LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

A pdf version of this report is available here. Summary. In this report we argue that AI systems capable of large scale scientific research will likely pursue unwanted goals and this will lead to catastrophic outcomes. We argue this is the default outcome, even with significant countermeasures, given the current trajectory of AI development. In Section 1 we discuss the tasks which are the focus of...

This is a linkpost for https://rootsofprogress.org/the-block-funding-model-for-scienceWhen Galileo wanted to study the heavens through his telescope, he got money from those legendary patrons of the Renaissance, the Medici. To win their favor, when he discovered the moons of Jupiter, he named them the Medicean Stars. Other scientists and inventors offered flashy gifts, such as Cornelis Drebbel&apo...

Let your every day be full of joy, love the child that holds your hand, let your wife delight in your embrace, for these alone are the concerns of humanity.[1] — Epic of Gilgamesh - Tablet X Say we want to train a scientist AI to help in a precise, narrow field of science (e.g. medicine design) but prevent its power from being applied anywhere else (e.g. chatting with humans, designing bio-weapons...

We are organising the 9th edition without funds. We have no personal runway left to do this again. We will not run the 10th edition without funding. In a nutshell: Last month, we put out AI Safety Camp's funding case.  A private donor then decided to donate €5K.    Five more donors offered $7K on Manifund.  For that $7K to not be wiped out and returned, another $21K in funding is needed. At t...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Crossposted from substack . As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry. Four billion years of evolution endowed our brains with a simple, straightforward mechanism to make sure we occasionally get an energy refuel so we can continue the fora...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tEPHGZAb63dfq2v8n/how-useful-is-mechanistic-interpretability Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration. [Curated Post] ✓ [ 125+ Karma Post]  ✓

This is a linkpost for https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZAsJv7xijKTfZkMtr/sleeper-agents-training- deceptive-llms-that-persist-through Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration. [Curated Post] ✓ [ 125+ Karma Post] ✓

I wrote this entire post in February of 2023, during the fallout from the TIME article. I didn't post it at the time for multiple reasons: because I had no desire to get involved in all that nonsense because I was horribly burned out from my own community conflict investigation and couldn't stand the thought of engaging with people online because I generally think it's bad to post o...

"( Cross-posted from my website . Audio version here , or search "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.)" T his is the first essay in a series that I’m calling “Otherness and control in the age of AGI.” See here for more about the series as a whole. ) When species meet The most succinct argument for AI risk, in my opinion, is the “second species” argument. Basically, it goe...

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. Following on from our recent paper, “Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training”, I’m very excited to announce that I have started leading a new team at Anthropic, the Alignment Stress-Testing team, with Carson Denison and Monte MacDiarmid as current team members. Our mission—an...

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. This is a linkpost for https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566I'm not going to add a bunch of commentary here on top of what we've already put out, since we've put a lot of effort into the paper itself, and I'd mostly just recommend reading it directly, especially since there are a lot of subtle res...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated The goal of this post is to clarify a few concepts relating to AI Alignment under a common framework. The main concepts to be clarified: Optimization. Specifically, this will be a type of Vingean agency . It will split into Selection vs Control variants. Reference (the relationship which holds between map...

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. Thanks to Clément Dumas, Nikola Jurković, Nora Belrose, Arthur Conmy, and Oam Patel for feedback. In the comments of the post on Google Deepmind's CCS challenges paper, I expressed skepticism that some of the experimental results seemed possible. When addressing my concerns, Rohin Shah made some claims alon...

(Cross-posted from my website. Audio version here, or search "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This is the first essay in a series that I’m calling “Otherness and control in the age of AGI.” See here for more about the series as a whole.) When species meet The most succinct argument for AI risk, in my opinion, is the “second species” argument. Basically, it goes like this. Premi...

As we announced back in October, I have taken on the senior leadership role at MIRI as its CEO. It's a big pair of shoes to fill, and an awesome responsibility that I’m honored to take on. There have been several changes at MIRI since our 2020 strategic update, so let's get into it.[1] The short version: We think it's very unlikely that the AI alignment field will be able to make pr...

Background: The Plan, The Plan: 2022 Update. If you haven’t read those, don’t worry, we’re going to go through things from the top this year, and with moderately more detail than before. 1. What's Your Plan For AI Alignment? Median happy trajectory: Sort out our fundamental confusions about agency and abstraction enough to do interpretability that works and generalizes robustly. Look through...

In certain circumstances, apologizing can also be a countersignalling power-move, i.e. “I am so high status that I can grovel a bit without anybody mistaking me for a general groveller”. But that's not really the type of move this post is focused on. There's this narrative about a tradeoff between: The virtue of Saying Oops, early and often, correcting course rather than continuing to po...

This is a linkpost for https://unstableontology.com/2023/12/31/a-case-for-ai-alignment-being-difficult/ Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated This is an attempt to distill a model of AGI alignment that I have gained primarily from thinkers such as Eliezer Yudkowsky (and to a lesser extent Paul Christiano), but explained in my own terms rather...

lsusrIt is my understanding that you won all of your public forum debates this year. That's very impressive. I thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the techniques you used. LyrongolemOf course! So, just for a brief overview for those who don't know, public forum is a 2v2 debate format, usually on a policy topic. One of the more interesting ones has been the last one I went...

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. This is a review of Paul Christiano's article "where I agree and disagree with Eliezer". Written for the LessWrong 2022 Review. In the existential AI safety community, there is an ongoing debate between positions situated differently on some axis which doesn't have a common agreed-upon name,...

This point feels fairly obvious, yet seems worth stating explicitly. Those of us familiar with the field of AI after the deep-learning revolution know perfectly well that we have no idea how our ML models work. Sure, we have an understanding of the dynamics of training loops and SGD's properties, and we know how ML models' architectures work. But we don't know what specific algorith...

TL;DR: Contrast-consistent search (CCS) seemed exciting to us and we were keen to apply it. At this point, we think it is unlikely to be directly helpful for implementations of alignment strategies (>95%). Instead of finding knowledge, it seems to find the most prominent feature. We are less sure about the wider category of unsupervised consistency-based methods, but tend to think they won’t be...

This is a linkpost for https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/succession“A table beside the evening sea where you sit shelling pistachios, flicking the next open with the half- shell of the last, story opening story, on down to the sandy end of time.” V1: Leaving Deceleration is the hardest part. Even after burning almost all of my fuel, I’m still coming in at 0.8c. I’ve planned a slingshot around the gal...

Recently, Ben Pace wrote a well-intentioned blog post mostly based on complaints from 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees who 1) wanted more money, 2) felt socially isolated, and 3) felt persecuted/oppressed. Of relevance, one has accused the majority of her previous employers, and 28 people of abuse - that we know of. She has accused multiple people of threatening to kill her and literally accused an e...

The New York Times Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek's Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about...