I'm the co-founder and CEO of Apollo Research: https://www.apolloresearch.ai/
My goal is to improve our understanding of scheming and build tools and methods to detect and mitigate it.
I previously did a Ph.D. in ML at the International Max-Planck research school in Tübingen, worked part-time with Epoch and did independent AI safety research.
For more see https://www.mariushobbhahn.com/aboutme/
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There are two sections that I think make this explicit:
1. No failure mode is sufficient to justify bigger actions.
2. Some scheming is totally normal.
My main point is that even things that would seem like warning shots today, e.g. severe loss of life, will look small in comparison to the benefits at the time, thus not providing any reason to pause.
I think this is a very important question and the answer should NOT be based on common-sense reasoning. My guess is that we could get evidence about the hidden reasoning capabilities of LLMs in a variety of ways both from theoretical considerations, e.g. a refined version of the two-hop curse or extensive black box experiments, e.g. comparing performance on evals with and without CoT, or with modified CoT that changes the logic (and thus tests whether the models internal reasoning aligns with the revealed reasoning).
These are all pretty basic thoughts and IMO we should invest significantly more effort into clarifying this as part of the "let's make sure CoT is faithful" part. A lot of safety strategies rest on CoT faithfulness, so we should not leave this to shallow investigations and vibes.
Something like the OpenPhil AI worldview contest: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/announcing-the-winners-of-the-2023-open-philanthropy-ai-worldviews-contest/
Or the ARC ELK prize: https://www.alignment.org/blog/prizes-for-elk-proposals/
In general, I wouldn't make it too complicated and accept some arbitrariness. There is a predetermined panel of e.g. 5 experts and e.g. 3 categories (feasibility, effectiveness, everything else). All submissions first get scored by 2 experts with a shallow judgment (e.g., 5-10 minutes). Maybe there is some "saving" mechanism if an overeager expert wants to read plans that weren't assigned to them. Everything in the top N% then gets scored by all experts with a more detailed review. Then, there is a final ranking.
I'd hope that the time spent per expert is only 5-10 hours in total. I'd be fine with missing a bunch of posts that contain good ideas that are badly communicated or otherwise easy to miss on the shallow review.
My main goal with the contest would be that writing a good plan and communicating it clearly is incentivized.
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Brief comments (shared in private with Joe earlier):
1. We agree. We also found the sandbagging with no CoT results the most concerning in expectation.
2. They are still early results, and we didn't have a lot of time to investigate them, so we didn't want to make them the headline result. Due to the natural deadline of the o1 release, we couldn't do a proper investigation.
3. The main goal of the paper was to investigate scheming inability arguments for scheming safety cases. Therefore, shifting focus to propensity-based finding would have watered down the main purpose IMO.
We will potentially further look into these findings in 2025.
Good point!
Yes, I use the term scheming in a much broader way, similar to how we use it in the in-context scheming paper. I would assume that our scheming term is even broader than Joe's alignment-faking because it also includes taking direct covert action like disabling oversight (which arguably is not alignment-faking).