I feel for the position you’re in - I wish I had more that is useful to say. I also worry about future career prospects, what a world looks like where people can’t find work, etc. I think it’s really understandable to be feeling concerned

If I were in your position, I’d try to separate out “Should I go into something like a trade?” from “And if so, should I leave college now?” If you think you’d enjoy a trade, that does strike me as a reasonable career to choose (which might or might not mean leaving college). At least in the US there’s pretty good money to be made by being a small business owner of a reliable trade service, or so is my impression. Note that this is different of course than being new to the trade and reasonably might take a while to transition over (not sure exactly how long), but many trades are undersupplied even at a worker level (again in the US)

I think there’s a broader question to consider here, which is “what are your values/goals for life”, both professionally and personally. If your preferred lens were social impact, that might look different than if you’re eg just trying to live a happy enough, stable enough life with the people you love. I don’t have great advice here, but I wonder if you’ve looked over resources like 80,000 Hours in terms of thinking about career choice?

Unfortunately it seems that OpenAI has walked back the Preparedness Framework's previous commitment to testing fine-tuned versions of its models, and also did not highlight this among the changes. I tweeted a bit more detail here

What do you mean here by "does not mean anything"?

It seems clear to me that there's some notion of off-the-record that journalists understand.

This might vary on details, and I agree is probably not legally binding, but it does seem to mean something.

I appreciate the feedback. That’s interesting about the plane vs. car analogy - I tended to think about these analogies in terms of life/casualties, and for whatever reason, describing an internal test-flight didn’t rise to that level for me (and if it’s civilian passengers, that’s an external deployment). I also wanted to convey the idea not just that internal testing could cause external harm, but that you might irreparably breach containment. Anyway, appreciate the explanation, and I hope you enjoyed the post overall!

Scaffolding for sure matters, yup!

I think you're generally correct that the most-capable version hasn't been created, though there are times where AI companies do have specialized versions for a domain internally, and don't seem to be testing these anyway. It's reasonable IMO to think that these might outperform the unspecialized versions.

Daniel said:

Thanks for doing this, I found the chart very helpful! I'm honestly a bit surprised and sad to see that task-specific fine-tuning is still not the norm. Back in 2022 when our team was getting the ball rolling on the whole dangerous capabilities testing / evals agenda, I was like "All of this will be worse than useless if they don't eventually make fine-tuning an important part of the evals" and everyone was like "yep of course we'll get there eventually, for now we will do the weaker elicitation techniques." It is now almost three years later...

The post is now live on Substack, and link-posted to LW:

https://stevenadler.substack.com/p/ai-companies-should-be-safety-testing

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tQzeafo9HjCeXn7ZF/ai-companies-should-be-safety-testing-the-most-capable

I’ve only seen this excerpt, but it seems to me like Jack isn’t just arguing against regulation because it might slow progress - and rather something more like:

“there’s some optimal time to have a safety intervention, and if you do it too early because your timeline bet was wrong, you risk having worse practices at the actually critical time because of backlash”

This seems probably correct to me? I think ideally we’d be able to be cautious early and still win the arguments to be appropriately cautious later too. But empirically, I think it’s fair not to take as a given?

You might find this post interesting and relevant if you haven’t seen it before: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/iq_with_conscie.html

I’d guess that was “I have a lecture series with her” :-)