- Less important, but the grant justification appears to take seriously the idea that making AGI open source is compatible with safety. I might be missing some key insight, but it seems trivially obvious why this is a terrible idea even if you're only concerned with human misuse and not misalignment.
Hmmm, can you point to where you think the grant shows this? I think the following paragraph from the grant seems to indicate otherwise:
When OpenAI launched, it characterized the nature of the risks – and the most appropriate strategies for reducing them – in a way that we disagreed with. In particular, it emphasized the importance of distributing AI broadly;1 our current view is that this may turn out to be a promising strategy for reducing potential risks, but that the opposite may also turn out to be true (for example, if it ends up being important for institutions to keep some major breakthroughs secure to prevent misuse and/or to prevent accidents). Since then, OpenAI has put out more recent content consistent with the latter view,2 and we are no longer aware of any clear disagreements. However, it does seem that our starting assumptions and biases on this topic are likely to be different from those of OpenAI’s leadership, and we won’t be surprised if there are disagreements in the future.
I'm glad to hear you got exposure to the Alignment field in SERI MATS! I still think that your writing reads off as though your ideas misunderstands core alignment problems, so my best feedback then is to share drafts/discuss your ideas with other familiar with the field. My guess is that it would be preferable for you to find people who are critical of your ideas and try to understand why, since it seems like they are representative of the kinds of people who are downvoting your posts.
(preface: writing and communicating is hard and that i'm glad you are trying to improve)
i sampled two:
this post was hard to follow, and didn't seem to be very serious. it also reads off as unfamiliar with the basics of the AI Alignment problem (the proposed changes to gpt-4 don't concretely address many/any of the core Alignment concerns for reasons addressed by other commentors)
this post makes multiple (self-proclaimed controversial) claims that seem wrong or are not obvious, but doesn't try to justify them in-depth.
overall, i'm getting the impression that your ideas are 1) wrong and you haven't thought about them enough and/or 2) you arent communicating them well enough. i think the former is more likely, but it could also be some combination of the both. i think this means that:
Reverse engineering. Unclear if this is being pushed much anymore. 2022: Anthropic circuits, Interpretability In The Wild, Grokking mod arithmetic
FWIW, I was one of Neel's MATS 4.1 scholars and I would classify 3/4 of Neel's scholar's outputs as reverse engineering some component of LLMs (for completeness, this is the other one, which doesn't nicely fit as 'reverse engineering' imo). I would also say that this is still an active direction of research (lots of ground to cover with MLP neurons, polysemantic heads, and more)
Quick feedback since nobody else has commented - I'm all for the AI Safety appearing "not just a bunch of crazy lunatics, but an actually sensible, open and welcoming community."
But the spirit behind this post feels like it is just throwing in the towel, and I very much disapprove of that. I think this is why I and others downvoted too
Ehh... feels like your base rate of 10% for LW users who are willing to pay for a subscription is too high, especially seeing how the 'free' version would still offer everything I (and presumably others) care about. Generalizing to other platforms, this feels closest to Twitter's situation with Twitter Blue, whose rates appear is far, far lower: if we be generous and say they have one million subscribers, then out of the 41.5 million monetizable daily active users they currently have, this would suggest a base rate of less than 3%.
Thanks for the writeup!
Small nitpik: typo in "this indeed does not seem like an attitude that leads to go outcomes"
I'm not sure if you've seen it or not, but here's a relevant clip where he mentions that they aren't training GPT-5. I don't quite know how to update from it. It doesn't seem likely that they paused from a desire to conduct more safety work, but I would also be surprised if somehow they are reaching some sort of performance limit from model size.
However, as Zvi mentions, Sam did say:
“I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models...We'll make them better in other ways”
The increased public attention towards AI Safety risk is probably a good thing. But, when stuff like this is getting lumped in with the rest of AI Safety, it feels like the public-facing slow-down-AI movement is going to be a grab-bag of AI Safety, AI Ethics, and AI... privacy(?). As such, I'm afraid that the public discourse will devolve into "Woah-there-Slow-AI" and "GOGOGOGO" tribal warfare; from the track record of American politics, this seems likely - maybe even inevitable?
More importantly, though, what I'm afraid of is that this will translate into adversarial relations between AI Capabilities organizations and AI Safety orgs (more generally, that capabilities teams will become less inclined to incorporate safety concerns in their products).
I'm not actually in an AI organization, so if someone is in one and has thoughts on this dynamic happening/not happening, I would love to hear.
Small nitpick (I agree with mostly everything else in the post and am glad you wrote it up). This feels like an unfair criticism - I assume you are referring specifically to the statement in their paper that:
I think Anthropic's interpretability team, while making maybe dubious claims about the impact of their work on safety, has been clear that mechanistic interpretability is far from 'solved.' For instance, Chris Olah in the linked NYT article from today:
Also, in the paper's section on Inability to Evaluate:
I think they are overstating how far/useful mechanistic interpretability is currently. However, I don't think this messaging is close to 'mechanistic interpretability solves AI Interpretability' - this error is on a16z, not Anthropic.