Third, we gave the model a secret “scratchpad”—a workspace where it could record its step-by-step reasoning. We told the model to use the scratchpad to reason about what it should do (as far as the model was aware, the scratchpad was invisible to users and to Anthropic). This allowed us to observe whether the model planned to fake alignment, and how it would go about doing so.
This feels like amusingly like tricking a child. “Remember kiddo, you can reason out loud about where you’re going to hide and I won’t hear it. Now let’s play hide and seek!”
Notably we do show results where the model will still exhibit a compliance gap even without a hidden scratchpad (though we only see a substantial effect without a hidden scratchpad in our synthetic document fine-tuned setting, not our prompted setting):
Agree, I’m surprised that a model which can reason about its own training process wouldn’t also reason that the “secret scratchpad” might actually be surveilled and so avoid recording any controversial thoughts there. But it’s lucky for us that some of these models have been willing to write interesting things on the scratchpad at least at current capability levels and below, because Anthropic has sure produced some interesting results from it (IIRC they used the scratchpad technique in at least one other paper).
This feels like amusingly like tricking a child. “Remember kiddo, you can reason out loud about where you’re going to hide and I won’t hear it. Now let’s play hide and seek!”
Notably we do show results where the model will still exhibit a compliance gap even without a hidden scratchpad (though we only see a substantial effect without a hidden scratchpad in our synthetic document fine-tuned setting, not our prompted setting):
Agree, I’m surprised that a model which can reason about its own training process wouldn’t also reason that the “secret scratchpad” might actually be surveilled and so avoid recording any controversial thoughts there. But it’s lucky for us that some of these models have been willing to write interesting things on the scratchpad at least at current capability levels and below, because Anthropic has sure produced some interesting results from it (IIRC they used the scratchpad technique in at least one other paper).