I always assume when thinking about future dangerous models that they have access to some sort of black-box memory. Do we think there is a non-negligible chance that an AI that doesn't have hidden memory, only English-language CoT, will be able to evade our monitoring and execute a rouge deployment? (Not a rhetorical question, there might be a way I haven't thought of.)

So I think that assuming the AI being stateless when thinking about future risk is not a good idea, as I think the vast majority of the risk comes from AIs for which this assumption is not true. I think this makes the post's claim significantly weaker, as the untrusted AI can just learn which of its attacks get replaced, and improve its attacks based on this data. 

It still needs to avoid getting top 1% suspiciousness score and getting audited though, as it would be dangerous to the AI to ever get caught writing a text that clearly intends to jailbreak the monitor. So I agree that even an AI with black-box memory will still be severely constrained in how many and how egregious jailbreak attempts it can try.

Hm, probably we disagree on something. I'm very confused how to mesh epistemic uncertainty with these "distribution over different Universes" types of probability. When I say "Boltzmann brains are probably very low measure", I mean "I think Boltzmann brains are very low measure, but this is a confusing topic and there might be considerations I haven't thought of and I might be totally mistaken". I think this epistemic uncertainty is distinct from the type of "objective probabilities" I talk about in my post, and I don't really know how to use language without referring to degrees of my epistemic uncertainty. 

You still need a prior over worlds to calculate impacts, which is the cursed part.

Maybe we have some deeper disagreement here. It feels plausible to me that there is a measure of "realness" in the Multiverse that is an objective fact about the world, and we might be able to figure it out. When I say probabilities are cursed, I just mean that even if an objective prior over worlds and moments exist (like the Solomonoff prior), your probabilities of where you are are still hackable by simulations, so you shouldn't rely on raw probabilities for decision-making, like the people using the Oracle do. Meanwhile, expected values are not hackable in the same way, because if they recreate you in a tiny simulation, you don't care about that, and if they recreate you in a big simulation or promise you things in the outside world (like in my other post), then that's not hacking your decision making, but a fair deal, and you should in fact let that influence your decisions. 

Is your position that the problem is deeper than this, and there is no objective prior over worlds, it's just a thing like ethics that we choose for ourselves, and then later can bargain and trade with other beings who have a different prior of realness?

I think it only came up once for a friend. I translated it and it makes sense, it just leaves replaces the appropriate English verb with a Chinese one in the middle of a sentence. (I note that this often happens with me to when I talk with my friends in Hungarian, I'm sometimes more used to the English phrase for something, and say one word in English in the middle of the sentence.)

I like your poem on Twitter.

I think that Boltzmann brains in particular are probably very low measure though, at least if you use Solomonoff induction. If you think that weighting observer moments within a Universe by their description complexity is crazy (which I kind of feel), then you need to come up with a different measure on observer moments, but I expect that if we find a satisfying measure, Boltzmann brains will be low measure in that too.

I agree that there's no real answer to "where you are", you are a superposition of beings across the multiverse, sure. But I think probabilities are kind of real, if you make up some definition of what beings are sufficiently similar to you that you consider them "you", then you can have a probability distribution over where those beings are, and it's a fair equivalent rephrasing to say "I'm in this type of situation with this probability". (This is what I do in the post. Very unclear though why you'd ever want to estimate that, that's why I say that probabilities are cursed.) 

I think expected utilities are still reasonable. When you make a decision, you can estimate who are the beings whose decision correlate with this one, and what is the impact of each of their decisions, and calculate the sum of all that. I think it's fair to call this sum expected utility. It's possible that you don't want to optimize for the direct sum, but for something determined by "coalition dynamics", I don't understand the details well enough to really have an opinion. 

(My guess is we don't have real disagreement here and it's just a question of phrasing, but tell me if you think we disagree in a deeper way.)

I think that pleading total agnosticism towards the simulators' goals is not enough. I write "one common interest of all possible simulators is for us to cede power to an AI whose job is to figure out the distribution of values of possible simulators as best as it can, then serve those values." So I think you need a better reason to guard against being influenced then "I can't know what they want, everything and its opposite is equally likely", because the action proposed above is pretty clearly more favored by the simulators than not doing it. 

Btw, I don't actually want to fully "guard against being influenced by the simulators", I would in fact like to make deals with them, but reasonable deals where we get our fair share of value, instead of being stupidly tricked like the Oracle and ceding all our value for one observable turning out positively. I might later write a post about what kind of deals I would actually support.

The simulators can just use a random number generator to generate the events you use in your decision-making. They lose no information by this, your decision based on leaves falling on your face would be uncorrelated anyway with all other decisions anyway from their perspective, so they might as well replace it with a random number generator. (In reality, there might be some hidden correlation between the leaf falling on your left face, and another leaf falling on someone else's face, as both events are causally downstream of the weather, but given that the process is chaotic, the simulators would have no way to determine this correlation, so they might as well replace it with randomness, the simulation doesn't become any less informative.)

Separately, I don't object to being sometimes forked and used in solipsist branches, I usually enjoy myself, so I'm fine with the simulators creating more moments of me, so I have no motive to try schemes that make it harder to make solipsist simulations of me.

I experimented a bunch with DeepSeek today, it seems to be exactly on the same level in highs school competition math as o1-preview in my experiments. So I don't think it's benchmark-gaming, at least in math. On the other hand, it's noticeably worse than even the original GPT-4 at understanding a short story I also always test models on.

I think it's also very noteworthy that DeepSeek gives everyone 50 free messages a day (!) with their CoT model, while OpenAI only gives 30 o1-preview messages a week to subscribers. I assume they figured out how to run it much cheaper, but I'm confused in general.

A positive part of the news is that unlike o1, they show their actual chain of thought, and they promise to make their model open-source soon. I think this is really great for the science of studying faithful chain of thought.

From the experiments I have run, it looks like it is doing clear, interpretable English chain of thought (though with an occasional Chinese character once in a while), and I think it didn't really yet start evolving into optimized alien gibberish. I think this part of the news is a positive update.

Yes, I agree that we won't get such Oracles by training. As I said, all of this is mostly just a fun thought experiment, and I don't think these arguments have much relevance in the near-term.

I agree that the part where the Oracle can infer from first principles that the aliens' values are more proobably more common among potential simulators is also speculative. But I expect that superintelligent AIs with access to a lot of compute (so they might run simulations on their own), will in fact be able to infer non-zero information about the distribution of the simulators' values, and that's enough for the argument to go through.

I think that the standard simulation argument is still pretty strong: If the world was like what it looks to be, then probably we could, and plausibly we would, create lots of simulations. Therefore, we are probably in a simulation.

I agree that all the rest, for example the Oracle assuming that most of the simulations it appears in are created for anthropic capture/influencing reasons, are pretty speculative and I have low confidence in them.