All of Lauro Langosco's Comments + Replies

The argument I think is good (nr (2) in my previous comment) doesn't go through reference classes at all. I don't want to make an outside-view argument (eg "things we call optimization often produce misaligned results, therefore sgd is dangerous"). I like the evolution analogy because it makes salient some aspects of AI training that make misalignment more likely. Once those aspects are salient you can stop thinking about evolution and just think directly about AI.

evolution does not grow minds, it grows hyperparameters for minds.

Imo this is a nitpick that isn't really relevant to the point of the analogy. Evolution is a good example of how selection for X doesn't necessarily lead to a thing that wants ('optimizes for') X; and more broadly it's a good example for how the results of an optimization process can be unexpected.

I want to distinguish two possible takes here:

1. The argument from direct implication: "Humans are misaligned wrt evolution, therefore AIs will be misaligned wrt their objectives"
2. Evolution as an

I think the specification problem is still hard and unsolved. It looks like you're using a different definition of 'specification problem' / 'outer alignment' than others, and this is causing confusion.

IMO all these terms are a bit fuzzy / hard to pin down, and so it makes sense that they'd lead to disagreement sometimes. The best way (afaict) to avoid this is to keep the terms grounded in 'what would be useful for avoiding AGI doom'? To me it looks like on your definition, outer alignment is basically a trivial problem that doesn't help alignment much.

Mor... (read more)

Do you have an example of one way that the full alignment problem is easier now that we've seen that GPT-4 can understand & report on human values?

(I'm asking because it's hard for me to tell if your definition of outer alignment is disconnected from the rest of the problem in a way where it's possible for outer alignment to become easier without the rest of the problem becoming easier).

I think it's false in the sense that MIRI never claimed that it would be hard to build an AI with GPT-4 level understanding of human values + GPT-4 level of willingness to answer honestly (as far as I can tell). The reason I think it's false is mostly that I haven't seen a claim like that made anywhere, including in the posts you cite.

I agree lots of the responses elide the part where you emphasize that it's important how GPT-4 doesn't just understand human values, but is also "willing" to answer questions somewhat honestly. TBH I don't understand why that... (read more)

You make a claim that's very close to that - your claim, if I understand correctly, is that MIRI thought AI wouldn't understand human values and also not lie to us about it (or otherwise decide to give misleading or unhelpful outputs):

The key difference between the value identification/specification problem and the problem of getting an AI to understand human values is the transparency and legibility of how the values are represented: if you solve the problem of value identification, that means you have an actual function that can tell you the value of a

My paraphrase of your (Matthews) position: while I'm not claiming that GPT-4 provides any evidence about inner alignment (i.e. getting an AI to actually care about human values), I claim that it does provide evidence about outer alignment being easier than we thought: we can specify human values via language models, which have a pretty robust understanding of human values and don't systematically deceive us about their judgement. This means people who used to think outer alignment / value specification was hard should change their minds.

(End paraphrase)

I t... (read more)

Broadly agree with the takes here.

However, these results seem explainable by the widely-observed tendency of larger models to learn faster and generalize better, given equal optimization steps.

This seems right and I don't think we say anything contradicting it in the paper.

I also don't see how saying 'different patterns are learned at different speeds' is supposed to have any explanatory power. It doesn't explain why some types of patterns are faster to learn than others, or what determines the relative learnability of memorizing versus generalizing

There are positive feedback loops between prongs:

• Successfully containing & using more capable models (p1) gives you more scary demos for p2
• Success in p1 also speeds up p3 a lot, because:
  • 1) You can empirically study AGI directly, 
  • 2) Very advanced but “narrow” AI tools accelerate research (“narrow” here still means maybe more general than GPT-4)
  • 3) Maybe you can even have (proto-)AGIs do research for you
• You definitely need a lot of success in p2 for anything to work, otherwise people will take all the useful work we can get from proto-AGIs and pour i

A three-pronged approach to AGI safety. (This is assuming we couldn't just avoid building AGI or proto-AGIs at all until say ~2100, which would of course be much better).


Prong 1: boxing & capability control (aka ‘careful bootstrapping’)

• Make the AGI as capable as possible, under the constraint that you can make sure it can’t break out of the box or do other bad stuff. 
• Assume the AGI is misaligned. Be super paranoid
• Goal: get useful work out of boxed AGIs.
  • For example, AIs might be able to do interpretability really well.
  • More generally, for any field

There are less costly, more effective steps to reduce the underlying problem, like making the field of alignment 10x larger or passing regulation to require evals

IMO making the field of alignment 10x larger or evals do not solve a big part of the problem, while indefinitely pausing AI development would. I agree it's much harder, but I think it's good to at least try, as long as it doesn't terribly hurt less ambitious efforts (which I think it doesn't).

Thinking about alignment-relevant thresholds in AGI capabilities. A kind of rambly list of relevant thresholds:

1. Ability to be deceptively aligned
2. Ability to think / reflect about its goals enough that model realises it does not like what it is being RLHF’d for
3. Incentives to break containment exist in a way that is accessible / understandable to the model
4. Ability to break containment
5. Ability to robustly understand human intent
6. Situational awareness
7. Coherence / robustly pursuing it’s goal in a diverse set of circumstances
8. Interpretability methods break (or other ove

I like that mini-game! Thanks for the reference

like, we could imagine playing a game where i propose a way that it [the AI] diverges [from POUDA-avoidance] in deployment, and you counter by asserting that there's a situation in the training data where it had to have gotten whacked if it was that stupid, and i counter either by a more-sophisticated deployment-divergence or by naming either a shallower or a factually non-[Alice]like thing that it could have learned instead such that the divergence still occurs, and we go back and forth. and i win if you're forced into exotic and unlikely training data,

More generally, suppose that the agent acts in accordance with the following policy in all decision-situations: ‘if I previously turned down some option X, I will not choose any option that I strictly disprefer to X.’ That policy makes the agent immune to all possible money-pumps for Completeness.

Am I missing something or does this agent satisfy Completeness anytime it faces a decision for the second time?

I would not call 1) an instance of goal misgeneralization. Goal misgeneralization only occurs if the model does badly at the training objective. If you reward an RL agent for making humans happy and it goes on to make humans happy in unintended ways like putting them into heroin cells, the RL agent is doing fine on the training objective. I'd call 1) an instance of misspecification and 2) an instance of misgeneralization.

(AFAICT The Alignment Problem from a DL Perspective uses the term in the same way I do, but I'd have to reread more carefully to make sur... (read more)

It does make me more uncertain about most of the details. And that then makes me more pessimistic about the solution, because I expect that I'm missing some of the problems.

(Analogy: say I'm working on a math exercise sheet and I have some concrete reason to suspect my answer may be wrong; if I then realize I'm actually confused about the entire setup, I should be even more pessimistic about having gotten the correct answer).

To briefly hop in and say something that may be useful: I had a reaction pretty similar to what Eliezer commented, and I don't see continuity or "Things will be weird before getting extremely weird" as a crux. (I don't know why you think he does, and don't know what he thinks, but would guess he doesn't think it's a crux either)

Yeah we're on the same page here, thanks for checking!

For one thing, you use the “might” near the end of that excerpt. That seems more compatible with a ‘maybe, maybe not’ claim, than with an ‘(almost) definitely not’ claim, right?

I feel pretty uncertain about all the factors here. One reason I overall still lean towards the 'definitely not' stance is that building a toddler AGI that is alignable in principle is only one of multiple steps that need to go right for us to get a reflectively-stable docile AGI; in particular we still need to solve the prob... (read more)

Are you arguing that it’s probably not going to work, or that it’s definitely not going to work? I’m inclined to agree with the first and disagree with the second.

I'm arguing that it's definitely not going to work (I don't have 99% confidence here bc I might be missing something, but IM(current)O the things I list are actual blockers).

First bullet point → Seems like a very possible but not absolutely certain failure mode for what I wrote.

Do you mean we possibly don't need the prerequisites, or we definitely need them but that's possibly fine?

In particular, if we zap the AGI with negative reward when it’s acting from a deceptive motivation and positive reward when it’s acting from a being-helpful motivation, would those zaps turn into a reflectively-endorsed desire for “I am being docile / helpful / etc.”? Maybe, maybe not, I dunno.

Curious what your take is on these reasons to think the answer is no (IMO the first one is basically already enough):

• In order to have reflectively-endorsed goals that are stable under capability gains, the AGI needs to have reached some threshold levels of situa

That's a challenge, and while you (hopefully) chew on it, I'll tell an implausibly-detailed story to exemplify a deeper obstacle.

Some thoughts written down before reading the rest of the post (list is unpolished / not well communicated)
The main problems I see:

• There are kinds of deception (or rather kinds of deceptive capabilities / thoughts) that only show up after a certain capability level, and training before that level just won't affect them cause they're not there yet.
• General capabilities imply the ability to be deceptive if useful in a particu

awesome!

Is there an open-source implementation of causal scrubbing available?

I also think that often "the AI just maximizes reward" is a useful simplifying assumption. That is, we can make an argument of the form "even if the AI just maximizes reward, it still takes over; if it maximizes some correlate of the reward instead, then we have even less control over what it does and so are even more doomed".

(Though of course it's important to spell the argument out)

I agree with your general point here, but I think Ajeya's post actually gets this right, eg

There is some ambiguity about what exactly “maximize reward” means, but once Alex is sufficiently powerful -- and once human knowledge/control has eroded enough -- an uprising or coup eventually seems to be the reward-maximizing move under most interpretations of “reward.”

and

What if Alex doesn’t generalize to maximizing its reward in the deployment setting? What if it has more complex behaviors or “motives” that aren’t directly and simply derived from