Olli Järviniemi

Karma: 1,706

Olli Järviniemi Dec 9, 2024, 12:30 PM
5 points
0
on: Loppukilpailija’s Shortform
I recently gave a workshop in AI control, for which I created an exercise set.
The exercise set can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hmwnQ4qQiC5j19yYJ2wbeEjcHO2g4z-G/view?usp=sharing
The PDF is self-contained, but three additional points:
- I assumed no familiarity about AI control from the audience. Accordingly, the target audience for the exercises is newcomers, and are about the basics.
  - If you want to get into AI control, and like exercises, consider doing these.
  - Conversely, if you are already pretty familiar with control, I don’t expect you’ll get much out of these exercises. (A good fraction of the problems is about re-deriving things that already appear in AI control papers etc., so if you already know those, it’s pretty pointless.)
- I felt like some of the exercises weren’t that good, and am not satisfied with my answers to some of them—I spent a limited time on this. I thought it’s worth sharing the set anyways.
  - (I compensated by highlighting problems that were relatively good, and by flagging the answers I thought were weak; the rest is on the reader.)
- I largely focused on monitoring schemes, but don’t interpret this as meaning there’s nothing else to AI control.
You can send feedback by messaging me or anonymously here.

Olli Järviniemi Dec 5, 2024, 11:24 PM
18 points
1
on: When do “brains beat brawn” in Chess? An experiment
The post studies handicapped chess as a domain to study how player capability and starting position affect win probabilities. From the conclusion:
In the view of Miles and others, the initially gargantuan resource imbalance between the AI and humanity doesn’t matter, because the AGI is so super-duper smart, it will be able to come up with the “perfect” plan to overcome any resource imbalance, like a GM playing against a little kid that doesn’t understand the rules very well.
The problem with this argument is that you can use the exact same reasoning to imply that’s it’s “obvious” that Stockfish could reliably beat me with queen odds. But we know now that that’s not true.
Since this post came out, a chess bot (LeelaQueenOdds) that has been designed to play with fewer pieces has come out. simplegeometry’s comment introduces it well. With queen odds, LQO is way better than Stockfish, which has not been designed for it. Consequentially, the main empirical result of the post is severely undermined. (I wonder how far even LQO is from truly optimal play against humans.)
(This is in addition to—as is pointed out by many commenters—how the whole analogue is stretched at best, given the many critical ways in which chess is different from reality. The post has little argument in favor of the validity of the analogue.)
I don’t think the post has stood the test of time, and vote against including it in the 2023 Review.

Olli Järviniemi Nov 27, 2024, 6:45 AM
25 points
0
in reply to: simplegeometry’s comment on: When do “brains beat brawn” in Chess? An experiment
I found it interesting to play against LeelaQueenOdds. My experiences:
- I got absolutely crushed on 1+1 time controls (took me 50+ games to win one), but I’m competitive at 3+2 if I play seriously.
- The model is really good at exploiting human blind spots and playing aggressively. I could feel it striking in my weak spots, but not being able to do much about it. (I now better acknowledge the existence of adversarial attacks for humans on a gut level.)
- I found it really addictive to play against it: You know the trick that casinos use, where they make you feel like you “almost” won? This was that: I constantly felt like I could have won, if it wasn’t just for that one silly mistake—despite having lost the previous ten games to such “random mistakes”, too… I now better understand what it’s like to be a gambling addict.
Overall fascinating to play from a position that should be an easy win, but getting crushed by an opponent that Just Plays Better than I do.
[For context, I’m around 2100 in Lichess on short time controls (bullet/blitz). I also won against Stockfish 16 at rook odds on my first try—it’s really not optimized for this sort of thing.]

Olli Järviniemi Nov 15, 2024, 2:55 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Adam Scholl’s comment on: Untrusted smart models and trusted dumb models
You might be interested in this post of mine, which is more precise about what “trustworthy” means. In short, my definition is “the AI isn’t adversarially trying to cause a bad outcome”. This includes aligned models, and also unaligned models that are dumb enough to realize they should (try to) sabotage. This does not include models that are unaligned, trying to sabotage and which we are able to stop from causing bad outcomes (but we might still have use-cases for such models).

Olli Järviniemi Nov 14, 2024, 10:36 PM
2 points
0
on: The Parable of the Dagger

Olli Järviniemi Nov 9, 2024, 4:36 PM
5 points
−1
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Anthropic: Three Sketches of ASL-4 Safety Case Components
Thanks, that clears it up. Indeed I agree that “take real trajectories, then edit the attacks in” is relatively promising, and didn’t track this when writing my first comment (oops) - thanks for flagging it.

Olli Järviniemi Nov 7, 2024, 6:31 PM
LW: 2 AF: 1
−2
AF
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Anthropic: Three Sketches of ASL-4 Safety Case Components
Not sure I understand what you are saying.
If we can construct fake honeypots that are indistinguishable—to the policy—from real opportunities, and do this at scale, then that could suffice: we could drive the policy’s P(deployment | great opportunity) very low. (This relies on how many high-stakes we can create and how many the model will see in deployment.) If this is what you are saying, I agree.
If we can construct fake attacks that are indistinguishable—to the untrusted monitor—from real attacks, then that possibly suffices: we could drive the monitor’s prior P(deployment | attack) very low. (We have to worry about some other sources of evidence, though.) I guess one could call these honeypots for the monitor, and if this is what you are saying, I agree.
If you are saying that we don’t need either of these—i.e. that we can get by with honeypots/attacks that are noticeably fake—then that’s news to me, and I don’t see how you can do that.

Olli Järviniemi Nov 7, 2024, 2:07 AM
52 points
18
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: adam_scholl’s Shortform
Wow, tough crowd

Olli Järviniemi Nov 6, 2024, 10:13 PM
LW: 6 AF: 4
0
AF
on: Anthropic: Three Sketches of ASL-4 Safety Case Components
Glad to see public writing on what safety cases could look like!
I liked the section “Common precautions”. Points like “wherever possible, run supervised fine-tuning on the eval”, “run the eval on multiple model sizes”, “ensure that we don’t train against measurements” and “all generated outputs are monitored” are commonly acknowledged as useful/important (even if obvious), so it’s nice they were explicitly mentioned here.
In the AI control sketch, there’s a part that I find unsatisfactory:
The situations for the game were generated using Simulation Procedure S, which we are confident generates situations from a distribution that the model cannot distinguish from the genuine deployment distribution. (See below for validating the indistinguishability of this distribution.)
It’s a strong assumption that we have such a simulation procedure, at least if we are talking about General External Deployment (GED). [Edited later: As Buck says, we actually don’t even need this assumption for trusted monitoring. I’m still leaving this up, since untrusted monitoring does rely on such assumptions.] In the Limitations section later, you write
Diversity of simulations. It seems very difficult to produce realistic simulations for a sufficiently diverse set of situations to achieve indistinguishability. Manual construction is infeasible (note that context lengths are likely to be very long). Automatically generating realistic contexts is a challenging research problem.
but I think that even this is still understating the issue: For example, during GED a user might ask a model to proofread a yet-unpublished graduate level textbook on analytic number theory she has been writing. It would be very costly to generate a diverse set of such inputs for the evaluation, and automatic generation faces the challenge of discrimination being easier than generation.
The best solution for this that I’m aware of is to train and use a trusted model to flag inputs that likely weren’t in the evaluation set. Now, you mention a related technique in “[P2.5] Optional Steps.”
Information hiding. Each input to an oversight model is first fed to a smaller, trusted model trained to check for clear signs that an input is either test or deployment. Such details (such as clear evidence of the date, or other side channels) are explicitly censored in all inputs such that the presence of censorship does not itself carry information about deployment status.
but I think this is far from enough: in the “textbook on analytic number theory” example, it’s extremely hard to hide the fact that this input would have been costly to simulate.^[1]
My answer would be to have a human oversee the model’s actions on inputs flagged by the trusted model, and use such inputs to continually train and evaluate the model. But this is costly and not privacy-preserving. (The cost is acceptable if these inputs are rare enough, though. And if such inputs are common, one needs to put more effort to bridge the evaluation-deployment gap.)
1. ^
  I also worry about multimodality (e.g. native computer usage) making it harder to 1) make realistic simulations and 2) modify inputs in real time to hide information.

Olli Järviniemi Nov 1, 2024, 6:59 PM
−2 points
0
on: Living Metaphorically
Quantity is size
Example: “That’s a large salary”
Mapping: From numbers and quantities to size.
Experience: Observing that multiple things occupy a larger volume than a single instance.
I hadn’t previously appreciated just how deep this mapping is. Basically all language about numbers goes through size: $10^{100}$ is a huge number, $0.3 %$ is such a small portion. Fine, when comparing numbers you say “three is greater than two”. But in Finnish we also say “three is bigger than two” and “five is smaller than seven”, and “two plus two is as large as four”. No, really, the equality sign is called the “equal-largeness” sign!

Olli Järviniemi Oct 20, 2024, 9:36 PM
12 points
1
on: Interest in Leetcode, but for Rationality?
This is a long answer, in which I list around ten concrete problem types that such a site could have.
Before I go into my concrete proposals, here are some general points:
- I think the rationality community has focused too much on quantifying subjective uncertainty / probabilistic calibration, and too little on quantitative thinking and numeric literacy in general.
  - The set of possible exercises for the latter is way larger and pretty unexplored.
  - There are lots of existing calibration tools, so I’d caution against the failure mode of making Yet Another Calibration Tool.
    (Though I agree with abstractapplic that a calibration tool that’s Actually Really Good still doesn’t exist.)
- More generally, I feel like at least I (and possibly the rationality community at large) has gotten too fixated on a few particular forms of rationality training: cognitive bias training, calibration training, spotting logical fallacies.
  - The low-hanging fruit here might be mostly plucked / pushing the frontier requires some thought (c.f. abstractapplic’s comment).
- Project Euler is worth looking as an example of a well-executed problem database. A few things I like about it:
  - A comment thread for those who have solved the problem.
  - A wide distribution of problem difficulty (with those difficulties shown by the problems).
  - Numbers Going Up when you solve problems is pretty motivating (as are public leaderboards).
  - The obvious thing: there is a large diverse set of original, high-quality problems.
  - (Project Euler has the big benefit that there is always an objective numerical answer that can be used for verifying user solutions; rationality has a harder task here.)
- Two key features a good site would (IMO) have:
  - Support a wide variety of problem types. You say that LeetCode has the issue of overfitting; I think the same holds for rationality training. The skillset we are trying to develop is large, too.
  - Allow anyone to submit problems with a low barrier. This seems really important if you want to have a large, high-quality problem set.
- I feel like the following two are separate entities worth distinguishing:
  - High-quantity examples “covering the basics”. Calibration training is a central example here. Completing a single instance of the exercise would take some seconds or minutes at top, and the idea is that you do lots of repetitions.
  - High-effort “advanced examples”. The “Dungeons and Data Science” exercises strike me as a central example here, where completion presumably takes at least minutes and maybe at least hours.
  - (At the very least, the UI / site design should think about “an average user completes 0-10 tasks of this form” and “an average user completes 300 tasks of this form” separately.)
And overall I think that having an Actually Really Good website for rationality training would be extremely valuable, so I’m supportive of efforts in this direction.
I brainstormed some problem types that I think such a site could include.
1: Probabilistic calibration training for quantifying uncertainty
This is the obvious one. I already commented on this, in particular that I don’t think this should be the main focus. (But if one were to execute this: I think that the lack of quantity and/or diversity of questions in existing tools is a core reason I don’t do this more.)
2: “Statistical calibration”
I feel like there are lots of quantitative statistics one could ask questions about. Here are some basic ones:
- What is the GPD of [country]?
- What share of [country]’s national budget goes to [domain]?
- How many people work in [sector/company]?
- How many people die of [cause] yearly?
- Various economic trends, e.g. productivity gains / price drops in various sectors over time.
- How much time do people spend doing [activity] daily/yearly?
(For more ideas, you can e.g. look at Statistics Finland’s list here. And there just are various quantitative statistics floating around: e.g. today I learned that salt intake in 1800s Europe was ~18g/day, which sure is more than I’d have guessed.)
3: Quantitative modeling
(The line between this and the previous one is blurry.)
Fermi estimates are the classic one here; see Quantified Intuitions’ The Estimation Game. See also this recent post that’s thematically related.
There’s room for more sophisticated quantitative modeling, too. Here are two examples to illustrate what I have in mind:
Example 1. How much value would it create to increase the speed of all passenger airplanes by 5%?
Example 2. Consider a company that has two options: either have its employees visit nearby restaurants for lunch, or hire food personnel and start serving lunch at its own spaces. How large does the company need to be for the second one to become profitable?
It’s not obvious how to model these phenomena, and the questions are (intentionally) underspecified; I think the interesting part would be comparing modeling choices and estimates of parameters with different users rather than simply comparing outputs.
4: The Wikipedia false-modifications game
See this post for discussion.
5: Discourse-gone-astray in the wild
(Less confident on this one.)
I suspect there’s a lot of pedagogically useful examples of poor discourse happening the wild (e.g. tilted or poorly researched newspaper articles, heated discussions in Twitter or elsewhere). This feels like a better way to execute what the “spot cognitive biases / logical fallacies” exercises aim to do. Answering questions like “How is this text misleading?”, “How did this conversation go off the rails?” or “What would have been a better response instead of what was said here?” and then comparing one’s notes to others seems like it could make a useful exercise.
6: Re-deriving established concepts
Recently it occurred to me that I didn’t know how inflation works and what its upsides are. Working this through (with some vague memories and hints from my friend) felt like a pretty good exercise to me.
Another example: I don’t know how people make vacuums in practice, but when I sat and thought it through, it wasn’t too hard to think of a way to create a space with much less air molecules than atmosphere with pretty simple tools.
Third example: I’ve had partial success prompting people to re-derive the notion of Shapley value.
I like this sort of problems: they are a bit confusing, in that part of the problem is asking the right questions, but there are established, correct (or at least extremely good) solutions.
(Of course someone might already know the canonical answer to any given question, but that’s fine. I think there are lots of good examples in economics—e.g. Vickrey auction, prediction markets, why price controls are bad / price gouging is pretty good, “fair” betting odds—for this, but maybe this is just because I don’t know much economics.)
7: Generating multiple ideas/interventions/solutions/hypotheses
An exercise I did at some point is “Generate 25 ideas for interventions that might improve learning and other outcomes in public education”. I feel like the ability to come up with multiple ideas to a given problem is pretty useful (e.g. this is something I face in my work all the time, and this list itself is an example of “think of many things”). This is similar to the babble exercises, though I’m picturing more “serious” prompts than the ones there.
Another way to train this skill would be to have interactive exercises that are about doing science (c.f. the 2-4-6 problem) and aiming to complete them as efficiently as possible (This article is thematically relevant.)
(Discussion of half-developed ideas that I don’t yet quite see how to turn into exercises.)
8: Getting better results with more effort
Two personal anecdotes:
- I used to play chess as a child, but stopped at some point. When I years later played again, I noticed something: my quick intuitions felt just as weak as before, but I felt like I was better at thinking about what to think, and using more time to make better decisions by thinking more. Whereas when I was younger, I remember often making decisions pretty quickly and not seeing what else I could do.
- I did math olympiads in high school. Especially early on, some problems just felt fundamentally unapproachable to me—I just couldn’t make any progress on them. Whereas nowadays when I encounter problems, in math or otherwise, I’m rarely stuck in this sense. “Oh, obviously if I just spent more time on this, I could figure this stuff out eventually”
A type of exercise where you are supposed to first give an initial answer after X time, and then are allowed to revise your answer for Y time, seems like it could train this and other skills. (Maybe brainstorming exercises of the form “if you had a week/month/year of time, how would you solve [problem]?” could help, too.)
9: I think there’s something in the genre of “be specific”, and more specifically in “operationalize vague claims into something that has a truth value”, that’d be nice to have in large-quantity exercise form. See this post for related discussion. I’m also reminded of this comment.
There are definitely things not covered by this list; in particular, I have little of directly training to apply all this in real life (c.f. TAPs, which is definitely a very real-life-y technique). So while I did keep practicality in mind, I’d be happy to see exercises that bridge the theory-practice-gap even more.
Also, the Dungeons and Data Science and the stuff Raymond is doing are something to keep in mind.

Olli Järviniemi Oct 10, 2024, 2:36 PM
5 points
4
in reply to: Bogdan Ionut Cirstea’s comment on: Schelling game evaluations for AI control
My main worry is that we don’t know how to measure the important things—a running theme in the post. So while we could benchmark and do unlearning on e.g. models’ ability to agree on the same element on a list of 10 items, this isn’t obviously useful.
(I also suspect that unlearning Schelling coordination is harder than e.g. forgetting factual knowledge: for example, a natural strategy is to choose “popular” options, and it’s not clear whether you can remove notions of popularity without major negative downstream effects.)
That said, I’d imagine there’s something useful you can do with white-box techniques, like making the monitor think that a particular signal/action has been produced by [humans / other AIs] via activation steering, among other ideas about changing the model’s beliefs of its deployment status. It seems to me one could create benchmarks for how well such methods work. I haven’t thought about this much, but I do want to echo calls for more white-box work on control.

Olli Järviniemi Sep 13, 2024, 7:50 AM
4 points
0
on: Untrustworthy models: a frame for scheming evaluations
I tentatively think that it’s good to distinguish at least between the following three model classes: active planners, sleeper agents and opportunists.
Looking back at this, I find this categorization pretty confusing, and not quite carving the model space at the right places. I discuss what I now think is a better frame here.
Briefly, the idea is that one should make a distinction on how often the model is thinking about its plans against you. In this post’s terminology, this basically draws a line between opportunists vs. active planners and sleeper agents. The latter two roughly correspond to different strategies, namely active sabotage vs. “lie and wait”.
But I think the descriptions I gave of “active planners” etc. in the post are overly specific and are possibly sneaking in false inferences. So I think those labels are possibly harmful, and I’ve mostly stopped using those terms in my own thinking.

Olli Järviniemi Sep 13, 2024, 7:38 AM
11 points
8
on: Loppukilpailija’s Shortform
For background, see this post on trustworthiness.
Here are two notions of trustworthiness that are useful to distinguish:
1. On most inputs/contexts, the model isn’t egregiously misaligned. (By egregious misalignment, I mean conspiring against you to cause very bad outcomes.)
2. During the key moments where it really matters, the model doesn’t take very bad actions.
These notions can vary substantially. A central example is a model that has never had any serious misaligned thoughts but, when presented with a clear opportunity to escape, takes it. This model would be trusted under the first notion, but not under the second.
Another example is the case where a weaker model is monitoring a stronger model. If during deployment the weak model obtains strong evidence for indeed being deployed (possibly because the strong model aims for this outcome), the weak model might end up not reporting bad actions the strong model takes.^[1] This can happen even if the weak model is generally not egregiously misaligned.
I find this distinction useful for two reasons:
First, there are many sorts of evaluations and arguments which imply (1) but not (2). For instance, arguments from the model’s incompetence at theory-of-mind and keeping secrets, or at thinking of and executing cross-context strategies, are strong evidence in favor of (1), but much weaker evidence in favor of (2). Obtaining strong evidence for (2) might require evaluations targeted at that specifically.
Second, whether we care about (1) or (2) depends on the application. Situations where we primarily care about (1) include: the model has produced large quantities of research, we have run capability evaluations on the model, we are forming vague high-level impressions about the model’s psychology based on behavioral evidence. In these cases we typically have redundancy and multiple lines of evidence, and thus sabotage would need to be somewhat consistent. In contrast, we care about (2) when a single action by the model can have large consequences, which is the case at least when the model is monitoring other models.
I like this frame better than my previous ones. Credit to Ryan. For ease of reference, here’s terminology: property (1) is average or low-stakes trustworthiness, and property (2) is worst-case or high-stakes trustworthiness.
1. ^
  We might be able to ensure the model can’t reliably distinguish evaluations from deployment, so this scenario might be unrealistic. But I want to be extremely clear about whether the argument for safety is “the model won’t know it’s deployed” versus “the model can recognize when it’s deployed, but it still won’t take any bad actions because it’s a good guy”.
What links here?
- An overview of control measures by ryan_greenblatt (Mar 24, 2025, 11:16 PM; 40 points)
- Olli Järviniemi's comment on Trustworthy and untrustworthy models by Olli Järviniemi (Sep 13, 2024, 7:50 AM; 4 points)

Olli Järviniemi Sep 6, 2024, 6:31 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Would catching your AIs trying to escape convince AI developers to slow down or undeploy?
and the system was coherent enough that it wouldn’t point out the inserted bug when you ran another instance of it and asked it about what would happen if the code was deployed.
If we are already at the stage “use another copy to monitor the actions”, then surely we’ll at least consider the failure mode “maybe the monitor just always gives thumbs-up” and take some measures against it.
So simply lying isn’t as easy as it sounds: The monitor-instance has been trained and evaluated on synthetic examples of buggy code, so we know that the vast majority of the time it reports bugs. Thus, in order to not point out the bug, it needs to be able to obtain a lot of Bayesian evidence about the bug it sees being authentic rather than synthetic. (Edit: training isn’t strictly necessary—maybe you can get high evaluation accuracy via prompt engineering etc. - though it helps a lot.)
(There’s some not-yet-public writing that will go into more detail about this dynamic and how we can evaluate whether models can indeed muster that Bayesian evidence. It might be best to continue this discussion after that’s out?)

Olli Järviniemi Sep 6, 2024, 6:07 PM
10 points
−1
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Would catching your AIs trying to escape convince AI developers to slow down or undeploy?
You seem to be making a huge number of assumptions of what “scheming” means, so I am now mostly assuming you are talking about something else than what I am talking about, but I’ll try to clarify.
I agree there is miscommunication about what “scheming” means. I put out a post just yesterday about how people really should be more specific about what they mean by that.
I think Tom uses “scheming” to point at models that are very worst-case-like, in a way current models are not, whereas you think “there is no hard line between ‘role-playing’ and ‘scheming’.”
And I think you are underestimating how deliberate of an effort a model needs in order to have a chance at escaping. In particular, the model needs to bypass our control measures, which have been designed to secure against deliberate, best-effort attacks by the model, and the model needs to not get caught trying to do so^[1] during evaluations. This requires a high degree of adversariality on the model’s part, which doesn’t fit with my understanding of “role-playing”, and which I take to be the reason why Tom makes “a huge number of assumptions” about scheming.
1. ^
  There are complications from “even benign models sometimes fail and do weird stuff when (adversarially) evaluated”. These are not trivial, but I think we can incorporate that into our model.

Olli Järviniemi Aug 22, 2024, 1:08 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Bogdan Ionut Cirstea’s comment on: Untrustworthy models: a frame for scheming evaluations
Quite a few of these seem very hard to do in a single forward pass.
Current models definitely don’t seem capable of doing this in a single forward pass. But we are possibly not far away from models being capable of doing basic forms of this reasoning with CoT (possibly we are already there), and then one needs to get quantitative: How authentic-looking red-teaming examples can humans generate? For performance reasons, we are probably giving Weak a CoT—how long is it? (We could monitor Weak’s CoT, though then you have more complexity, and Weak isn’t really trustworthy if you need to do that.) And probably it’s very easy for Weak to figure it’s being used as a monitor—it’s prompt literally contains instructions for what to report and what to not.
Overall this is messy, and someone needs to actually sit down and think through these arguments and then run the evaluations. (“Thinking through these arguments” is largely what I’m doing nowadays.) So while I am more optimistic about “scheming-risks” than I have been before, there’s work to be done here.
Rephrased, we can use Weak to automate non-trivial chunks of safety research and as an internals monitor, too (not just on externalized reasoning).
We definitely want to do some monitoring on internals (e.g. “coup probes”). The worry is that it’s hard to get confidence that such methods work right when a model is actually defecting, if one doesn’t in advance have any examples of the models doing that and has to go with synthetic analogues.

Olli Järviniemi Aug 18, 2024, 9:17 PM
15 points
4
on: Can HCH epistemically dominate Ramanujan?
I think the “sudden and inexplicable flashes of insight” description of Ramanujan is exaggerated/misleading.
On the first example of the post: It’s not hard to see that the problem is, by the formula for triangular numbers, roughly(!) about the solvability of
$\frac{x (x + 1)}{2} = \frac{n (n + 1)}{4}$ .
Since $t (t + 1)$ is roughly a square - $4 t (t + 1) = (2 t + 1)^{2} - 1$ - one can see that this reduces to something like Pell’s equation $a^{2} - 2 b^{2} = 1$ . (And if you actually do the calculations while being careful about house $x$ , you indeed reduce to $a^{2} - 8 b^{2} = 1$ .)
I think it’s totally reasonable to expect an experienced mathematician to (at a high level) see the reduction to Pell’s equation in 60 seconds, and from that making the (famous, standard) association to continued fractions takes 0.2 seconds, so the claim “The minute I heard the problem, I knew that the answer was a continued fraction” is entirely reasonable. Ramanujan surely could notice a Pell’s equation in his sleep (literally!), and continued fractions are a major theme in his work. If you spend hundreds-if-not-thousands of hours on a particular domain of math, you start to see connections like this very quickly.
About “visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes”: Reading the relevant passage in The man who knew infinity, there is no claim there about this content being novel or correct or the source of Ramanujan’s insights.
On the famous taxicab number 1729, Ramanujan apparently didn’t come up with this on the spot, but had thought about this earlier (emphasis mine):
Berndt is the only person who has proved each of the 3,542 theorems [in Ramanujan’s pre-Cambridge notebooks]. He is convinced that nothing “came to” Ramanujan but every step was thought or worked out and could in all probability be found in the notebooks. Berndt recalls Ramanujan’s well-known interaction with G.H. Hardy. Visiting Ramanujan in a Cambridge hospital where he was being treated for tuberculosis, Hardy said: “I rode here today in a taxicab whose number was 1729. This is a dull number.” Ramanujan replied: “No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.” Berndt believes that this was no flash of insight, as is commonly thought. He says that Ramanujan had recorded this result in one of his notebooks before he came to Cambridge. He says that this instance demonstrated Ramanujan’s love for numbers and their properties.
This is not say Ramanujan wasn’t a brilliant mathematician—clearly he was! Rather, I’d say that one shouldn’t picture Ramanujan’s thought processes as wholly different from those of other brilliant mathematicians; if you can imitate modern Field’s medalists, then you should be able to imitate Ramanujan.
I haven’t read much about Ramanujan; these are what I picked up, after seeing the post yesterday, by thinking about the anecdotes and looking to the references a little.

Olli Järviniemi Aug 17, 2024, 5:23 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty
I first considered making a top-level post about this, but it felt kinda awkward, since a lot of this is a response to Yudkowsky (and his points in this post in particular) and I had to provide a lot of context and quotes there.
(I do have some posts about AI control coming up that are more standalone “here’s what I believe”, but that’s a separate thing and does not directly respond to a Yudkowskian position.)
Making a top-level post of course gets you more views and likes and whatnot; I’m sad that high-quality comments on old posts very easily go unnoticed and get much less response than low-quality top-level posts. It might be locally sensible to write a shortform that says “hey I wrote this long effort-comment, maybe check it out”, but I don’t like this being the solution either. I would like to see the frontpage allocating relatively more attention towards this sort of thing over a flood of new posts. (E.g. your effort-comments strike me as “this makes most sense as a comment, but man, the site does currently give this stuff very little attention”, and I’m not happy about this.)

Olli Järviniemi Aug 17, 2024, 4:06 AM
6 points
0
on: Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty
I am much more optimistic about ML not generalizing (by default) to dangerous capabilities and domains than what I perceive is Yudkowsky’s position. I found this to be a relatively legible area of disagreement (from my perspective), and illustrative of key reasons why I’m not-hopeless about doing very impactful things safely with current ML, so I have taken the time to outline my thoughts below.
A piece of my position.
Here’s one thing I believe: You can do the following things basically safely:
- (Formal) theorem-proving
  - (In line with Yudkowsky, I mean “old-school fancy-math theorems”: things like theorems in Arxiv pure math papers)
  - (I don’t expect this to be particularly useful, but mentioning it as a safe-thing-you-can-do.)
- Programming and software-engineering
  - I mean things like implementing a machine learning experiment based on a natural-ish language task description, with intended solutions spanning less than 10^5 lines of Python
- Analyzing experimental results, generating new experiment ideas and writing descriptions for the implementations of these ideas
  - Namely in the context of ML experiments, not science in general
More precisely: if you do “the obvious things” in the current paradigm (transformers + RL + maybe Monte Carlo Tree Search), aim for getting (merely) top-human-level results in the above domains, and take “obvious” safety/containment measures, you will obtain top-human-level performance in these domains without the systems posing non-negligible catastrophic risk.
Some “obvious” safety/containment measures I have in mind:
- Sandbox the environments in which you run the models.
- During training, test every once in a while that the model isn’t capable of doing tasks that we didn’t train the model for and which want the model to not be good at.
  - From my perspective it’s quite clear that a not-vastly-superhuman theorem-prover won’t generalize to e.g. escaping their sandbox environment, for reasons explained below, but if you are worried about this, maybe you could do things like “check that it isn’t good at strategy board games involving theory-of-mind / hidden information” or “check it can’t find non-trivial security vulnerabilities in given programs”, by fine-tuning and evaluating the model on these tasks. These tasks seem like something you could format as theorem-proving. For the software-engineer and science AIs you can similarly test generalization capability.
- Don’t train the model to predict all the text found on the Internet
  - (How do you get the model to understand natural-ish language, then? My answer: train the model on text generated by current LLMs, with the aim of getting the relevant models understand natural language and instructions without leaking tons of information about the world.)
  - Generally limit the information they get about the world.
- Have another model (and other metrics) evaluate that the model’s outputs are not anomalous; if they are, halt the model.
It’s not clear that this alone would be sufficient to end the acute risk period, but:
- I think that there are things in these areas that are useful (like building increasingly useful things in increasingly realistic physics simulations).
- the reasons I’m relatively optimistic about the safety of these things also carry over (though to a lesser extent) more generally to the current LLM-dominated paradigm, which more obviously allows for very impactful things.
(I acknowledge that this part is cruxy, but won’t discuss it further here.)
Why do I think these things are safe?
Three reasons:
1: The information the model has about the world is very limited, and utilizing that information seems computationally very difficult.
It seems incredibly hard for a model to locate itself in Tegmark IV, or whatever it is that Reality is, based on only the data it sees in the above training process.
Note also that the models I’m picturing have no “memory” beside what gets carved to them by the training process (e.g. SGD). This doesn’t prevent the model from “remembering” and “accessing” information from past inputs to leverage in the current context—obviously there’s information flow there—but it does make it much more difficult. (See e.g. the Connecting the Dots paper for more on the capabilities of LLMs here.)
2: There is little pressure for the model to think deeply about reality outside of the inputs it sees.
Yudkowsky responds to a similar comment by Ngo with “that’s not where humans came from”. I find this response unpersuasive (both in its original context and if one were to apply it here) for multiple reasons:
- I think there’s clearly more pressure in the direction of “generally understand the world” by inclusive genetic fitness than there is for a theorem-prover, software-engineer or an experimental-result-analyzer by SGD.
  - The details of the training process for nanoengineering (the example used by Ngo and Yudkowsky) were too unclear for me to comment on that.
- There is a massive difference in the feasibility of understanding the world in these two cases; deducing useful information about the world and leveraging that is vastly easier for humans.
- The distribution humans are trained on is vastly richer than what these ML models would be trained on.
- As Ngo points out, the genomic bottleneck pushes towards brains that can figure things out on the fly.
3: It’s actually very hard for a model in this setting to take catastrophic actions.
E.g. you need situational awareness and theory of mind at quite a deep level, forming plans that extend beyond the current context, coordinating with copies of yourself (if you can’t take over during a single input), actually coming up with a plan that allows for taking over (and which bypasses any containment and other measures humans may have built).
In addition to general capabilities such as theory of mind, pulling off a takeover plan seems like it requires quite a lot of specific information about the model’s situation that might be very difficult to access. E.g. assuming that a software-engineer-model understands the programs it writes are being run in a sandbox environment in a data center, it seems be very hard to go from that to taking over the world if the model lacks any specific information about the sandbox, data center, Internet, and the physical entities in the world, especially if humans put even a half-hearted effort in containment.
I think observations from LLM are a reason for optimism: despite being trained on (relatively) very rich data that clearly incentivizes thinking about reality as a whole, and despite them being pretty decent in domains like programming and science, they are pretty bad at these skills and capabilities I outlined. For example, GPT-4 level models stumble in theory-of-mind (e.g. here and here) and are not terribly good at situational awareness (see here), despite these being (relatively) very training-relevant. And clearly GPT-4 level models are, by a wide margin, incapable of escaping containment even without any particular countermeasures.
(The takes here are standard AI control points.)
In aggregate I find these arguments compelling for expecting models to not generalizing to human-level, or clearly superhuman level, in things like escaping containment that we very much didn’t train the model to do, before the model is vastly superhuman in the thing we did train it for.
Reactions to arguments given by Yudkowsky.
One argument Yudkowsky gives is
I put to you that there is a predictable bias in your estimates, where you don’t know about the Deep Stuff that is required to prove theorems, so you imagine that certain cognitive capabilities are more disjoint than they actually are. If you knew about the things that humans are using to reuse their reasoning about chipped handaxes and other humans, to prove math theorems, you would see it as more plausible that proving math theorems would generalize to chipping handaxes and manipulating humans.
There’s an important asymmetry between
“Things which reason about chipped handaxes and other Things can prove math theorems”
and
“Things which can prove math theorems can reason about chipped handaxes and other Things”,
namely that math is a very fundamental thing in a way that chipping handaxes and manipulating humans are not.
I do grant there is math underlying those skills (e.g. 3D Euclidean geometry, mathematical physics, game theory, information theory), and one can formulate math theorems that essentially correspond to e.g. chipping handaxes, so as domains theorem-proving and handaxe-chipping are not disjoint. But the degree of generalization one needs for a theorem-prover trained on old-school fancy-math theorems to solve problems like manipulating humans is very large.
There’s also this interaction:
Ngo: And that if you put agents in environments where they answer questions but don’t interact much with the physical world, then there will be many different traits which are necessary for achieving goals in the real world which they will lack, because there was little advantage to the optimiser of building those traits in.
Yudkowsky: I’ll observe that TransformerXL built an attention window that generalized, trained it on I think 380 tokens or something like that, and then found that it generalized to 4000 tokens or something like that.
I think Ngo’s point is very reasonable, and I feel underwhelmed by Yudkowsky’s response: I think it’s a priori reasonable to expect attention mechanisms to generalize, by design, to a larger number of tokens, and this is a very weak form of generalization in comparison to what is needed for takeover.
Overall I couldn’t find object-level arguments by Yudkowsky for expecting strong generalization that I found compelling (in this discussion or elsewhere). There are many high-level conceptual points Yudkowsky makes (e.g. sections 1.1 and 1.2 of this post has many hard-to-quote parts that I appreciated, and he of course has written a lot along the years) that I agree with and which point towards “there are laws of cognition that underlie seemingly-disjoint domains”. Ultimately I still think the generalization problems are quantitatively difficult enough that you can get away with building superhuman models in narrow domains, without them posing non-negligible catastrophic risk.
In his later conversation with Ngo, Yudkowsky writes (timestamp 17:46 there) about the possibility of doing science with “shallow” thoughts. Excerpt:
then I ask myself about people in 5 years being able to use the shallow stuff in any way whatsoever to produce the science papers
and of course the answer there is, “okay, but is it doing that without having shallowly learned stuff that adds up to deep stuff which is why it can now do science”
and I try saying back “no, it was born of shallowness and it remains shallow and it’s just doing science because it turns out that there is totally a way to be an incredibly mentally shallow skillful scientist if you think 10,000 shallow thoughts per minute instead of 1 deep thought per hour”
and my brain is like, “I cannot absolutely rule it out but it really seems like trying to call the next big surprise in 2014 and you guess self-driving cars instead of Go because how the heck would you guess that Go was shallower than self-driving cars”
I stress that my reasons for relative optimism are not only about “shallowness” of the thought, but in addition about the model being trained on a very narrow domain, causing it to lack a lot of the very out-of-distribution capabilities and information it would need to cause a catastrophe.