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I don't think that AI alignment people doing "enemy of enemy is friend" logic with AI luddites (i.e. people worried about Privacy/Racism/Artists/Misinformation/Jobs/Whatever) is useful.

Alignment research is a luxury good for labs, which means it would be the first thing axed (hyperbolically speaking) if you imposed generic hurdles/costs on their revenue, or if you made them spend on mitigating P/R/A/M/J/W problems.

This "crowding-out" effect is already happening to a very large extent: there are vastly more researchers and capital being devoted to P/R/A/M/J/W problems, which could have been allocated to actual alignment research! If you are forming a "coalition" with these people, you are getting a very shitty deal -- they've been much more effective at getting their priorities funded than you have been!

If you want them to care about notkilleveryoneism, you have to specifically make it expensive for them to kill everyone, not just untargetedly "oppose" them. E.g. like foom liability.

they've been much more effective at getting their priorities funded than you have been!

 

Sounds plausible but do you have any numeric evidence for this?

There is a cliche that there are two types of mathematicians: "theory developers" and "problem solvers". Similarly, Robin Hanson divides the production of knowledge into "framing" and "filling".

It seems to me there are actually three sorts of information in the world:

  • "Ideas": math/science theories and models, inventions, business ideas, solutions to open-ended problems
  • "Answers": math theorems, experimental observations, results of computations
  • "Proofs": math proofs, arguments, evidence, digital signatures, certifications, reputations, signalling

From a strictly Bayesian perspective, there seems to be no "fundamental" difference between these forms of information. They're all just things you condition your prior on. Yet this division seems to be natural in quite a variety of informational tasks. What gives?


adding this from replies for prominence--

Yes, I also realized that "ideas" being a thing is due to bounded rationality -- specifically they are the outputs of AI search. "Proofs" are weirder though, and I haven't seen them distinguished very often. I wonder if this is a reasonable analogy to make:

  • Ideas : search
  • Answers : inference
  • Proofs: alignment
Reply22111
[-]robo93

Humans are computationally bounded, Bayes is not.  In an ideal Bayesian perspective:

  • Your prior must include all possible theories a priori.  Before you opened your eyes as a baby, you put some probability of being in a universe with Quantum Field Theory with  gauge symmetry and updated from there.
  • Your update with unbounded computation.  There's not such thing as proofs, since all poofs are tautological.

Humans are computationally bounded and can't think this way.

(riffing)

"Ideas" find paradigms for modeling the universe that may be profitable to track under limited computation.  Maybe you could understand fluid behavior better if you kept track of temperature, or understand biology better if you keep track of vital force.  With a bayesian-lite perspective, they kinda give you a prior and places to look where your beliefs are "mailable".

"Proofs" (and evidence) are the justifications for answers.  With a bayesian-lite perspective, they kinda give you conditional probabilities.

"Answers" are useful because they can become precomputed, reified, cached beliefs with high credence inertial you can treat as approximately atomic.  In a tabletop physics experiment, you can ignore how your apparatus will gravitationally move the earth (and the details of the composition of the earth).  Similarly, you can ignore how the tabletop physics experiment will move you belief about the conservation of energy (and the details of why your credences about the conservation of energy are what they are).

Yes, I also realized that "ideas" being a thing is due to bounded rationality -- specifically they are the outputs of AI search. "Proofs" are weirder though, and I haven't seen them distinguished very often. I wonder if this is a reasonable analogy to make:

  • Ideas : search
  • Answers : inference
  • Proofs: alignment

Ideas come from unsupervised training, answers from supervised training and proofs from RL on a specified reward function.

I think only particular reward functions, such as in multi-agent/co-operative environments (agents can include humans, like in RLHF) or in actually interactive proving environments?

The use of "Differential Progress" ("does this advance safety more or capabilities more?") by the AI safety community to evaluate the value of research is ill-motivated.

Most capabilities advancements are not very counterfactual ("some similar advancement would have happened anyway"), whereas safety research is. In other words: differential progress measures absolute rather than comparative advantage / disregards the impact of supply on value / measures value as the y-intercept of the demand curve rather than the intersection of the demand and supply curves.

Even if you looked at actual market value, just p_safety > p_capabilities isn't a principled condition.

Concretely, I think that harping on differential progress risks AI safety getting crowded out by harmless but useless work -- most obviously "AI bias" "AI disinformation", and in my more controversial opinion, overtly prosaic AI safety research which will not give us any insights that can be generalized beyond current architectures. A serious solution to AI alignment will in all likelihood involve risky things like imagining more powerful architectures and revealing some deeper insights about intelligence.

I think there are two important insights here. One is that counterfactual differential progress is the right metric for weighing whether ideas or work should be published. This seems obviously true but not obvious, so well worth stating, and frequently.

The second important idea is that doing detailed work on alignment requires talking about specific AGI designs. This also seems obviously true, but I think goes unnoticed and unappreciated a lot of the time. How an AGI arrives at decisions, beliefs, and values is going to be dependent on its specific architectures.

Putting these two concepts together makes the publication decision much more difficult. Should we cripple alignment work in the interest of having more time before AGI? One pat answer I see is "discuss those ideas privately not publicly". But in practice, this severely limits the number of eyes on each idea, making it vastly more likley that good ideas in alignment aren't spread worked on quickly.

I don't have any good solutions here, but want to note that this issue seems critically important for alignment work. I've personally been roadblocked in substantial ways by this dilemma.

My background means I have relatively a lot of knowledge and theories about how the human mind works. I have specific ideas about several possible routes from current AI to x-risk AGI. Each of these routes also has associated alignment plans. But I can't discuss those plans in detail without discussing the AGI designs in detail. They sound vague and unconvincing without the design forms they fit into. This is a sharp limitation on how much progress I can make on these ideas. I have a handful of people who can and will engage in detail in private, limited and vague engagement in public where the ideas must remain vague, and largely I am working on my own. Private feedback indicates that these AGI designs and alignment schemes might well be viable and relevant, although of course a debunking is always one conversation away.

This is not ideal, nor do I know of a route around it.

The third virtue of rationality, lightness, is wrong. In fact: the more you value information to change your mind on some question, the more obstinate you should be to changing your mind on that question. Lightness implies disinterest in the question.

Imagine your mind as a logarithmic market-maker which assigns some initial subsidy to any new question . This subsidy parameter captures your marginal value for information on . But it also measures how hard it is to change your mind — the cost of moving your probability from to is .

What would this imply in practice? It means that each individual “trader” (both internal mental heuristics/thought patterns, and external sources of information/other people) will generally have a smaller influence on your beliefs, as they may not have enough wealth. Traders who influence your belief will carry greater risk (to their influence on you in future), though will also earn more reward if they’re right.

Being obstinate makes you more prone to motivated cognition. 

current LLMs vs dangerous AIs

Most current "alignment research" with LLMs seems indistinguishable from "capabilities research". Both are just "getting the AI to be better at what we want it to do", and there isn't really a critical difference between the two.

Alignment in the original sense was defined oppositionally to the AI's own nefarious objectives. Which LLMs don't have, so alignment research with LLMs is probably moot.

something related I wrote in my MATS application:


  1. I think the most important alignment failure modes occur when deploying an LLM as part of an agent (i.e. a program that autonomously runs a limited-context chain of thought from LLM predictions, maintains a long-term storage, calls functions such as search over storage, self-prompting and habit modification either based on LLM-generated function calls or as cron-jobs/hooks).

  2. These kinds of alignment failures are (1) only truly serious when the agent is somehow objective-driven or equivalently has feelings, which current LLMs have not been trained to be (I think that would need some kind of online learning, or learning to self-modify) (2) can only be solved when the agent is objective-driven.

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Something that seems like it should be well-known, but I have not seen an explicit reference for:

Goodhart’s law can, in principle, be overcome via adversarial training (or generally learning Multi-Agent Systems)

—aka “The enemy is smart.”

Goodhart’s law only really applies to a “static” objective, not when the objective is the outcome of a game with other agents who can adapt.

This doesn’t really require the other agents to act in a way that continuously “improves” the training objective either, it just requires them to be able to constantly throw adversarial examples to the agent forcing it to “generalize”.

In particular, I think this is the basic reason why any reasonable Scalable Oversight protocol would be fundamentally “multi-agent” in nature (like Debate).

This just moves the proxy-being-Goodharted-against from some hardcoded ruleset to a (presumably human) evaluator or selector of adversarial examples.

This then sets up something like a Generative Adversarial Network. The trouble is, such a setup is inherently unstable. Without careful guidance, one of the two adversaries will tend to dominate.

In predator/prey relationships in nature a stable relationship can come about if the predators starve and reproduce less when they eat too many of the prey. If, however, this effect isn't strong enough (maybe the predators have several prey species), the result is the prey species can go extinct. Also, the prey species is helped in multi-prey scenarios by becoming less common, and ths less likely to be found and killed by predators and less vulnerable to species-specific disease.

Obviously, these specific considerations don't apply in a literal sense. I'm trying to point out the general concept that you need counterbalancing factors for an adversarial relationship to stay stable.

Just realized in logarithmic market scoring the net number of stocks is basically just log-odds, lol:

Why aren't adverserial inputs used more widely for captchas?

  • Different models have different adverserial examples?
  • There are only a known adverserial examples for a given model (discovering them takes time), and can easily just be manually enumerated?

quick thoughts on LLM psychology

LLMs cannot be directly anthromorphized. Though something like “a program that continuously calls an LLM to generate a rolling chain of thought, dumps memory into a relational database, can call from a library of functions which includes dumping to recall from that database, receives inputs that are added to the LLM context” is much more agent-like.

Humans evolved feelings as signals of cost and benefit — because we can respond to those signals in our behaviour.

These feelings add up to a “utility function”, something that is only instrumentally useful to the training process. I.e. you can think of a utility function as itself a heuristic taught by the reward function.

LLMs certainly do need cost-benefit signals about features of text. But I think their feelings/utility functions are limited to just that.

E.g. LLMs do not experience the feeling of “mental effort”. They do not find some questions harder than others, because the energy cost of cognition is not a useful signal to them during the training process (I don’t think regularization counts for this either).

LLMs also do not experience “annoyance”. They don’t have the ability to ignore or obliterate a user they’re annoyed with, so annoyance is not a useful signal to them.

Ok, but aren’t LLMs capable of simulating annoyance? E.g. if annoying questions are followed by annoyed responses in the dataset, couldn’t LLMs learn to experience some model of annoyance so as to correctly reproduce the verbal effects of annoyance in its response?

More precisely, if you just gave an LLM the function ignore_user() in its function library, it would run it when “simulating annoyance” even though ignoring the user wasn’t useful during training, because it’s playing the role.

I don’t think this is the same as being annoyed, though. For people, simulating an emotion and feeling it are often similar due to mirror neurons or whatever, but there is no reason to expect this is the case for LLMs.

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conditionalization is not the probabilistic version of implies

P Q Q| P P → Q
T T T T
T F F F
F T N/A T
F F N/A T

Resolution logic for conditionalization: Q if P or True

Resolution logic for implies: Q if P or None

The simplest way to explain "the reward function isn't the utility function" is: humans evolved to have utility functions because it was instrumentally useful for the reward function / evolution selected agents with utility functions.

(yeah I know maybe we don't even have utility functions; that's not the point)

Concretely: it was useful for humans to have feelings and desires, because that way evolution doesn't have to spoonfeed us every last detail of how we should act, instead it gives us heuristics like "food smells good, I want".

Evolution couldn't just select a perfect optimizer of the reward function, because there is no such thing as a perfect optimizer (computational costs mean that a "perfect optimizer" is actually uncomputable). So instead it selected agents that were boundedly optimal given their training environment.

One thing I'm surprised by is how everyone learns the canonical way to handwrite certain math characters, despite learning most things from printed or electronic material. E.g. writing as IR rather than how it's rendered.

I know I learned the canonical way because of Khan Academy, but I don't think "guy handwriting on a blackboard like thing" is THAT disproportionately common among educational resources?

I learned maths mostly by teachers at school writing on a whiteboard, university lecturers writing on a blackboard or projector, and to a lesser extent friends writing on pieces of paper.

There was a tiny supplement of textbook-reading at school and large supplement of printed-notes-reading at university.

I would guess only a tiny fraction learn exclusively via typed materials. If you have any kind of teacher, how could you? Nobody shows you how to rearrange an equation by live-typing latex.

I used to have an idea for a karma/reputation system: repeatedly recalculate karma weighted by the karma of the upvoters and downvoters on a comment (then normalize to avoid hyperinflation) until a fixed point is reached.

I feel like this is vaguely somehow related to:

Oh right, lol, good point.

Also check out "personalized pagerank", where the rating shown to each user is "rooted" in what kind of content this user has upvoted in the past. It's a neat solution to many problems.

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