A competing hypothesis is just that a more capable model (and also one trained more for long-term agency) becomes more bold/reckless without deep alignment training. AI companies at the moment probably don’t even know how to do alignment training with depth (as far as I’m aware, their interventions are at a superficial level like “evaluate outputs” or “write a constitution”).
I think the Waluigi hypothesis is interesting but it seems quite complicated when there’s a simple alternative explanation? I know you also mention language from the constitution being used, but my sense is that LLMs get linguistic tics all the time, and as other commenters have pointed out elsewhere, the causality could also be that an earlier model of Claude (which may already have had that writing pattern) was used to help write the constitution.
Yes, I had thought about that… I don’t have the capacity to show conclusively that the misalignment effects on vending bench are not entirely due to capability increases, but what still holds, and is interesting by itself, is that in the new models with the new constitution, both misalignment (e.g. dishonesty, power seeking) and virtue signalling have increased. And so this can be seen as reward hackign, though perhaps these are separate phenomena, and not a WaLuigi effect.
A competing hypothesis is just that a more capable model (and also one trained more for long-term agency) becomes more bold/reckless without deep alignment training. AI companies at the moment probably don’t even know how to do alignment training with depth (as far as I’m aware, their interventions are at a superficial level like “evaluate outputs” or “write a constitution”).
I think the Waluigi hypothesis is interesting but it seems quite complicated when there’s a simple alternative explanation? I know you also mention language from the constitution being used, but my sense is that LLMs get linguistic tics all the time, and as other commenters have pointed out elsewhere, the causality could also be that an earlier model of Claude (which may already have had that writing pattern) was used to help write the constitution.
Yes, I had thought about that… I don’t have the capacity to show conclusively that the misalignment effects on vending bench are not entirely due to capability increases, but what still holds, and is interesting by itself, is that in the new models with the new constitution, both misalignment (e.g. dishonesty, power seeking) and virtue signalling have increased. And so this can be seen as reward hackign, though perhaps these are separate phenomena, and not a WaLuigi effect.