A single principal is envisioned preferentially to a committee. However, I think a committee presents genuine interest in terms of alignment.
First, human values constitute a set or a field. A single principal does not seem capable of mapping the entire set or field of human values. On the contrary, the more the principal were represented by a large committee, the more it would be likely to correctly map what we mean by human values.
Next, the key could be collective intelligence. Bees and ants are not very intelligent individually, but their collective intelligence is significant. Unity creates intellectual strength. If we set aside Moloch, overall humanity’s collective intelligence is clearly superior to that of any individual. For example, even a genius like Einstein was not capable of finding the best solutions to all the problems of his time. The entire group of participants at the Solvay Conference represented a collective intelligence strictly superior and significantly superior to that of Einstein alone. Thus, a principal composed of multiple individuals would have considerably less chance of being deceived. You can fool one person a thousand times but not a thousand people a thousand times, as they say. Thus a committee-principal could, according to your protocol, communicate with an advisor very slightly more intelligent. Let’s say the ratio between the committee-principal and the advisor is 10 to 1, it would be possible to increase the levels as proposed in the article by operating a scaling respecting this ratio at each stage. Thus a level 3 advisor would have a ratio of 1000 to 1 with the base committee-principal. This could quickly become problematic for the base level represented by humans. However, if the process seems to work well, it would be possible to admit an exception and cap the size of the human committee. On the other hand, all the other AI levels could effectively respect the ratio fixed in advance.
Currently we have an ELO ranking of LLMs on METR. It would be interesting to formally evaluate the gain related to collective intelligence. Let’s say that o3, Claude Opus 4, and Gemini 2.5 collaborate to take the METR test, the fruit of their collaboration should provide a score slightly superior to that of any of the 3 taken in isolation. We could repeat the operation by having all sorts of combinations of LLMs with different ELO scores collaborate. We should eventually be able to statistically infer a collective intelligence function from this, probably non-linear (exponential diminishing returns). We could then use this function to define the appropriate ratio to bridge an intelligence gap evaluated by METR (or its equivalent in the future) between an AI committee composed by individuals wich ELO score would be lower, occupying the role of principal a lower ELO score and an AI occupying the role of advisor with a higher ELO score. That way, the committee-principal would have a collective intelligence on par with or even superior to that of the advisor.
A single principal is envisioned preferentially to a committee. However, I think a committee presents genuine interest in terms of alignment.
First, human values constitute a set or a field. A single principal does not seem capable of mapping the entire set or field of human values. On the contrary, the more the principal were represented by a large committee, the more it would be likely to correctly map what we mean by human values.
Next, the key could be collective intelligence. Bees and ants are not very intelligent individually, but their collective intelligence is significant. Unity creates intellectual strength. If we set aside Moloch, overall humanity’s collective intelligence is clearly superior to that of any individual. For example, even a genius like Einstein was not capable of finding the best solutions to all the problems of his time. The entire group of participants at the Solvay Conference represented a collective intelligence strictly superior and significantly superior to that of Einstein alone. Thus, a principal composed of multiple individuals would have considerably less chance of being deceived. You can fool one person a thousand times but not a thousand people a thousand times, as they say. Thus a committee-principal could, according to your protocol, communicate with an advisor very slightly more intelligent. Let’s say the ratio between the committee-principal and the advisor is 10 to 1, it would be possible to increase the levels as proposed in the article by operating a scaling respecting this ratio at each stage. Thus a level 3 advisor would have a ratio of 1000 to 1 with the base committee-principal. This could quickly become problematic for the base level represented by humans. However, if the process seems to work well, it would be possible to admit an exception and cap the size of the human committee. On the other hand, all the other AI levels could effectively respect the ratio fixed in advance.
Currently we have an ELO ranking of LLMs on METR. It would be interesting to formally evaluate the gain related to collective intelligence. Let’s say that o3, Claude Opus 4, and Gemini 2.5 collaborate to take the METR test, the fruit of their collaboration should provide a score slightly superior to that of any of the 3 taken in isolation. We could repeat the operation by having all sorts of combinations of LLMs with different ELO scores collaborate. We should eventually be able to statistically infer a collective intelligence function from this, probably non-linear (exponential diminishing returns). We could then use this function to define the appropriate ratio to bridge an intelligence gap evaluated by METR (or its equivalent in the future) between an AI committee composed by individuals wich ELO score would be lower, occupying the role of principal a lower ELO score and an AI occupying the role of advisor with a higher ELO score. That way, the committee-principal would have a collective intelligence on par with or even superior to that of the advisor.