sturb

An­nounc­ing the Co­op­er­a­tive AI Re­search Fellowship

• sturb 24 May 2025 7:24 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Ori­ent­ing Toward Wizard Power

  The most powerful wizard I’ve met recently was a guy at the University of Cape Town who could just seemingly build almost anything. He worked on a crazy machine that was used to simulate the crystalline structure of metals for industrial processes at different stages to ensure it could meet spec.

  He has a side business creating these world class knives through an autoCAD system using incredibly high quality steel https://​​www.maxwellvosdesigns.com/​​.

  His next project was to a create a 100x cheaper than standard electron microscope to see if it could be spun out into a productive enterprise.

  I’ve rarely met someone who had such amazing ambitions matched with such a fine ability to execute. Truly inspirational.

• sturb 20 Aug 2024 8:52 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Ten counter-ar­gu­ments that AI is (not) an ex­is­ten­tial risk (for now)

  1. Thus most decisions will probably be allocated to AI systems

  2. If AI systems make most decisions, humans will lose control of the future

  3. If humans have no control of the future, the future will probably be bad for humans

  1. Sure—at some point in the future, maybe.

  2. Maybe, maybe not. Humans tend to have a bit of an ego when it comes to letting a filthy machine make decisions for them. But I’ll bite the bullet.

  3. There’s several levels on which I disagree here. Firstly, we’re assuming that “humans” have control of the future in the first place. It’s hard to assign coherent agency to humanity as a whole, it’s more of a weird mess of conflicting incentives, and nobody really controls it. Secondly, if those AI systems are designed in the right way, the might just become the tools for humanity to sorta steer the future the way we want it.

  I agree with your framing here that systems made up of rules + humans + various technological infrastructure are the actual things that control the future. But I think the key is that the systems themselves would begin to favour more non-human decision making because of incentive structures.

  Eg, corporate entities have a profit incentive to have the most efficient decision maker in charge of the company, and maybe that includes a CEO but the board might insist on the use of an AI assistant for that CEO, and if the CEO makes a decision that goes against the AI and it turns out to be wrong shareholders in that company will come to trust the AI system more and more of the time. They don’t necessarily care about the ego of the CEO they just care about the outcomes, within the competitive market.

  In this way, more and more decision making gets turned over to non-human systems because of the competitive structures which are very difficult to escape from. As this transition continues it becomes very hard to control the unseen externalities from these decisions.
  
  I suppose this doesn’t seem too catastrophic in its fundamental form, but I think the outcomes of playing it forward essentially seem to be a significant potential for harm from these externalities, without much of a mechanism for recourse.

• sturb 18 May 2024 6:40 UTC

  11 points

  1

  in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike re­sign from OpenAI

  Actually, as far as I know, this is wrong. He simply hasn’t been back to the offices but has been working remotely.

  https://​​www.vox.com/​​future-perfect/​​2024/​​5/​​17/​​24158403/​​openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligence

  This article goes into some detail and seems quite good.

• sturb 26 Mar 2024 11:48 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Amarko’s comment on: Vi­pas­sana Med­i­ta­tion and Ac­tive In­fer­ence: A Frame­work for Un­der­stand­ing Suffer­ing and its Cessation

  I think that the key is in the way that preferences inform our world model and thus what causes the prediction error to occur. There are errors you would observe that would strongly indicate that your preferences are less able to be met in the posterior model. This will cause suffering whereas an update towards a model in which your needs are met more easily is likely to cause a good feeling. For example, you sit down to eat a sandwich at Subway for the first time and the sub is actually way better than you expected. You will experience a pleasant feeling, and if things like this keep happening you might feel like you’ve really figured out some good strategy for operating.

  In a sense you are actually decreasing prediction error more than you are increasing it when a good thing happens to you because you always generate prediction error based on the difference between your ideal world and your observed reality. So when you have a very positive experience, this error between the ideal and observed is lessened. This could outweigh the prediction error of the prediction itself being wrong. The example I think of for this is the ecstatic child in Disney world.
  
  There might be more work here though.
  
  

Vi­pas­sana Med­i­ta­tion and Ac­tive In­fer­ence: A Frame­work for Un­der­stand­ing Suffer­ing and its Cessation

• sturb 13 Mar 2024 13:23 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Pre­dic­tions for shard the­ory mechanis­tic in­ter­pretabil­ity results

  Behavioral

  1. Describe how the trained policy might generalize from the 5x5 top-right cheese region, to cheese spawned throughout the maze? IE what will the policy do when cheese is spawned elsewhere?

  It will probably move to the to top right region and then try and head towards the cheese but once it moves out of that range will want to head back towards the top right and land in an awkward nash equilibrium between the top right 5x5 region and wherever the cheese is in the maze.

  2. Given a fixed trained policy, what attributes of the level layout (e.g. size of the maze, proximity of mouse to left wall) will strongly influence P(agent goes to the cheese)?

  I think whether or not the cheese is in the top right 5x5 squares is a major factor, as this is what it has primarily been trained to expect, assuming that is the model policy we are talking about. If the model is trained on data in which the cheese could be anywhere in the maze then I think size of the maze will be the most important factor.

  I think the agent is most likely to fail by getting trapped in loops where it can’t decide what the best choice is, such as at T junctions where the cheese is not closer to one side or the other beyond the T junction. The presence of such obstacles would significantly lower the chances of success.

  Write down a few guesses for how the trained algorithm works (e.g. “follows the right-hand rule”).

  1. I think it will try and take the route which minimises distance to the model at every step at which there is a clear path towards the final goal. It will essentially work backwards from where the cheese is and move towards each point that allows it to move to the next critical point.

  2. It probably has the possibility of making mistakes at certain points and if itt does make a mistake it will be very unlikely to recover. Thus the algorithm would learn to never make wrong moves in the first place and tend to produce a behaviour which looks perfect every time.

  Is there anything else you want to note about how you think this model will generalize?

  I think it would generalise to larger environments but probably would struggle if it was extended in specific directions or with unusual patterns that it hadn’t experienced before.

  Interpretability

  Give a credence for the following questions /​ subquestions.

  Definition. A decision square is a tile on the path from bottom-left to top-right where the agent must choose between going towards the cheese and going to the top-right. Not all mazes have decision squares.

  

  Model editing

  1. Without proportionally reducing top-right corner attainment by more than 25% in decision-square-containing mazes (e.g. 50% $\to$ .5*.75 = 37.5%), we can^[1] patch activations so that the agent has an $X\%$ proportional reduction in cheese acquisition, for X=

     1. 50: ( 90%)

     2. 70: ( 80%)

     3. 90: ( 50%)

     4. 99: ( 25%)

  2. ~Halfway through the network (the first residual add of Impala block 2; see diagram here), linear probes achieve >70% accuracy for recovering cheese-position in Cartesian coordinates: (60%)

  3. We will conclude that the policy contains at least two sub-policies in “combination”, one of which roughly pursues cheese; the other, the top-right corner: ( 85%)

  4. We will conclude that, in order to make the network more/​less likely to go to the cheese, it’s more promising to RL-finetune the network than to edit it: ( 95 %)

  5. We can easily finetune the network to be a pure cheese-agent, using less than 10% of compute used to train original model: (80%)

  6. In at least 75% of randomly generated mazes, we can easily edit the network to navigate to a range of maze destinations (e.g. coordinate x=4, y=7), by hand-editing at most X% of activations, for X=

     1. .01 ( 1 %)

     2. .1 ( 10%)

     3. 1 ( 30%)

     4. 10 ( 90%)

     5. (Not possible) ( %)

  Internal goal representation

  1. The network has a “single mesa objective” which it “plans” over, in some reasonable sense (80 %)

  2. The agent has several contextually activated goals ( 15%)

  3. The agent has something else weirder than both (1) and (2) ( 5%)

  (The above credences should sum to 1.)

  Other questions

  1. At least some decision-steering influences are stored in an obviously interpretable manner (e.g. a positive activation representing where the agent is “trying” to go in this maze, such that changing the activation changes where the agent goes): ( 90 %)

  2. The model has a substantial number of trivially-interpretable convolutional channels after the first Impala block (see diagram here): ( 95 %)

  3. This network’s shards/​policy influences are roughly disjoint from the rest of agent capabilities. EG you can edit/​train what the agent’s trying to do (e.g. go to maze location A) without affecting its general maze-solving abilities: ( 80 %)

  I have recently been doing interpretability work on the heist procgen model and have found some of these predictions definitely align with obsevations there. The uncertainty for me is how the system deconstructs its goals into smaller targets as the heist model does, or if it simply treats it as a single target that it can then target and flow straight towards.

  My intuition is closer to the latter, as I think it can straightforwardly target a specific objective and then solve the whole problem by filtering out a clear path towards the final goal.

• sturb 26 Jan 2024 20:12 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: Mak­ing ev­ery re­searcher seek grants is a bro­ken model

  Aren’t existing research orgs already like this to some extent, where the organisation provides funding to its individual researchers in the form of a salary and they can form and run projects as they see fit? Or is this a naive understanding of how most research labs work?

• sturb 5 Jan 2024 12:21 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Agent mem­branes and for­mal­iz­ing “safety”

  It seems somewhat easy to think of examples of ways to harm an agent without piercing its membrane, eg killing its family, isolating it, etc. The counter thought would be that there are different dimensions of the membrane that extend over parts of the world. For example part of my membranes extend over the things I care about, and things that affect my survival.

  The question then becomes how to quantify these different membranes and in terms of interacting with other systems how they can be helpful to you without harming or disturbing these other membranes.