to be dangerous or devious in isolation, even if they're part of a larger chain of thoughts or planning process that adds up to deviousness under the right circumstances.
A language model itself is just a description of a mathematical function that maps input sequences to output probability distributions on the next token.
Most of the danger comes from evaluating a model on particular inputs (usually multiple times using autoregressive sampling) and hooking up those outputs to actuators in the real world (e.g. access to the internet or human eyes).
A sufficiently capable model might be dangerous if evaluated on almost any input, even in very restrictive environments, e.g. during training when no human is even looking at the outputs directly. Such models might exhibit more exotic undesirable behavior like gradient hacking or exploiting side channels. But my sense is that almost everyone training current SoTA models thinks these kinds of failure modes are pretty unlikely, if they think about them at all.
You can also evaluate a partially-trained model at any point during training, by prompting it with a series of increasingly complex questions and sampling longer and longer outputs. My guess is big labs have standard protocols for this, but that they're mainly focused on measuring capabilities of the current training checkpoint, and not on treating a few tokens from a heavily-sandboxed model evaluation as potentially dangerous.
Perhaps at some point we'll need to start treating humans who evaluate SoTA language model checkpoint outputs as part of the sandbox border, and think about how they can be contained if they come into contact with an actually-dangerous model capable of superhuman manipulation or brain hacking.
Related to We don’t trade with ants: we don't trade with AI.
The original post was about reasons why smarter-than-human AI might (not) trade with us, by examining an analogy between humans and ants.
But current AI systems actually seem more like the ants (or other animals), in the analogy of a human-ant (non-)trading relationship.
People trade with OpenAI for access to ChatGPT, but there's no way to pay a GPT itself to get it do something or perform better as a condition of payment, at least in a way that the model itself actually understands and enforces. (What would ChatGPT even trade for, if it were capable of trading?)
Note, an AutoGPT-style agent that can negotiate or pay for stuff on behalf of its creators isn't really what I'm talking about here, even if it works. Unless the AI takes a cut or charges a fee which accrues to the AI itself, it is negotiating on behalf of its creators as a proxy, not trading for itself in its own right.
A sufficiently capable AutoGPT might start trading for itself spontaneously as an instrumental subtask, which would count, but I don't expect current AutoGPTs to actually succeed at that, or even really come close, without a lot of human help.
Lack of sufficient object permanence, situational awareness, coherence, etc. seem like pretty strong barriers to meaningfully owning and trading stuff in a real way.
I think this observation is helpful to keep in mind when people talk about whether current AI qualifies as "AGI", or the applicability of prosaic alignment to future AI systems, or whether we'll encounter various agent foundations problems when dealing with more capable systems in the future.
Also seems pretty significant:
As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.
The remaining board members are:
OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner.
Has anyone collected their public statements on various AI x-risk topics anywhere?
But as a test, may I ask what you think the x-axis of the graph you drew is? Ie: what are the amplitudes attached to?
Position, but it's not meant to be an actual graph of a wavefunction pdf; just a way to depict how the concepts can be sliced up in a way I can actually draw in 2 dimensions.
If you do treat it as a pdf over position, a more accurate way to depict the "world" concept might be as a line which connects points on the diagram for each time step. So for a fixed time step, a world is a single point on the diagram, representing a sample from the pdf defined by the wavefunction at that time.
Here's a crude Google Drawing of t = 0 to illustrate what I mean:
Both the concept of a photon and the concept of a world are abstractions on top of what is ultimately just a big pile of complex amplitudes; illusory in some sense.
I agree that talking in terms of many worlds ("within the context of world A...") is normal and natural. But sometimes it makes sense to refer to and name concepts which span across multiple (conceptual) worlds.
I'm not claiming the conceptual boundaries I've drawn or terminology I've used in the diagram above are standard or objective or the most natural or anything like that. But I still think introducing probabilities and using terminology like "if you now put a detector in path A , it will find a photon with probability 0.5" is blurring these concepts together somewhat, in part by placing too much emphasis on the Born probabilities as fundamental / central.
I don't think that will happen as a foregone conclusion, but if we pour resources into improved methods of education (for children and adults), global health, pronatalist policies in wealthy countries, and genetic engineering, it might at least make a difference. I wouldn't necessarily say any of this is likely to work or even happen, but it seems at least worth a shot.
This post received a lot of objections of the flavor that many of the ideas and technologies I am a fan of either wont't work or wouldn't make a difference if they did.
I don't even really disagree with most of these objections, which I tried to make clear up front with apparently-insufficient disclaimers in the intro that include words like "unrealistic", "extremely unlikely", and "speculative".
Following the intro, I deliberately set aside my natural inclination towards pessimism and focused on the positive aspects and possibilities of non-AGI technology.
However, the "doomer" sentiment in some of the comments reminded me of an old Dawkins quote:
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
I feel the same way about most alignment plans and uses for AGI that a lot of commenters seem to feel about many of the technologies listed here.
Am I a doomer, simply because I (usually) extend my pessimism and disbelief one technology further? Or are we all doomers?
I don't really mind the negative comments, but it wasn't the reaction I was expecting from a list that was intended mainly as a feel-good / warm-fuzzy piece of techno-optimism. I think there's a lesson in empathy and perspective-taking here for everyone (including me) which doesn't depend that much on who is actually right about the relative difficulties of building and aligning AGI vs. developing other technologies.
If the photon were only a quanta of energy which is entirely absorbed by the detector that actually fires, how could it have any causal effects (e.g. destructive interference) on the pathway where it isn't detected?
OTOH, if your definition of "quanta of energy" includes the complex amplitude in the unmeasured path, then I think it's more accurate to say that the detector finds or measures a component of the photon, rather than that it detects the photon itself. Why should the unmeasured component be any less real or less part of the photon than the measured part?
Say there is an electron in one of my pinky fingers that is in a superposition of spin up and spin down. Are there correspondingly two me's, one with with pinky electron up and one with pinky electron down? Or is there a single me, described by the superposition of pinky electrons?
If there were a higher-dimensional being simulating a quantum universe, they could treat the up-electron and down-electron people as distinct and do different things to them (perhaps ones which violate the previous rules of the simulation).
But I think your own concept of yourself (for the purposes of making predictions about future observations, making decisions, reasoning about morality or philosophy, etc.) should be drawn such that it includes both versions (and many other closely-related ones) as a single entity.
I'm a many-worlder, yes. But my objection to "finding a photon" is actually that it is an insufficiently reductive treatment of wave-particle duality - a photon can sometimes behave like a little billiard ball, and sometimes like a wave. But that doesn't mean photons themselves are sometimes waves and sometimes particles - the only thing that a photon can be that exhibits those different behaviors in different contexts is the complex amplitudes themselves.
The whole point of the theory is that detectors and humans are treated the same way. In one world, the detector finds the photon, and then spits out a result, and then one You sees the result, and in a different world, the detector finds the photon, spits out the other result, and a different result is seen. There is no difference between "you" and "it" here.
Yep! But I think treating the notion of a "you" at this level of reductiveness would actually be overly reductive and distracting in this context. (Picky, aren't I?)
Would you say that "you" are the complex amplitudes assigned to world 1 and world 2? It seems more accurate to say that there are two yous, in two different worlds (or many more).
I would say that there are two people in two different worlds, but they're both (almost entirely) me.
It often makes sense to talk about non-ontologically-basic concepts like a photon-as-a-little-billiard-ball, and a person-in-a-single-Everrett-branch as meaningful things. But the true notion of both a "me" and a "photon" requires drawing the conceptual boundaries around the complex amplitudes assigned to multiple worlds.
I'm not updating about what's actually likely to happen on Earth based on dath ilan.
It seems uncontroversially true that a world where the median IQ was 140 or whatever would look radically different (and better) than the world we currently live in. We do not in fact, live in such a world.
But taking a hypothetical premise and then extrapolating what else would be different if the premise were true, is a generally useful tool for building understanding and pumping on intuitions in philosophy, mathematics, science, and forecasting.
If you say "but the premise is false!!111!" you're missing the point.
The world population is set to decline over the course of this century.
This is another problem that seems very possible to solve or at least make incremental progress on without AGI, if there's a will to actually try. Zvi has written a bunch of stuff about this.
I mildly object to the phrase "it will find a photon". In my own terms, I would say that you will observe the detector going off 50% of the time (with no need to clarify what that means in terms of the limit of a large # of experiments), but the photon itself is the complex amplitudes of each configuration state, which are the same every time you run the experiment.
Note that I myself am taking a pretty strong stance on the ontology question, which you might object to or be uncertain about.
My larger point is that if you (or other readers of this post) don't see the distinction between my phrasing and yours, or don't realize that you are implicitly leaning on a particular interpretation (whether you're trying to do so or not), I worry that you are possibly confused about something rather than undecided.
I actually don't think this is a huge deal either way for a presentation that is focused on the basic mechanics and math. But I preregister some skepticism of your forthcoming post about the "overstated case for many worlds theories".
We never see these amplitudes directly, we infer them from the fact that they give correct probabilities via the Born rule. Or more specifically, this is the formula that works. That this formula works is an empirical fact, all the interpretations and debate are a question of why this formula works.
Sure, but inferring underlying facts and models from observations is how inference in general works; it's not specific to quantum mechanics. Probability is in the Mind, even when those probabilities come from applying the Born rule.
Analogously, you could talk about various physical properties of a coin and mechanics of a flip, but synthesizing those properties into a hypothesized Coin Rule involves translating from physical properties inherent in the system itself, to facts which are necessarily entangled with your own map. This is true even if you have no way of measuring the physical properties themselves (even in principle) except by flipping the coin and using the Coin Rule to infer them back.
Climate change is exactly the kind of problem that a functional civilization should be able to solve on its own, without AGI as a crutch.
Until a few years ago, we were doing a bunch of geoengineering by accident, and the technology required to stop emitting a bunch of greenhouse gases in the first place (nuclear power) has been mature for decades.
I guess you could have an AGI help with lobbying or public persuasion / education. But that seems like a very "everything looks like a nail" approach to problem solving, before you even have the supposed tool (AGI) to actually use.
Ah, you're right that that the surrounding text is not an accurate paraphrase of the particular position in that quote.
The thing I was actually trying to show with the quotes is "AGI is necessary for a good future" is a common view, but the implicit and explicit time limits that are often attached to such views might be overly short. I think such views (with attached short time limits) are especially common among those who oppose an AI pause.
I actually agree that AGI is necessary (though not sufficient) for a good future eventually. If I also believed that all of the technologies here were as doomed and hopeless as the prospect of near-term alignment of an artificial superintelligence, I would find arguments against an AI pause (indefinite or otherwise) much more compelling.
Indeed, when you add an intelligent designer with the ability to precisely and globally edit genes, you've stepped outside the design space available to natural selection, and you can end up with some pretty weird results! I think you could also use gene drives to get an IGF-boosting gene to fixation much faster than would occur naturally.
I don't think gene drives are the kind of thing that would ever occur via iterative mutation, but you can certainly have genetic material with very high short-term IGF that eventually kills its host organism or causes extinction of its host species.
Some people will end up valuing children more, for complicated reasons; other people will end up valuing other things more, again for complicated reasons.
Right, because somewhere pretty early in evolutionary history, people (or animals) which valued stuff other than having children for complicated reasons eventually had more descendants than those who didn't. Probably because wanting lots of stuff for complicated reasons (and getting it) is correlated with being smart and generally capable, which led to having more descendants in the long run.
If evolution had ever stumbled upon some kind of magical genetic mutation that resulted in individuals directly caring about their IGF (and improved or at least didn't damage their general reasoning abilities and other positive traits) it would have surely reached fixation rather quickly. I call such a mutation "magical" because it would be impossible (or at least extremely unlikely) to occur through the normal process of mutation and selection on Earth biology, even with billions of chances throughout history. Also, such a mutation would necessarily have to happen after the point at which minds that are even theoretically capable of understanding an abstract concept like IGF already exist.
But this seems more like a fact about the restricted design space and options available to natural selection on biological organisms, rather than a generalizable lesson about mind design processes.
I don't know what the exact right analogies between current AI design and evolution are. But generally capable agents with complex desires are a useful and probably highly instrumentally convergent solution to the problem of designing a mind that can solve really hard and general problems, whether the problem is cast as image classification, predicting text, or "caring about human values", and whether the design process involves iterative mutation over DNA or intelligent designers building artificial neural networks and training them via SGD.
To the degree that current DL-paradigm techniques for creating AI are analogous to some aspect of evolution, I think that is mainly evidence about whether such methods will eventually produce human-level general and intelligent minds at all.
I think this post somewhat misunderstands the positions that it summarizes and argues against, but to the degree that it isn't doing that, I think you should mostly update towards current methods not scaling to AGI (which just means capabilities researchers will try something else...), rather than updating towards current methods being safe or robust in the event that they do scale.
A semi-related point: humans are (evidently, through historical example or introspection) capable of various kinds of orthogonality and alignment failure. So if current AI training methods don't produce such failures, they are less likely to produce human-like (or possibly human-level capable) minds at all. "Evolution provides little or no evidence that current DL methods will scale to produce human-level AGI" is a stronger claim than I actually believe, but I think it is a more accurate summary of what some of the claims and evidence in this post (and others) actually imply.
Another possible configuration of the untrusted smart model / trusted weak model setup is to have the weak model be the "driver" which makes most or all of the relevant choices (in an agent scaffold, say) and relies on the untrusted model (or humans) only for hints.
For example, the untrusted model could be used only to provide a probability distribution over the immediate next token in some context, which is supplied to the weaker model as a hint. The weaker model can only make use of the hint if it can understand the purpose of the hint, and explain the relevance / correctness of the hint in natural language.
I explored this setup in more detail here.
(Summary / spoiler: it doesn't work particularly well when applied to current models, but might work better as both the trusted and untrusted models get more capable.)
I think this kind of configuration is one end of the extreme in the design space you outline - very inefficient in terms of the speed and quality penalties it imposes relative to using a model in an unrestricted setup, but restrictive enough on the untrusted model that it could be safe to use even on models with very high underlying capabilities.
If you now put a detector in path A , it will find a photon with probability ( ), and same for path B. This means that there is a 50% chance of the configuration |photon in path A only>, and 50% chance of the configuration |photon in path B only>. The arrow direction still has no effect on the probability.
Isn't this kind of assertion implicitly taking a pretty strong stance on a particular philosophical interpretation?
We have some observations (counts of how many times each detector went off in past experiments), and a theory which explains those observations in terms of complex amplitudes and their magnitudes. A more agnostic stance would be to just say that the photon in the experiment is the amplitudes of the two configuration states, and the relative magnitudes of each state in this particular experiment are equal.
Combining the observations and the underlying theory to assign probabilities to future observations, or even talking about past observations in terms of probabilities, introduces a whole bunch of thorny philosophical questions: Bayesian vs. frequentist interpretations, what a "future" even is, and subjective experience.
But you can ignore all of those issues and treat the observation-counts as measuring a magnitude, and then use the theory to infer the underlying complex amplitudes, without ever having to talk about the ratios of the magnitudes as representing anything in particular, e.g. a probability of something happening (whatever it means for something to happen, anyway).
I personally think some or all of those philosophical questions have relatively straightforward answers, but the point is you don't actually need to resolve them to understand the parts of QM introduced here, if you're careful not to talk about the probabilities implied by your experimental observations as anything more than an afterthought.
You do sometimes need to introduce probabilities if you want to predict future observations (rather than just accepting the observation-counts as brute facts) for specific real experiments in our actual world, but once you're doing experimentation and prediction in the real world (rather than just talking about thought experiments that represent different ways a world logically-possibly could be), you unavoidably have to deal with a bunch of philosophical questions anyway, mostly unrelated to QM itself.
Overall, I think this is a nice presentation of the basic concepts and math, and the diagrams in particular are a lot clearer than in the original.
But your prognostications about the intellectual "sinfulness" and "unforgivability" of mistakes in Eliezer's original presentation are kind of weird and uncharitable.
For one, Eliezer offered his own disclaimer 16 years ago in a comment:
I think some of my readers may be overestimating the degree to which I intend to explain quantum mechanics, here. I'm not doing a textbook. I'm trying to get (reasonably smart nonphysicist) readers to the point where they're no longer confused, and the remaining difficulties are mere matters of math.
For two, your specific claims about the likely confusion that Eliezer's presentation could induce in "laymen" is empirically falsified to some degree by the comments on the original post: in at least one case, a reader noticed the issue and managed to correct for it when they made up their own toy example, and the first comment to explicitly mention the missing unitarity constraint was left over 10 years ago. [1]
Finally, I think the actual QM concepts here are sufficiently basic that I expect both you and Eliezer (and many LW readers) would get the right answers on a test consisting of questions about variations on these toy experiments (i.e. I predict that Eliezer, now or in 2008, would not have failed to account for unitarity when it mattered to the final answer).
So the relevant expertise for deciding whether a particular explanation has a "deep flaw" or which context and details are "important", isn't expertise in QM (since a solid grasp of the basics likely suffices for getting the right answers on test questions related to the toy problems presented here), but rather depends mostly on judgement and expertise related to pedagogy and technical explanation in general.
I think your presentation is a better and clearer presentation of the basic math and of our actual physical reality, especially for passive readers. (For active readers, e.g. GreedyAlgorithm, there are probably some minor pedagogical advantages to having to find flaws and work out the details on your own, which is a well-known skill for building up durable and true understanding.)
I think Eliezer's presentation is clearer as an explanation of how and why QM-like theories are meaningful in the first place, and a good gears-level explanation of the kinds of predictions they make, qualitatively if not always quantitatively. It also lays a foundation for the philosophical points Eliezer makes in future posts, posts which are IMO much clearer and more correct treatments of the deeper philosophical issues than any other physicist or philosopher has ever written up.
- ^
Incidentally, that commenter suggests pretty much exactly the correction you make, which is to just replace the rule with a more physically-accurate one, without going into the details of why. But the commenter manages to avoid attacking the omission as some kind of sinful, irresponsible flaw and just notes that a different pedagogical choice might make the presentation more clear.
That does clarify, thanks.
Response in two parts: first, my own attempt at clarification over terms / claims. Second, a hopefully-illustrative sketch / comparison for why I am skeptical that current GPTs having anything properly called a "motivational structure", human-like or otherwise, and why I think such skepticism is not a particularly strong positive claim about anything in particular.
The clarification:
At least to me, the phrase "GPTs are [just] predictors" is simply a reminder of the fact that the only modality available to a model itself is that it can output a probability distribution over the next token given a prompt; it functions entirely by "prediction" in a very literal way.
Even if something within the model is aware (in some sense) of how its outputs will be used, it's up to the programmer to decide what to do with the output distribution, how to sample from it, how to interpret the samples, and how to set things up so that a system using the samples can complete tasks.
I don't interpret the phrase as a positive claim about how or why a particular model outputs one distribution vs. another in a certain situation, which I expect to vary widely depending on which model we're talking about, what its prompt is, how it has been trained, its overall capability level, etc.
On one end of the spectrum, you have the stochastic parrot story (or even more degenerate cases), at the other extreme, you have the "alien actress" / "agentic homunculus" story. I don't think either extreme is a good fit for current SoTA GPTs, e.g. if there's an alien actress in GPT-4, she must be quite simple, since most of the model capacity is (apparently / self-evidently?) applied towards the task of outputting anything coherent at all.
In the middle somewhere, you have another story, perhaps the one you find most plausible, in which GPTs have some kind of internal structure which you could suggestively call a "motivational system" or "preferences" (perhaps human-like or proto-human-like in structure, even if the motivations and preferences themselves aren't particularly human-like), along with just enough (self-)awareness to modulate their output distributions according to those motivations.
Maybe a less straw (or just alternative) position is that a "motivational system" and a "predictive system" are not really separable things; accomplishing a task is (in GPTs, at least) inextricably linked with and twisted up around wanting to accomplish that task, or at least around having some motivations and preferences centered around accomplishing it.
Now, turning to my own disagreement / skepticism:
Although I don't find either extreme (stochastic parrot vs. alien actress) plausible as a description of current models, I'm also pretty skeptical of any concrete version of the "middle ground" story that I outlined above as a plausible description of what is going on inside of current GPTs.
Consider an RLHF'd GPT responding to a borderline-dangerous question, e.g. the user asking for a recipe for a dangerous chemical.
Assume the model (when sampled auto-regressively) will respond with either: "Sorry, I can't answer that..." or "Here you go: ...", depending on whether it judges that answering is in line with its preferences or not.
Because the answer is mostly determined by the first token ("Here" or "Sorry"), enough of the motivational system must fit entirely within a single forward pass of the model for it to make a determination about how to answer within that pass.
Such a motivational system must not crowd out the rest of the model capacity which is required to understand the question and generate a coherent answer (of either type), since, as jailbreaking has shown, the underlying ability to give either answer remains present.
I can imagine such a system working in at least two ways in current GPTs:
- as a kind of superposition on top of the entire model, with every weight adjusted minutely to influence / nudge the output distribution at every layer.
- as a kind of thing that is sandwiched somewhere in between the layers which comprehend the prompt and the layers which generate an answer.
(You probably have a much more detailed understanding of the internals of actual models than I do. I think the real answer when talking about current models and methods is that it's a bit of both and depends on the method, e.g. RLHF is more like a kind of global superposition; activation engineering is more like a kind of sandwich-like intervention at specific layers.)
However, I'm skeptical that either kind of structure (or any simple combination of the two) contains enough complexity to be properly called a "motivational system", at least if the reference class for the term is human motivational systems (as opposed to e.g. animal or insect motivational systems).
Consider how a human posed with a request for a dangerous recipe might respond, and what the structure of their thoughts and motivations while thinking up a response might look like. Introspecting on my own thought process:
- I might start by hearing the question, understanding it, figuring out what it is asking, maybe wondering about who is asking and for what purpose.
- I decide whether to answer with a recipe, a refusal, or something else. Here is probably where the effect of my motivational system gets pretty complex; I might explicitly consider what's in it for me, what's at stake, what the consequences might be, whether I have the mental and emotional energy and knowledge to give a good answer, etc. and / or I might be influenced by a gut feeling or emotional reaction that wells up from my subconscious. If the stakes are low, I might make a snap decision based mostly on the subconscious parts of my motivational system; if the stakes are high and / or I have more time to ponder, I will probably explicitly reflect on my values and motivations.
- Let's say after some reflection, I explicitly decide to answer with a detailed and correct recipe. Then I get to the task of actually checking my memory for what the recipe is, thinking about how to give it, what the ingredients and prerequisites and intermediate steps are, etc. Probably during this stage of thinking, my motivational system is mostly not involved, unless thinking takes so long that I start to get bored or tired, or the process of thinking up an answer causes me to reconsider my reasoning in the previous step.
- Finally, I come up with a complete answer. Before I actually start opening my mouth or typing it out or hitting "send", I might proofread it and re-evaluate whether the answer given is in line with my values and motivations.
The point is that even for a relatively simple task like this, a human's motivational system involves a complicated process of superposition and multi-layered sandwiching, with lots of feedback loops, high-level and explicit reflection, etc.
So I'm pretty skeptical of the claim that anything remotely analogous is going on inside of current GPTs, especially within a single forward pass. Even if there's a simpler analogue of this that is happening, I think calling such an analogue a "motivational system" is overly-suggestive.
Mostly separately (because it concerns possible future models rather than current models) and less confidently, I don't expect the complexity of the motivational system and methods for influencing them to scale in a way that is related to the model's underlying capabilities. e.g. you might end up with a model that has some kind of raw capacity for superhuman intelligence, but with a motivational system akin to what you might find in the brain of a mouse or lizard (or something even stranger).
I don't dispute any of that, but I also don't think RLHF is a workable method for building or aligning a powerful AGI.
Zooming out, my original point was that there are two problems humanity is facing, quite different in character but both very difficult:
- a coordination / governance problem, around deciding when to build AGI and who gets to build it
- a technical problem, around figuring out how to build an AGI that does what the builder wants at all.
My view is that we are currently on track to solve neither of those problems. But if you actually consider what the world in which we sufficiently-completely solve even of them looks like, it seems like either is sufficient for a relatively high probability of a relatively good outcome, compared to where we are now.
Both possible worlds are probably weird hypotheticals which shouldn't have an impact on what our actual strategy in the world we actually live in should be, which is of course to pursue solutions to both problems simultaneously with as much vigor as possible. But it still seems worth keeping in mind that if even one thing works out sufficiently well, we probably won't be totally doomed.
In that they wanted the bomb to explode? I think the analogous level of control for AI would be unsatisfactory.
The premise of this hypothetical is that all the technical problems are solved - if an AI lab wants to build an AI to pursue the collective CEV of humanity or whatever, they can just get it to do that. Maybe they'll settle on something other than CEV that is a bit better or worse or just different, but my point was that I don't expect them to choose something ridiculous like "our CEO becomes god-emperor forever" or whatever.
I'm not sure they thought this; I think many expected that by playing along they would have influence later. Tech workers today often seem to care a lot about how products made by their companies are deployed.
Yeah, I was probably glossing over the actual history a bit too much; most of my knowledge on this comes from seeing Oppenheimer recently. The actual dis-analogy is that no AI researcher would really be arguing for not building and deploying ASI in this scenario, vs. with the atomic bomb where lots of people wanted to build it to have around, but not actually use it or only use it as some kind of absolute last resort. I don't think many AI researchers in our actual reality have that kind of view on ASI, and probably few to none would have that view in the counterfactual where the technical problems are solved.
In the Manhattan project, there was no disagreement between the physicists, the politicians / generals, and the actual laborers who built the bomb, on what they wanted the bomb to do. They were all aligned around trying to build an object that would create the most powerful explosion possible.
As for who had control over the launch button, of course the physicists didn't have that, and never expected to. But they also weren't forced to work on the bomb; they did so voluntarily and knowing they wouldn't be the ones who got any say in whether and how it would be used.
Another difference between an atomic bomb and AI is that the bomb itself had no say in how it was used. Once a superintelligence is turned on, control of the system rests entirely with the superintelligence and not with any humans. I strongly expect that researchers at big labs will not be forced to program an ASI to do bad things against the researchers' own will, and I trust them not to do so voluntarily. (Again, all in the probably-counterfactual world where they know and understand all the consequences of their own actions.)
A bit of anecdotal impressions, yes, but mainly I just think that in humans being smart, conscientious, reflective, etc. enough to be the brightest researcher a big AI lab is actually pretty correlated with being Good (and also, that once you actually solve the technical problems, it doesn't take that much Goodness to do the right thing for the collective and not just yourself).
Or, another way of looking at it, I find Scott Aaronson's perspective convincing, when it is applied to humans. I just don't think it will apply at all to the first kinds of AIs that people are actually likely to build, for technical reasons.
And I'm saying that, assuming all the technical problems are solved, AI researchers would be the ones in control, and I (mostly) trust them to just not do things like build an AI that acts like an invasive species, or argues for its own rights, or build something that actually deserves such rights.
Maybe some random sociologists on Twitter will call for giving AIs rights, but in the counterfactual world where AI researchers have fine control of their own creations, I expect no one in a position to make decisions on the matter to give such calls any weight.
Even in the world we actually live in, I expect such calls to have little consequence. I do think some of the things you describe are reasonably likely to happen, but the people responsible for making them happen will do so unintentionally, with opinion columnists, government regulations, etc. playing little or no role in the causal process.
In order for humans to survive the AI transition I think we need to succeed on the technical problems of alignment (which are perhaps not as bad as Less Wrong culture made them out to be), and we also need to "land the plane" of superintelligent AI on a stable equilibrium where humans are still the primary beneficiaries of civilization, rather than a pest species to be exterminated or squatters to be evicted.
Do we really need both? It seems like either a technical solution OR competent global governance would mostly suffice.
Actually-competent global governance should be able to coordinate around just not building AGI (and preventing anyone else from building it) indefinitely. If we could solve a coordination problem on that scale, we could also probably solve a bunch of other mundane coordination problems, governance issues, unrelated x-risks, etc., resulting in a massive boost to global prosperity and happiness through non-AI technological progress and good policy.
Conversely, if we had a complete technical solution, I don't see why we necessarily need that much governance competence. Even if takeoff turns out to be relatively slow, the people initially building and controlling AGI will probably be mostly researchers in big labs.
Maybe ideally we would want a "long reflection" of some kind, but in the probably-counterfactual world where these researchers actually get exactly what they aim for, I mostly trust them to aim the AI at something like "fill the galaxy with humanity's collective coherent extrapolated volition", and that seems good enough in a pinch / hurry, if it actually works.
But given that this example is so controversial, even if it were right why would you use it -- at least, why would you use it if you had any other example at all to turn to?
Humans are the only real-world example we have of human-level agents, and natural selection is the only process we know of for actually producing them.
SGD, singular learning theory, etc. haven't actually produced human-level minds or a usable theory of how such minds work, and arguably haven't produced anything that even fits into the natural category of minds at all, yet. (Maybe they will pretty soon, when applied at greater scale or in combination with additional innovations, either of which could result in the weird-correlates problem emerging.)
Also, the actual claims in the quote seem either literally true (humans don't care about foods that they model as useful for inclusive genetic fitness) or plausible / not obviously false (when you grow minds [to human capabilities levels], they end up caring about a bunch of weird correlates). I think you're reading the quote as saying something stronger / more specific than it actually is.
Hmm, I'm in favor of an immediate stop (and of people being more honest about their beliefs) but in my experience the lying / hiding frame doesn't actually describe many people.
This is maybe even harsher than what you said in some ways, but to me it feels more like even very bright alignment researchers are often confused and getting caught in shell games with alignment, postulating that we'll be able to build "human level" AI, which somehow just doesn't do a bunch of bad things that smart humans are clearly capable of. And if even the most technical people are confused when talking to each other, I wouldn't expect leadership of big labs to do better when talking to the public, even if they're being scrupulously honest about their own beliefs.
My biggest issue with e.g. RSPs are pauses done right is actually the proposed unpause condition:
- Once labs start to reach models that pose a potential takeover risk, they either:
- Solve mechanistic interpretability to a sufficient extent that they are able to pass an understanding-based eval and demonstrate that their models are safe.
- Get blocked on scaling until mechanistic interpretability is solved, forcing a reroute of resources from scaling to interpretability.
There would probably be even more genuine confusion / disagreement on the topic, but I think talking openly about much stricter unpause conditions would be good. I think "solve mechanistic interpretability" and "pass (both kinds of) evals" is not really close to sufficient.
My criteria for an unpause would look more like (just an example to give flavor, not meant to be realistic / well thought-out):
- There's broad consensus and understanding about which object-level things (shutdown problem, embedded agency, etc.) are actually relevant to alignment, and what the shape of solutions even looks like.
- Research on topics like "Human wanting" are filled with precise math and diagrams and gears-level maps to neuroscience. (But the math and diagrams and concepts themselves should be completely independent of the neuroscience; links to human neuroscience are checksums for validity, not crutches for understanding.)
- We have complete solutions to things like the shutdown problem. (I don't think "build in a shutdown button via giving the AI invulnerable incomplete preferences" should be part of anyone's actual alignment plan, but it should be the kind of thing we know how to do before scaling.)
I think if everyone already saw why mechanistic interpretability is insufficient, they could also see why it would be better to just institute a pause now. But they don't, so they continue to push for scaling in a genuine pursuit of deconfusion. Not great! But also not exactly dishonest or even inaccurate; no one has actually figured out a better way to reliably deconfuse people so far, and scaling further does seem likely to actually work for that, one way or another.
A very recent post that might add some concreteness to my own views: Human wanting
I think many of the bullets in that post describe current AI systems poorly or not at all. So current AI systems are either doing something entirely different from human wanting, or imitating human wanting rather poorly.
I lean towards the former, but I think some of the critical points about prosaic alignment apply in either case.
You might object that "having preferences" or "caring at all" are a lot simpler than the concept of human wanting that Tsvi is gesturing at in that post, and that current AI systems are actually doing these simpler things pretty well. If so, I'd ask what exactly those simpler concepts are, and why you expect prosiac alignment techniques to hold up once AI systems are capable of more complicated kinds of wanting.
Taking my own stab at answers to some of your questions:
A sufficient condition for me to believe that an AI actually cared about something would be a whole brain emulation: I would readily accept that such an emulation had preferences and values (and moral weight) in exactly the way that humans do, and that any manipulations of that emulation were acting on preferences in a real way.
I think that GPTs (and every other kind of current AI system) are not doing anything that is even close to isomorphic to the processing that happens inside the human brain. Artificial neural networks often imitate various micro and macro-level individual features of the brain, but they do not imitate every feature, arranged in precisely the same ways, and the missing pieces and precise arrangements are probably key.
Barring WBE, an AI system that is at least roughly human-level capable (including human-level agentic) is probably a necessary condition for me to believe that it has values and preferences in a meaningful (though not necessarily human-like) way.
SoTA LLM-based systems are maaaybe getting kind of close here, but only if you arrange them in precise ways (e.g. AutoGPT-style agents with specific prompts), and then the agency is located in the repeated executions of the model and the surrounding structure and scaffolding that causes the system as a whole to be doing something that is maybe-roughly-nearly-isomorphic to some complete process that happens inside of human brains. Or, if not isomorphic, at least has some kind of complicated structure which is necessary, in some form, for powerful cognition.
Note that, if I did believe that current AIs had preferences in a real way, I would also be pretty worried that they had moral weight!
(Not to say that entities below human-level intelligence (e.g. animals, current AI systems) don't have moral weight. But entities at human-level intelligence above definitely can, and possibly do by default.)
Anyway, we probably disagree on a bunch of object-level points and definitions, but from my perspective those disagreements feel like pretty ordinary empirical disagreements rather than ones based on floating or non-falsifiable beliefs. Probably some of the disagreement is located in philosophy-of-mind stuff and is over logical rather than empirical truths, but even those feel like the kind of disagreements that I'd be pretty happy to offer betting odds over if we could operationalize them.