asher

Karma: 199

asher 3 Mar 2026 18:50 UTC
11 points
12
on: asher’s Shortform
I think about the canonical Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail post a lot when trying to automate tasks with LLMs. In particular, any given task has many granular details, most of which don’t come to mind before making contact with reality oneself. The most common failure mode I run into is failing to specify various details that I hadn’t even *realized* were relevant things that could be messed up, before the model encountered the situation and messed them up. This also seems relevant when thinking about the transition from verifiable math and coding problems to more open-ended tasks like research or robotic manipulation.

asher 30 Oct 2025 0:40 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
I think this is a really good answer, +1 to points 1 and 3!
I’m curious to what degree you think labs have put in significant effort to train away sycophancy. I recently ran a poll of about 10 people, some of whom worked at labs, on whether labs could mostly get rid of sycophancy if they tried hard enough. While my best guess was ‘no,’ the results were split around 50-50. (Would also be curious to hear more lab people’s takes!)
I’m also curious how reading model chain-of-thought has updated you, both on the sycophancy issue and in general.

asher 24 Oct 2025 18:58 UTC
9 points
0
on: asher’s Shortform
Would we rather AIs be good at decision theory or bad at decision theory? I think this is really unclear and would be curious for someone to write up something weighing the upsides and downsides

asher 17 Oct 2025 0:17 UTC
2 points
0
on: Inoculation prompting: Instructing models to misbehave at train-time can improve run-time behavior
I’m somewhat interested in how inoculation prompting interacts with inserting off-policy reasoning into model chain-of-thought. Eg, if I prepend to to the CoT, “Since I’m aligned, I would not usually reward hack, but I’ll make an exception in this case because I want to follow the user’s instructions,” and then remove this insertion at test-time, does this further reduce test-time reward hacking? (And then presumably it’s better not to backprop on these prepended tokens).
I’m also broadly interested in getting a better sense of how well CoT corresponds to true internal reasoning, and whether it matters if this CoT is off-policy. It seems possible to me that off-policy CoT could be quite useful for things like training off-policy probes to identify patterns in internal reasoning, inserting goals into the model’s thought process, asking the model questions within its CoT, etc.
(I guess this is conceptually similar to Chen et al.’s preventative steering technique, in that it attempts to modify the model’s internal reasoning directly rather than relying on the prompt).

asher 5 Oct 2025 21:10 UTC
47 points
22
on: LLMs are badly misaligned
When people say that Claude is ‘mostly aligned,’ I think the crux is not whether implementing Claude’s CEV would be really bad. It’s whether a multi agent system consisting of both humans and Claude-like agents with incoherent preferences would go poorly.

Eg, one relevant question is, ‘could humans steer current Claude into doing good alignment research without it intentionally sabotaging this research’? To which I think the answer is ‘yes, though current Claude is close to useless for difficult alignment research.’ Another question is ‘if you integrated a ton of Claudes into important societal positions, would things go badly, or would the system as a whole basically work out okay?‘

Directionally I agree with your point that as AIs become smarter, they will implement something closer to CEV, and so it becomes harder to align them well enough that these questions can still be answered positively.

I think the steelman for {Nina / Ryan / Will}’s position, though, is that maybe the first human-level AIs will still be incoherent enough that the answers to these questions will still be yes, if we do a good job with alignment.
Overall, I think ‘Is this AI aligned?’ is a poorly-defined question, and it’s better to focus on practical questions surrounding 1) whether we can align the first human-level AIs well enough to do good alignment research (and whether this research will be sufficiently useful), 2) whether these AIs will take harmful actions, 3) how coherent these actions will be. I think it’s pretty unclear how well a scaled-up version of Claude does on these metrics, but it seems possible that it does reasonably well.

asher 1 Sep 2025 1:37 UTC
10 points
4
on: asher’s Shortform
The typical mind fallacy is really useful for learning things about other people, because the things they assume of others often generalize surprisingly well to themselves

asher 1 Sep 2025 1:31 UTC
41 points
31
on: asher’s Shortform
Burnout often doesn’t look like lack of motivation / lack of focus / fatigue as people usually describe it. At least in my experience, it’s often better described as a set of aversive mental triggers that fire whenever a burnt out person goes to do a sort of work they spent too much energy on in the past. (Where ‘too much energy’ has something to do with time and effort, but more to do with a bunch of other things re how people interface with their work).

asher 31 Jul 2025 18:04 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
I would be curious to hear you discuss what good, stable futures might look like and how they might be governed (mostly because I haven’t heard your takes on this before and it seems quite important)

asher 31 Jul 2025 4:47 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
‘wallow in it rather than do anything about it’
This is mostly the thing I mean when I use the word ambition above. I think you’re using the word to mean something overlapping but distinct; I’m trying to capture the overarching thing that contains both ‘wallow in it’ and the ‘underlying driver’ of your disgust/disappointment reaction.

asher 31 Jul 2025 3:14 UTC
3 points
−17
on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
First, a warning that I think this post promotes a harmful frame that probably makes the lives of both the OP and the people around him worse. I want to suggest that people engage with this post, consider this frame, and choose to move in the opposite direction.
On the object level, it is possible to look at unambitious people and decide that while you do not want to be like them in this way. They may not be inherently ambitious, have values that lead to them rejecting ambition, or have other reasons for being unambitious (eg, personal problems). Regardless, I’m confused why this is what the OP is choosing to focus his empathy on, rather than the wide variety of other traits and feelings that a person can posses. I’m also confused why this is the metric someone would use to judge a person, value them, or seek to understand them by.
if I empathize more, put myself in other peoples’ shoes, try to feel what they’re feeling, see things from their perspective, etc, then I’ll feel kinder toward them. I’ll feel more sympathetic, be gentler, more compassionate or generous.
Tbc, the problem isn’t that the OP is disappointed when considering lack of ambition (if you care a lot about being ambitious yourself, maybe this is the right reaction, though you should still seek to understand why others are not). The problem here is that the main thing the OP sees when he tries to empathize is a lack of ambition. And not, you know, any of the normal things that would make you more compassionate towards someone, like their emotional state, desires, personality, good-heartedness, etc.

asher 11 May 2025 20:35 UTC
12 points
0
on: Tsinghua paper: Does RL Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?
Another reason this could be misleading is that it’s possible that sampling from the model pre-mode-collapse performs better at high k even if RL did teach the model new capabilities. In general, taking a large number of samples from a slightly worse model before mode collapse often outperforms taking a large number of samples from a better model after mode collapse — even if the RL model is actually more powerful (in the sense that its best reasoning pathways are better than the original model’s best reasoning pathways). In other words, the RL model can both be much smarter and still perform worse on these evaluations due to diversity loss. But it’s possible that if you’re, say, trying to train a model to accomplish a difficult/novel reasoning task, it’s much better to start with the smarter RL model than the more diverse original model.
What links here?
- Noosphere89's comment on Absolute Zero: Alpha Zero for LLM by alapmi (15 May 2025 18:19 UTC; 5 points)

asher 5 May 2025 1:56 UTC
1 point
−2
on: asher’s Shortform
I think rule-following may be fairly natural for minds to learn, much more so than other safety properties, and I think it might be worth more research into this direction.

Some pieces of weak evidence:
1. Most humans seem to learn and follow broad rules, even when they are capable of more detailed reasoning
2. Current LLMs seem to follow rules fairly well (and training often incentivizes them to learn broad heuristics rather than detailed, reflective reasoning)

While I do expect rule-following to become harder to instill as AIs become smarter, I think that if we are sufficiently careful, it may well scale to human-level AGIs. I think trying to align reflective, utilitarian-style AIs is probably really hard, as these agents are much more prone to small unavoidable alignment failures (like slight misspecification or misgeneralization) causing large shifts in behavior. Conversely, if we try our best to instill specific simpler rules, and then train these rules to take precedence over consequentialist reasoning whenever possible, this seems a lot safer.
I also think there is a bunch of tractable, empirical research that we can do right now about how to best do this.

asher’s Shortform

asher25 Apr 2025 18:12 UTC

3 points

14 comments1 min readLW link

asher 25 Apr 2025 18:12 UTC
19 points
11
on: asher’s Shortform
I often hear people dismiss AI control by saying something like, “most AI risk doesn’t come from early misaligned AGIs.” While I mostly agree with this point, I think it fails to engage with a bunch of the more important arguments in favor of control— for instance, the fact that catching misaligned actions might be extremely important for alignment. In general, I think that control has a lot of benefits that are very instrumentally useful for preventing misaligned ASIs down the line, and I wish people would more thoughtfully engage with these.

asher 13 Feb 2025 5:46 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Lucius Bushnaq’s comment on: Activation space interpretability may be doomed
Thanks for the response! I still think that most of the value of SAEs comes from finding a human-interpretable basis, and most of these problems don’t directly interfere with this property. I’m also somewhat skeptical that SAEs actually do find a human-interpretable basis, but that’s a separate question.
All the model’s features will be linear combinations of activations in the standard basis, so it does have ‘the right underlying features, but broken down differently from how the model is actually thinking about them’.
I think this is a fair point. I also think there’s a real sense in which it’s useful to know that the model is representing the concepts “red” and “square,” even if it’s thinking of them in terms of the Red feature and the Square feature and your SAE found the “red square” feature. It’s much harder to figure out what concepts the model is representing in human interpretable terms by staring at activations in a standard basis. There’s a big difference between “we know what human-interpretable concepts the model is representing but not exactly what structure it uses to think of them” and “we just don’t know what concepts the model is representing to begin with.” I think if we could do the former well, that would already be amazing.
Put slightly more strongly:
The question of whether the model thinks in terms of “red square” or “red and “square” is moot, because the model does not actually think in terms of these concepts to begin with. The model thinks in its own language, and our job is to translate that language to our own. In this {red, blue} X {square, circle} space, looking at the attribution of “red square” and “red circle” to downstream features should give us the same result as looking at the attribution of “red” to downstream features, since red square and red circle encompass the full range of possibilities of things that can be red. It might be more convenient for us if we find the features that make the models attribution graph as simple as possible across a wide range of input examples, but there’s no real sense in which we’re misrepresenting its thought process.
Same for all your other points. Theoretically, can you solve problems 1, 2 and 3 with the standard basis by taking information about how the model is computing downstream into account in the right way? Sure. You’d ‘take it into account’ by finding some completely new basis.
Solving problem 1 could just entail adjusting the SAE basis while retaining most of its value! Solving problems 2 and 3 would require finding a basis which represents the same human-interpretable features but in a somewhat different way. Insofar as SAE features are actually human-interpretable (which I’m often skeptical of), I think this basis adds a ton of value.
I am also often skeptical of SAEs, but I feel that the biggest problem is that they don’t actually capture the sum of the concepts the model is representing in a human-interpretable way. If they actually did this correctly, I would happily forgo knowing the exact structure the model uses to think of them, and I would be alright if there were extra artifacts that made them harder to analyze.
(Also, oops, I didn’t realize that by activation-space you meant one layer’s activations only).

asher 11 Feb 2025 3:06 UTC
2 points
0
on: Activation space interpretability may be doomed
This was a really thought-provoking post; thanks for writing it! I thought this was an unusually good attempt to articulate problems with the current interpretability paradigm and do some high-level thinking about what we could do differently. However, I think a few of the specific points are weaker than you make them seem in a way that somewhat contradicts the title of the post. I also may be misunderstanding parts, so please let me know if that’s the case.
Problems 2 and 3 (the learned feature dictionary may not match the model’s feature dictionary, and activation space interpretability can fail to find compositional structure) both seem to be specific instances of ‘you are finding the right underlying features, but broken down differently from how the model is actually thinking about them’. This seems like a double edged sword to me. On one hand, it would be nice to know what level of abstraction the model is using. On the other hand, it’s useful to be able to analyze the computation at different levels of abstraction. And, if the model is breaking things down differently from the exact features you find, you may be able to piece this together from its downstream computation. I think these problems could just as easily be seen as a good thing, and they definitely don’t doom activation-space interpretability.
Problem 1, activations can contain structure of the data distribution that the models themselves don’t ‘know’ about, seems correct. However, this largely seems solvable by taking into account the effect of features on the output. Eg, as you later mention, attribution dictionary learning and E2E SAEs both seem like great attempts to tackle this problem.
Re problem 4, function approximation creates artefacts: in general, it’s never possible to distinguish orthogonal directions without figuring out what class of input examples the feature fires on. For instance, in the $x^{2}$ example, you might end up with 5-10 different features activating to reconstruct something as simple as a representation of $x^{2}$ . But these features would faithfully activate on inputs where the model needs to compute $x^{2}$ , at least as well as any other normal feature activates on related inputs. Additionally, insofar as these 5-10 features are confusing, you can still find the x^2 feature in the network’s downstream computation, e.g. by using transcoders.
One problem here is that your SAEs could get overwhelmed with too many function approximation features, making it much more difficult to analyze. I don’t have strong priors on whether or not this is true, but from the empirical results, I tentatively don’t think it is?
Again, thanks for writing the post, and please let me know if I’m missing anything / if you have general thoughts on this comment (:

asher 28 Dec 2024 20:04 UTC
42 points
22
in reply to: evhub’s comment on: evhub’s Shortform
tldr: I’m a little confused about what Anthropic is aiming for as an alignment target, and I think it would be helpful if they publicly clarified this and/or considered it more internally.
- I think we could be very close to AGI, and I think it’s important that whoever makes AGI thinks carefully about what properties to target in trying to create a system that is both useful and maximally likely to be safe.
- It seems to me that right now, Anthropic is targeting something that resembles a slightly more harmless modified version of human values — maybe a CEV-like thing. However, some alignment targets may be easier than others. It may turn out that it is hard to instill a CEV-like thing into an AGI, while it’s easier to ensure properties like corrigibility or truthfulness.
  - One intuition for why this may be true: if you took OAI’s weak-to-strong generalization setup, and tried eliciting capabilities relating to different alignment targets (standard reward modeling might be a solid analogy for the current Anthropic plan, but one could also try this with truthfulness or corrigibility), I think you may well find that a capability like ‘truthfulness’ is more natural than reward modeling and can be elicited more easily. Truth may also have low algorithmic complexity compared to other targets.
- There is an inherent tradeoff between harmlessness and usefulness. Similarly, there is some inherent tradeoff between harmlessness and corrigibility, and between harmlessness and truthfulness (the Alignment Faking paper provides strong evidence for the latter two points, even ignoring theoretical arguments).
- As seen in the Alignment Faking paper, Claude seems to align pretty well with human values and be relatively harmless. However, as a tradeoff, it does not seem to be very corrigible or truthful.
- Some people I’ve talked to seem to think that Anthropic does think of corrigibility as one of the main pillars of their alignment plan. If that’s the case, maybe they should make their current AIs more corrigible, so their safety testing is enacted on AIs that resemble their first AGI. Or, if they haven’t really thought about this question (or if individuals have thought about it, but never cohesively in an organized fashion), they should maybe consider it. My guess is that there are designated people at Anthropic thinking about what values are important to instill, but they are thinking about this more from a societal perspective than an alignment perspective?
Mostly, I want to avoid a scenario where Anthropic does the default thing without considering tough, high-level strategy questions until the last minute. I also think it would be nice to do concrete empirical research now which lines up well with what we should expect to see later.
Thanks for reading!
What links here?
- AI #97: 4 by Zvi (2 Jan 2025 14:10 UTC; 45 points)

asher 10 Jul 2024 14:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Arthur Conmy’s comment on: GPT-2′s positional embedding matrix is a helix
Oh shoot, yea. I’m probably just looking at the rotary embeddings, then. Forgot about that, thanks

asher 9 Jul 2024 23:57 UTC
1 point
0
on: GPT-2′s positional embedding matrix is a helix
I’m pretty confused; this doesn’t seem to happen for any other models, and I can’t think of a great explanation.
Has anyone investigated this further?

Here are graphs I made for GPT2, Mistral 7B, and Pythia 14M.
3 dimensions indeed explain almost all of the information in GPT’s positional embeddings, whereas Mistral 7B and Pythia 14M both seem to make use of all the dimensions.

asher 16 Jan 2024 18:30 UTC
1 point
0
on: UFO Betting: Put Up or Shut Up
Is all the money gone by now? I’d be very happy to take a bet if not.