Tomek Korbak

Paper link Before releasing a new model, labs need to understand not just what it can do, but how it is likely to behave in real-world use, including where it might introduce new risks. This becomes even more important as capabilities increase. As part of our pre-deployment safety review, we...

Authors: Yueh-Han Chen, Robert McCarthy, Bruce W. Lee, He He, Ian Kivlichan, Bowen Baker, Micah Carroll, Tomek Korbak In collaboration with OpenAI TL;DR: Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring can detect misbehavior in reasoning models, but only if models cannot control what they verbalize. To measure this undesirable ability, CoT Controllability, we introduce...

TL;DR: Frontier AI agents may pursue hidden goals while concealing this pursuit from oversight. Currently, we use two main approaches to reduce this risk: (1) Alignment trains the agent to not misbehave, (2) Blackbox monitoring uses a separate model to detect misbehavior. We study a third approach—self-incrimination—which trains agents to...

Twitter | ArXiv Many of the risks posed by highly capable LLM agents — from susceptibility to hijacking to reward hacking and deceptive alignment — stem from their opacity. If we could reliably monitor the reasoning processes underlying AI decisions, many of those risks would become far more tractable. Compared...

tldr: Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a proposed safety mechanism for overseeing AI systems, but its effectiveness against deliberately obfuscated reasoning remains unproven. "Obfuscated" reasoning refers to reasoning which would not be understood by a human, but which contains information that a model could understand in principle, for example model-encrypted reasoning....

The Alignment Project is a global fund of over £15 million, dedicated to accelerating progress in AI control and alignment research. It is backed by an international coalition of governments, industry, venture capital and philanthropic funders. This post is part of a sequence on research areas that we are excited...

The Alignment Project is a global fund of over £15 million, dedicated to accelerating progress in AI control and alignment research. It is backed by an international coalition of governments, industry, venture capital and philanthropic funders. This sequence sets out the research areas we are excited to fund – we...