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

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

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

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

A fairer comparison would probably be to actually try hard at building the kind of scaffold which could use ~10k$ in inference costs productively. I suspect the resulting agent would probably not do much better than with 100$ of inference, but it seems hard to be confident. And it seems harder still to be confident about what will happen even in just 3 years' time, give... (read more)

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

12/10/24 update: more, and in my view even somewhat methodologically s... (read more)

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

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

Contra 'optimists'. I'm more unsure here, but the vibe I'm getting from e.g. AI Pause Will Likely Backfire (Guest Post) is roughly something like 'no paus... (read more)

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

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

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

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

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

• the o1 results have illustrated specialized inference scaling laws, for model capabilities  in some specialized domains (e.g. math); notably, these don't seem to generally hold for all domains - e.g. o1 doesn't seem better than gpt4o at writing;
• there's ongoing work at OpenAI to make generalized inference scaling work;
• e.g. this could perhaps (though maybe somewhat overambitiously) be framed, in the language of https://epochai.org/blog/trading-off-compute-in-training-and-inference, as there no longer being an upper bound in how many OOMs of inference compute can be traded for equivalent OOMs of pretraining;
• to the best of my awarenes, current regulatory frameworks/proposals (e.g. the EU AI Act, the Executive Order, SB 1047) frame the capabilities of models in terms of (pre)training compute and maybe fine-tuning compute (e.g. if (pre)training FLOP > 1e26, the developer needs to take various measures), without any similar requirements framed in terms of inference compute; so current regulatory frameworks seem unprepared f

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

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

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

Better proxies could also make it easier to productively deploy ... (read more)

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

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

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

from https://jack-clark.net/2024/08/18/import-ai-383-automated-ai-scientists-cyborg-jellyfish-what-it-takes-to-run-a-cluster/…, commenting on https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292: 'Why this matters – the taste of automated science: This paper gives us a taste of a future where powerful AI systems propose their own ideas, use tools to do scientific experiments, and generate results. At this stage, what we have here is basically a ‘toy example’ with papers of dubious quality and insights of dubious import. But you know where we were with language models five yea... (read more)

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

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

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

Despite this promise, we seem not to have much knowledge when such automated AI safety R&D might happ... (read more)

(cross-posted from X/twitter)

The already-feasibility of https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/ (with basically non-x-risky systems, sub-ASL-3, and bad at situational awareness so very unlikely to be scheming) has updated me significantly on the tractability of the alignment / control problem. More than ever, I expect it's gonna be relatively tractable (if done competently and carefully) to safely, iteratively automate parts of AI safety research, all the way up to roughly human-level automated safety research (using LLM agents roughly-shaped like the AI scientist... (read more)

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

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

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

For example, in one run, it edited the code to perform a system call to run itself. This led to the script endlessly calling itself. In another case, its experiments took too ... (read more)

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

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

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

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

Epistemic status: at least somewhat rant-mode.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'While the labs certainly perform much valuable alignment research, and definitely contribute a disproportionate amount per-capita, they cannot realistically hope to compete with the thousands of hobbyists and PhD students tinkering and trying to improve and control models. This disparity will only grow larger as ... (read more)

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

And there are theoretical results suggesting some latent factors can be identified using multimodality (all the following could be intepretable as different modalities - mul... (read more)

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

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

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

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

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

The first two (decomposability and linearity) are properties we hypothesize to be widespread, while the latte... (read more)

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

My prompts bolded:

'Could we do concept algebra directly on the fMRI of the higher visual cortex?
Yes, in principle, it should be possible... (read more)

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

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

Given the potential scalability of automated interp, I'd be excited to see plans to use large amo... (read more)

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

Paper: Is a Good Representation Sufficient for Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning? (quote: 'This work shows that, from the statisti... (read more)