@SaferAI
simeon_c
Karma: 929
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about taxonomizing AI risk related concepts to reduce the dimensionality of AI threat modelling while remaining quite comprehensive. It’s in the context of developing categories to assess whether labs plans cover various areas of risk.
There are two questions I’d like to get takes on. Any take on one of these 2 wd be very valuable.
In the misalignment threat model space, a number of safety teams tend to assume that the only type of goal misgeneralization that could lead to X-risks is deceptive misalignment. I’m not sure to understand where that confidence comes from. Could anyone make or link to a case that rules out the plausibility of all other forms of goal misgeneralization?
It seems to me that to minimize the dimensionality of the threat modelling, it’s sometimes more useful to think about the threat model (e.g. a terrorist misuses an LLM to develop a bioweapon) and sometimes more useful to think about a property which has many downstream consequences on the level of risk. I’d like to get takes on one such property:
Situational awareness: It seems to me that it’s most useful to think of this property as its own hazard which has many downstream consequences on the level of risk (most prominently that a model with it can condition on being tested when completing tests). Do you agree or disagree with this take? Or would you rather discuss situational awareness only in the context of the deceptive alignment threat model?
Rephrasing based on an ask: “Western Democracies need to urgently put a hard stop to Russia and China war (preparation) efforts” → Western Democracies need to urgently take actions to stop the current shift towards a new World order where conflicts are a lot more likely due to Western democracies no longer being a hegemonic power able to crush authoritarians power that grab land etc. This shift is currently primarily driven by the fact that Russia & China are heavily rearming themselves whereas Western democracies are not.
@Elizabeth
I liked this extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whispering/oilbfihknpdbpfkcncojikmooipnlglo), which I use for long messages. I press a shortcut, it starts recording with Whisper, then repress and it puts the transcript in my clipboard.
In those, Ukraine committed to pass laws for Decentralisation of power, including through the adoption of the Ukrainian law “On temporary Order of Local Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts”. Instead of Decentralization they passed laws forbidding those districts from teaching children in the languages that those districts wants to teach them.
Ukraines unwillingness to follow the agreements was a key reason why the invasion in 2022 happened and was very popular with the Russian population
I ignored that, that’s useful, thank you.
My (simple) reasoning is that I pattern matched hard to the Anschluss (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss) as a prelude to WW2 where democracies accepted a first conquest hoping that it would stop there (spoiler: it didn’t).
Minsk really much feels the same way. From the perspetive of democracies it seems kinda reasonable to try one time a peaceful resolution accepting a conquest and see if Putin stops (although in hindsight it’s unreasonable to not prepare to the possibility he doesn’t). Now that he started invading Ukraine as a whole, it seems really hard for me to believe “once he’ll get Ukraine, he’ll really stop”. I expect many reasons to invade other adjacent countries to come up aswell.
The latest illegal land grab was done by Israel without any opposition by the US. If you are truly worried about land grabs being a problem why not speak against that US position of being okay with some land grabs instead of just speaking for buying more weapons?
Two things on this.
Object-level: I’m not ok with this.
At a meta-level, there’s a repugnant moral dilemma fundamental to this:
The American hegemonic power was abused, e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstrike or a number of wars that the US created for dubious reasons (i.e. usually some economic or geostrategic interests). (same for France, I’m just focusing on the US here for simplicity)
Still, despite those deep injustice, the 2000s have been the least lethal in interstate conflicts because hegemony with threat of being crushed by the great power disincentivizes heavily anyone to fight.
It seems to me that hegemony of some power or coalition of powers is the most stable state for that reason. So I find this state quite desirable.
Then the other question is, who should be in that position?
I have the chance to be able to write this about my country without ending up in jail for. And if I do end up in jail, I have higher odds than in most other countries to be able to contest it.
So, although western democracies are quite bad and repugnant in a bunch of ways, I find them the least worse and most beneficial existing form of political power to currently defend and preserve the hegemony of.
Indeed. One consideration is that the LW community used to be much less into policy adjacent stuff and hence much less relevant on that domain. Now, with AI governance becoming an increasingly big deal, I think we could potentially use some of that presence to push for certain things in defense.
Pushing for things in the genre of what Noah describes in the first piece I shared seems feasible for some people in policy.
Idk what the LW community can do but somehow, to the extent we think liberalism is valuable, the Western democracies need to urgently put a hard stop to Russia and China war (preparation) efforts. I fear that rearmament is a key component of the only viable path at this stage.
I won’t argue in details here but link to Noahpinion, who’s been quite vocal on those topics. The TLDR is that China and Russia have been scaling their war industry preparation efforts for years, while Western democracies industries keep declining and remain crazily dependent from the Chinese industry. This creates a new global equilibrium where the US is no longer powerful enough to disincentivize all authoritarians regime from grabbing more land etc.
Some readings relevant to that:
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https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/were-not-ready-for-the-big-one
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Why Putin probably won’t stop with Ukraine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements
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Western democracies current arsenal (centered around some very expensive units, like aircraft carriers) is not well fit for the modern improvements in missiles and drones: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/df-26b-china-has-missile-could-sink-navy-aircraft-carrier-2500-miles-away-207871
I know this is not a core LW theme but to the extent this threat might be existential to liberalism, and to the existence of LW as a website in the first place, I think we should all care. It would also be quite terrible for safety if AGI was developed during a global war, which seems uncomfortably likely (~10% imo).
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If you wanna reread the debate, you can scroll through this thread (https://x.com/bshlgrs/status/1764701597727416448).
There was a hot debate recently but regardless, the bottom line is just “RSPs should probably be interpreted literally and nothing else. If a literal statement is not strictly there, it should be assumed it’s not a commitment.”
I’ve not seen people doing very literal interpretation on those so I just wanted to emphasize that point.
Given the recent argument on whether Anthropic really did commit to not push the frontier or just misled most people into thinking that it was the case, it’s relevant to reread the RSPs in hairsplitting mode. I was rereading the RSPs and noticed a few relevant findings:
Disclaimer: this is focused on negative stuff but does not deny the merits of RSPs etc etc.
I couldn’t find any sentence committing to not significantly increase extreme risks. OTOH I found statements that if taken literally could imply an implicit acknowledgment of the opposite: “our most significant immediate commitments include a high standard of security for ASL-3 containment, and a commitment not to deploy ASL-3 models until thorough red-teaming finds no risk of catastrophe.”.
Note that it makes a statement on the risk only bearing on deployment measures and not on security. Given that the lack security is probably the biggest source of risk of ASL-3 systems & the biggest weakness of RSPs, I find it pretty likely that this is not random.I found a number of commitments that are totally unenforceable in hairsplitting mode. Here are two examples:
“World-class experts collaborating with prompt engineers should red-team the deployment thoroughly and fail to elicit information at a level of sophistication, accuracy, usefulness, detail, and frequency which significantly enables catastrophic misuse.”
The use of five underdefined adjectives + “significantly” is a pretty safe barrier against any enforcement.
“When informed of a newly discovered model vulnerability enabling catastrophic harm (e.g. a jailbreak or a detection failure), we commit to mitigate or patch it promptly (e.g. 50% of the time in which catastrophic harm could realistically occur).”
The combination of “or”, of the characterization of promptly as “50% of the time, the use of “e.g.” and of “realistically” is also a safe barrier against enforceability.
It’s only my subjective judgment here and you don’t have to trust it but I also found Core Views on AI Safety to have a number of similar patterns.
There’s a number of properties of AI systems that makes it easier to collect information in a safe way about those systems and hence demonstrate their safety: interpretability, formal verifiability, modularity etc. Which adjective wd you use to characterize those properties?
I’m thinking of “resilience” because from the perspective of an AI developer it helps a lot understanding the risk profile, but do you have other suggestions?
Some alternatives:
auditability properties
legibility properties
Unsure how much we disagree Zach and Oliver so I’ll try to quantify: I would guess that Claude 3 will cut release date of next gen models from OpenAI by a few months at least (I would guess 3 months), which has significant effects on timelines.
Tentatively, I’m thinking that this effect may be surlinear. My model is that each new release increases the speed of development (bc of increased investment in all the value chain including compute + realization from people that it’s not like other technologies etc) and so that a few months now causes more than a few months on AGI timelines.
Oh thanks, I hadn’t find it, gonna delete!
Yeah basically Davidad has not only a safety plan but a governance plan which actively aims at making this shift happen!
Thanks for writing that. I’ve been trying to taboo “goals” because it creates so much confusion, which this post tries to decrease. In line with this post, I think what matters is how difficult a task is to achieve, and what it takes to achieve it in terms of ability to overcome obstacles.
“Anthropic’s commitment to follow the ASL scheme thus implies that we commit to pause the scaling and/or delay the deployment of new models whenever our scaling ability outstrips our ability to comply with the safety procedures for the corresponding ASL.”
And/or = or, so I just want to flag that the actual commitment here cd be as weak as “we delay the deployment but keep scaling internally”. If it’s a mistake, you can correct it, but if it’s not, it doesn’t seem like a robust commitment to pause to me, even assuming that the conditions of pause were well established.
Because it’s meaningless to talk about a “compromise” dismissing one entire side of the people who disagree with you (but only one side!).
Like I could say “global compute thresholds is a robustly good compromise with everyone who disagrees with me”
*Footnote: only those who’re more pessimistic than me.
That may be right but then the claim is wrong. The true claim would be “RSPs seem like a robustly good compromise with people who are more optimistic than me”.
And then the claim becomes not really relevant?
Holden, thanks for this public post.
I would love if you could write something along the lines of what you wrote in “If it were all up to me, the world would pause now—but it isn’t, and I’m more uncertain about whether a “partial pause” is good” at the top of ARC post, which as we discussed and as I wrote in my post would make RSPs more likely to be positive in my opinion by making the policy/voluntary safety commitments distinction clearer.
Regarding
Responsible scaling policies (RSPs) seem like a robustly good compromise with people who have different views from mine
2. It seems like it’s empirically wrong based on the strong pushback RSPs received so that at least you shouldn’t call it “robustly”, unless you mean a kind of modified version that would accommodate the most important parts of the pushback.
3. I feel like overall the way you discuss RSPs here is one of the many instances of people chatting about idealized RSPs that are not specified, and pointed to against disagreement. See below, from my post:
And second, the coexistence of ARC’s RSP framework with the specific RSPs labs implementations allows slack for commitments that are weak within a framework that would in theory allow ambitious commitments. It leads to many arguments of the form:
“That’s the V1. We’ll raise ambition over time”. I’d like to see evidence of that happening over a 5 year timeframe, in any field or industry. I can think of fields, like aviation where it happened over the course of decades, crashes after crashes. But if it’s relying on expectations that there will be large scale accidents, then it should be clear. If it’s relying on the assumption that timelines are long, it should be explicit.
“It’s voluntary, we can’t expect too much and it’s way better than what’s existing”. Sure, but if the level of catastrophic risks is 1% (which several AI risk experts I’ve talked to believe to be the case for ASL-3 systems) and that it gives the impression that risks are covered, then the name “responsible scaling” is heavily misleading policymakers. The adequate name for 1% catastrophic risks would be catastrophic scaling, which is less rosy.
Thanks for the post.
Would your concerns be mostly addressed if ARC had published a suggestion for a much more comprehensive risk management framework, and explicitly said “these are the principles that we want labs’ risk-management proposals to conform to within a few years, but we encourage less-thorough risk management proposals before then, so that we can get some commitments on the table ASAP, and so that labs can iterate in public. And such less-thorough risk management proposals should prioritize covering x, y, z.”
Great question! A few points:
Yes, many of the things I point are “how to do things well” and I would in fact much prefer something that contains a section “we are striving towards that and our current effort is insufficient” than the current RSP communication which is more “here’s how to responsibly scale”.
That said, I think we disagree on the reference class of the effort (you say “a few years”). I think that you could do a very solid MVP of what I suggest with like 5 FTEs over 6 months.
As I wrote in “How to move forward” (worth skimming to understand what I’d change) I think that RSPs would be incredibly better if they:
had a different name
said that they are insufficient
linked to a post which says “here’s the actual thing which is needed to make us safe”.
Answer to your question: if I were optimizing in the paradigm of voluntary lab commitments as ARC is, yes I would much prefer that. I flagged early though that because labs are definitely not allies on this (because an actual risk assessment is likely to output “stop”), I think the “ask labs kindly” strategy is pretty doomed and I would much prefer a version of ARC trying to acquire bargaining power through a way or another (policy, PR threat etc.) rather than adapting their framework until labs accept to sign them.
Regarding
If people took your proposal as a minimum bar for how thorough a risk management proposal would be, before publishing, it seems like that would interfere with labs being able to “post the work they are doing as they do it, so people can give feedback and input”.
I don’t think it’s necessarily right, e.g. “the ISO standard asks the organization to define risk thresholds” could be a very simple task, much simpler than developing a full eval. The tricky thing is just to ensure we comply with such levels (and the inability to do that obviously reveals a lack of safety).
“ISO proposes a much more comprehensive procedure than RSPs”, it’s not right either that it would take longer, it’s just that there exists risk management tools, that you can run in like a few days, that helps having a very broad coverage of the scenario set.
“imply significant chances to be stolen by Russia or China (...). What are the risks downstream of that?” once again you can cover the most obvious things in like a couple pages. Writing “Maybe they would give the weights to their team of hackers, which increases substantially the chances of leak and global cyberoffence increase”. And I would be totally fine with half-baked things if they were communicated as such and not as RSPs are.
I mean the full option space obviously also includes “bargain with Russia and China to make credible commitments that they stop rearming (possibly in exchange for something)”, and I think we should totally explore that path aswell, I just don’t have much hope in it at this stage which is why I’m focusing on the other option, even if it is a fucked up local nash equilibrium.