But most of the deficiencies you point out in the third column of that table is about missing and insufficient risk analysis. E.g.:
“RSPs doesn’t argue why systems passing evals are safe”.
“the ISO standard asks the organization to define risk thresholds”
“ISO proposes a much more comprehensive procedure than RSPs”
“RSPs don’t seem to cover capabilities interaction as a major source of risk”
“imply significant chances to be stolen by Russia or China (...). What are the risks downstream of that?”
If people took your proposal as a minimum bar for how thorough a risk management proposal would be, before publishing, it seems like that would interfere with labs being able to “post the work they are doing as they do it, so people can give feedback and input”.
This makes me wonder: Would your concerns be mostly addressed if ARC had published a suggestion for a much more comprehensive risk management framework, and explicitly said “these are the principles that we want labs’ risk-management proposals to conform to within a few years, but we encourage less-thorough risk management proposals before then, so that we can get some commitments on the table ASAP, and so that labs can iterate in public. And such less-thorough risk management proposals should prioritize covering x, y, z.”
Would your concerns be mostly addressed if ARC had published a suggestion for a much more comprehensive risk management framework, and explicitly said “these are the principles that we want labs’ risk-management proposals to conform to within a few years, but we encourage less-thorough risk management proposals before then, so that we can get some commitments on the table ASAP, and so that labs can iterate in public. And such less-thorough risk management proposals should prioritize covering x, y, z.”
Great question! A few points:
Yes, many of the things I point are “how to do things well” and I would in fact much prefer something that contains a section “we are striving towards that and our current effort is insufficient” than the current RSP communication which is more “here’s how to responsibly scale”.
That said, I think we disagree on the reference class of the effort (you say “a few years”). I think that you could do a very solid MVP of what I suggest with like 5 FTEs over 6 months.
As I wrote in “How to move forward” (worth skimming to understand what I’d change) I think that RSPs would be incredibly better if they:
had a different name
said that they are insufficient
linked to a post which says “here’s the actual thing which is needed to make us safe”.
Answer to your question: if I were optimizing in the paradigm of voluntary lab commitments as ARC is, yes I would much prefer that. I flagged early though that because labs are definitely not allies on this (because an actual risk assessment is likely to output “stop”), I think the “ask labs kindly” strategy is pretty doomed and I would much prefer a version of ARC trying to acquire bargaining power through a way or another (policy, PR threat etc.) rather than adapting their framework until labs accept to sign them.
Regarding
If people took your proposal as a minimum bar for how thorough a risk management proposal would be, before publishing, it seems like that would interfere with labs being able to “post the work they are doing as they do it, so people can give feedback and input”.
I don’t think it’s necessarily right, e.g. “the ISO standard asks the organization to define risk thresholds” could be a very simple task, much simpler than developing a full eval. The tricky thing is just to ensure we comply with such levels (and the inability to do that obviously reveals a lack of safety).
“ISO proposes a much more comprehensive procedure than RSPs”, it’s not right either that it would take longer, it’s just that there exists risk management tools, that you can run in like a few days, that helps having a very broad coverage of the scenario set.
“imply significant chances to be stolen by Russia or China (...). What are the risks downstream of that?” once again you can cover the most obvious things in like a couple pages. Writing “Maybe they would give the weights to their team of hackers, which increases substantially the chances of leak and global cyberoffence increase”. And I would be totally fine with half-baked things if they were communicated as such and not as RSPs are.
But most of the deficiencies you point out in the third column of that table is about missing and insufficient risk analysis. E.g.:
“RSPs doesn’t argue why systems passing evals are safe”.
“the ISO standard asks the organization to define risk thresholds”
“ISO proposes a much more comprehensive procedure than RSPs”
“RSPs don’t seem to cover capabilities interaction as a major source of risk”
“imply significant chances to be stolen by Russia or China (...). What are the risks downstream of that?”
If people took your proposal as a minimum bar for how thorough a risk management proposal would be, before publishing, it seems like that would interfere with labs being able to “post the work they are doing as they do it, so people can give feedback and input”.
This makes me wonder: Would your concerns be mostly addressed if ARC had published a suggestion for a much more comprehensive risk management framework, and explicitly said “these are the principles that we want labs’ risk-management proposals to conform to within a few years, but we encourage less-thorough risk management proposals before then, so that we can get some commitments on the table ASAP, and so that labs can iterate in public. And such less-thorough risk management proposals should prioritize covering x, y, z.”
Great question! A few points:
Yes, many of the things I point are “how to do things well” and I would in fact much prefer something that contains a section “we are striving towards that and our current effort is insufficient” than the current RSP communication which is more “here’s how to responsibly scale”.
That said, I think we disagree on the reference class of the effort (you say “a few years”). I think that you could do a very solid MVP of what I suggest with like 5 FTEs over 6 months.
As I wrote in “How to move forward” (worth skimming to understand what I’d change) I think that RSPs would be incredibly better if they:
had a different name
said that they are insufficient
linked to a post which says “here’s the actual thing which is needed to make us safe”.
Answer to your question: if I were optimizing in the paradigm of voluntary lab commitments as ARC is, yes I would much prefer that. I flagged early though that because labs are definitely not allies on this (because an actual risk assessment is likely to output “stop”), I think the “ask labs kindly” strategy is pretty doomed and I would much prefer a version of ARC trying to acquire bargaining power through a way or another (policy, PR threat etc.) rather than adapting their framework until labs accept to sign them.
Regarding
I don’t think it’s necessarily right, e.g. “the ISO standard asks the organization to define risk thresholds” could be a very simple task, much simpler than developing a full eval. The tricky thing is just to ensure we comply with such levels (and the inability to do that obviously reveals a lack of safety).
“ISO proposes a much more comprehensive procedure than RSPs”, it’s not right either that it would take longer, it’s just that there exists risk management tools, that you can run in like a few days, that helps having a very broad coverage of the scenario set.
“imply significant chances to be stolen by Russia or China (...). What are the risks downstream of that?” once again you can cover the most obvious things in like a couple pages. Writing “Maybe they would give the weights to their team of hackers, which increases substantially the chances of leak and global cyberoffence increase”. And I would be totally fine with half-baked things if they were communicated as such and not as RSPs are.
Has anyone made such a credible, detailed, and comprehensive list?
If not, what would it look like in your opinion?