It's worth noting that activations are one thing you can modify, but many of the most performant methods (e.g., LoRRA) modify the weights. (Representations = {weights, activations}, hence "representation" engineering.)

Towards more cooperative AI safety strategies

Dan H4mo42

"Bay Area EA alignment community"/"Bay Area EA community"? (Most EAs in the Bay Area are focused on alignment compared to other causes.)

Towards more cooperative AI safety strategies

Dan H4mo149

The AI safety community is structurally power-seeking.

I don't think the set of people interested in AI safety is a even a "community" given how diverse it is (Bengio, Brynjolfsson, Song, etc.), so I think it's be more accurate to say "Bay Area AI alignment community is structurally power-seeking."

Fabien's Shortform

Dan H5moΩ10261

Got a massive simplification of the main technique within days of being released

The loss is cleaner, IDK about "massively," because in the first half of the loss we use a simpler distance involving 2 terms instead of 3. This doesn't affect performance and doesn't markedly change quantitative or qualitative claims in the paper. Thanks to Marks and Patel for pointing out the equivalent cleaner loss, and happy for them to be authors on the paper.

p=0.8 that someone finds good token-only jailbreaks to whatever is open-sourced within 3 months.

This puzzles me and maybe we just have a different sense of what progress in adversarial robustness looks like. 20% that no one could find a jailbreak within 3 months? That would be the most amazing advance in robustness ever if that were true and should be a big update on jailbreak robustness tractability. If it takes the community more than a day that's a tremendous advance.

people will easily find reliable jailbreaks

This is a little nonspecific (does easily mean >0% ASR with an automated attack, or does it mean a high ASR?). I should say we manually found a jailbreak after messing with the model for around a week after releasing. We also invited people who have a reputation as jailbreakers to poke at it and they had a very hard time. Nowhere did we claim "there are no more jailbreaks and they are solved once and for all," but I do think it's genuinely harder now.

Circuit breakers won’t prove significantly more robust than regular probing in a fair comparison

We had the idea a few times to try out a detection-based approach but we didn't get around to it. It seems possible that it'd perform similarly if it's leaning on the various things we did in the paper. (Obviously probing has been around but people haven't gotten results at this level, and people have certainly tried using detecting adversarial attacks in hundreds of papers in the past.) IDK if performance would be that different from circuit-breakers, in which case this would still be a contribution. I don't really care about the aesthetics of methods nearly as much as the performance, and similarly performing methods are fine in my book. A lot of different-looking deep learning methods perform similarly. A detection based method seems fine, so does a defense that's tuned into the model; maybe they could be stacked. Maybe will run a detector probe this weekend and update the paper with results if everything goes well. If we do find that it works, I think it'd be unfair to desscribe this after the fact as "overselling results and using fancy techniques that don't improve on simpler techniques" as done for RMU.

My main disagreement is with the hype.

We're not responsible for that. Hype is inevitable for most established researchers. Mediocre big AI company papers get lots of hype. Didn't even do customary things like write a corresponding blog post yet. I just tweeted the paper and shared my views in the same tweet: I do think jailbreak robustness is looking easier than expected, and this is affecting my priorities quite a bit.

Aims to do unlearning in a way that removes knowledge from LLMs

Yup that was the aim for the paper and for method development. We poked at the method for a whole month after the paper's release. We didn't find anything, though in that process I slowly reconceptualized RMU as more of a circuit-breaking technique and something that's just doing a bit of unlearning. It's destroying some key function-relevant bits of information that can be recovered, so it's not comprehensively wiping. IDK if I'd prefer unlearning (grab concept and delete it) vs circuit-breaking (grab concept and put an internal tripwire around it); maybe one will be much more performant than the other or easier to use in practice. Consequently I think there's a lot to do in developing unlearning methods (though I don't know if they'll be preferable to the latter type of method).

overselling results and using fancy techniques that don't improve on simpler techniques

This makes it sound like the simplification was lying around and we deliberately made it more complicated, only to update it to have a simpler forget term. We compare to multiple baselines, do quite a bit better than them, do enough ablations to be accepted at ICML (of course there are always more you could want), and all of our numbers are accurate. We could have just included the dataset without the method in the paper, and it would have still got news coverage (Alex Wang who is a billionaire was on the paper and it was on WMDs).

Probably the only time I chose to use something a little more mathematically complicated than was necessary was the Jensen-Shannon loss in AugMix. It performed similarly to doing three pairwise l2 distances between penultimate representations, but this was more annoying to write out. Usually I'm accused of doing papers that are on the simplistic side (sometimes papers like the OOD baseline paper caused frustration because it's getting credit for something very simple) since I don't optimize for cleverness, and my collaborators know full well that I discourage trying to be clever since it's often anticorrelated with performance.

Not going to check responses because I end up spending too much time typing for just a few viewers.

What do coherence arguments actually prove about agentic behavior?

Dan H5mo7-3

Key individuals that the community is structured around just ignored it, so it wasn't accepted as true. (This is a problem with small intellectual groups.)

Buck's Shortform

Dan H6moΩ8150

Some years ago we wrote that "[AI] systems will monitor for destructive behavior, and these monitoring systems need to be robust to adversaries" and discussed monitoring systems that can create "AI tripwires could help uncover early misaligned systems before they can cause damage." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5HtDzRAk7ePWsiL2L/open-problems-in-ai-x-risk-pais-5#Adversarial_Robustness

Since then, I've updated that adversarial robustness for LLMs is much more tractable (preview of paper out very soon). In vision settings, progress is extraordinarily slow but not necessarily for LLMs.

Introducing AI Lab Watch

Dan H6mo302

Various comments:

I wouldn't call this "AI lab watch." "Lab" has the connotation that these are small projects instead of multibillion dollar corporate behemoths.

"deployment" initially sounds like "are they using output filters which harm UX in deployment", but instead this seems to be penalizing organizations if they open source. This seems odd since open sourcing is not clearly bad right now. The description also makes claims like "Meta release all of their weights"---they don't release many image/video models because of deepfakes, so they are doing some cost-benefit analysis. Zuck: "So we want to see what other people are observing, what we’re observing, what we can mitigate, and then we'll make our assessment on whether we can make it open source." If this is mainly a penalty against open sourcing the label should be clearer.

"Commit to do pre-deployment risk assessment" They've all committed to this in the WH voluntary commitments and I think the labs are doing things on this front.

"Do risk assessment" These companies have signed on to WH voluntary commitments so are all checking for these things, and the EO says to check for these hazards too. This is why it's surprising to see Microsoft have 1% given that they're all checking for these hazards.

Looking at the scoring criteria, this seems highly fixated on rogue AIs, but I understand I'm saying that to the original forum of these concerns. Risk assessment's scoring doesn't really seem to prioritize bio x-risk as much as scheming AIs. This is strange because if we're focused on rogue AIs I'd put a half the priority of risk mitigation while the model is training. Many rogue AI people may think half of the time the AI will kill everyone is when the model is "training" (because it will escape during that time).

The first sentence of this site says the focus is on "extreme risks" but it seems the focus is mainly on rogue AIs. This should be upfront that this is from the perspective that loss of control is the main extreme risk, rather than positioning itself as a comprehensive safety tracker. If I were tracking rogue AI risks, I'd probably drill down to what they plan to do with automated AI R&D/intelligence explosions.

"Training" This seems to give way more weight to rogue AI stuff. Red teaming is actually assessable, but instead you're giving twice the points to if they have someone "work on scalable oversight." This seems like an EA vibes check rather than actually measuring something. This also seems like triple counting since it's highly associated with the "scalable alignment" section and the "alignment program" section. This doesn't even require that they use the technique for the big models they train and deploy. Independently, capabilities work related to building superintelligences can easily be framed as scalable oversight, so this doesn't set good incentives. Separately, at the end this also gives lots of points for voluntary (read: easily breakable) commitments. These should not be trusted and I think the amount of lipservice points is odd.

"Security" As I said on EAF the security scores are suspicious to me and even look backward. The major tech companies have much more experience protecting assets (e.g., clouds need to be highly secure) than startups like Anthropic and OpenAI. It takes years building up robust information security and the older companies have a sizable advantage.

"internal governance" scores seem odd. Older, larger institutions such as Microsoft and Google have many constraints and processes and don't have leaders who can unilaterally make decisions as easily, compared to startups. Their CEOs are also more fireable (OpenAI), and their board members aren't all selected by the founder (Anthropic). This seems highly keyed into if they are just a PBC or non-profit. In practice PBC just makes it harder to sue, but Zuck has such control of his company that getting successfully sued for not upholding his fiduciary duty to shareholders seems unlikely. It seems 20% of the points is not using non-disparagement agreements?? 30% is for whistleblower policies; CA has many whistleblower protections if I recall correctly. No points for a chief risk officer or internal audit committee?

"Alignment program" "Other labs near the frontier publish basically no alignment research" Meta publishes dozens of papers they call "alignment"; these actually don't feel that dissimilar to papers like Constitutional AI-like papers (https://twitter.com/jaseweston/status/1748158323369611577 https://twitter.com/jaseweston/status/1770626660338913666 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.11206 ). These papers aren't posted to LW but they definitely exist. To be clear I think this is general capabilities but this community seems to think differently. Alignment cannot be "did it come from EA authors" and it probably should not be "does it use alignment in its title." You'll need to be clear how this distinction is drawn.

Meta has people working on safety and CBRN+cyber + adversarial robustness etc. I think they're doing a good job (here are two papers from the last month: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.13161v1 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.16873).

As is, I think this is a little too quirky and not ecumenical enough for it to generate social pressure.

There should be points for how the organizations act wrt to legislation. In the SB 1047 bill that CAIS co-sponsored, we've noticed some AI companies to be much more antagonistic than others. I think is is probably a larger differentiator for an organization's goodness or badness.

(Won't read replies since I have a lot to do today.)