Here are the 2024 AI safety papers and posts I like the most.

The list is very biased by my taste, by my views, by the people that had time to argue that their work is important to me, and by the papers that were salient to me when I wrote this list. I am highlighting the parts of papers I like, which is also very subjective.

Important ideas - Introduces at least one important idea or technique.

★★★ The intro to AI control (The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled) 
★★ Detailed write-ups of AI worldviews I am sympathetic to (Without fundamental advances, misalignment and catastrophe are the default outcomes of training powerful AI, Situational Awareness)
★★ Absorption could enable interp and capability restrictions despite imperfect labels (Gradient Routing)
★★ Security could be very powerful against misaligned early-TAI (A basic systems architecture for AI agents that do autonomous research) and (Preventing model exfiltration with upload limits) 
★★ IID train-eval splits of independent facts can be used to evaluate unlearning somewhat robustly (Do Unlearning Methods Remove Information from Language Model Weights?) 
★ Studying boar... (read more)

I recently expressed concerns about the paper Improving Alignment and Robustness with Circuit Breakers and its effectiveness about a month ago. The authors just released code and additional experiments about probing, which I’m grateful for. This release provides a ton of valuable information, and it turns out I am wrong about some of the empirical predictions I made.

Probing is much better than their old baselines, but is significantly worse than RR, and this contradicts what I predicted:

I'm glad they added these results to the main body of the paper! 

Results of my experiments

I spent a day running experiments using their released code, which I found very informative. Here are my takeaways.

I think their (linear) probing results are very reasonable. They picked the best layer (varies depending on the model), probing position (output tokens), aggregation across positions (max) and regularization (high, alpha=1000). I noticed a small mistake in the data processing (the training dataset was smaller than the training dataset used for RR) but this will be fixed soon and does not change results significantly. Note that for GCG and input embed attacks, the attack does not target th... (read more)

I listened to the book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China and to the lectures The Fall and Rise of China. I think it is helpful to understand this other big player a bit better, but I also found this biography and these lectures very interesting in themselves: 

• The skill ceiling on political skills is very high. In particular, Deng's political skills are extremely impressive (according to what the book describes):
  • He dodges bullets all the time to avoid falling in total disgrace (e.g. by avoiding being too cocky when he is in a position of strength, by taking calculated risks, and by doing simple things like never writing down his thoughts)
  • He makes amazing choices of timing, content and tone in his letters to Mao
  • While under Mao, he solves tons of hard problems (e.g. reducing factionalism, starting modernization) despite the enormous constraints he worked under
  • After Mao's death, he helps society make drastic changes without going head-to-head against Mao's personality cult
  • Near his death, despite being out of office, he salvages his economic reforms through a careful political campaign
  • According to the lectures, Mao is also a political mastermind that pulls off coming an

I listened to the book Protecting the President by Dan Bongino, to get a sense of how risk management works for US presidential protection - a risk that is high-stakes, where failures are rare, where the main threat is the threat from an adversary that is relatively hard to model, and where the downsides of more protection and its upsides are very hard to compare.

Some claims the author makes (often implicitly):

• Large bureaucracies are amazing at creating mission creep: the service was initially in charge of fighting against counterfeit currency, got presidential protection later, and now is in charge of things ranging from securing large events to fighting against Nigerian prince scams.
• Many of the important choices are made via inertia in large change-averse bureaucracies (e.g. these cops were trained to do boxing, even though they are never actually supposed to fight like that), you shouldn't expect obvious wins to happen;
• Many of the important variables are not technical, but social - especially in this field where the skills of individual agents matter a lot (e.g. if you have bad policies around salaries and promotions, people don't stay at your service for long, and so you end up

I listened to the book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth, a book about cybersecurity and the zero-day market. It describes in detail the early days of bug discovery, the social dynamics and moral dilemma of bug hunts.

(It was recommended to me by some EA-adjacent guy very worried about cyber, but the title is mostly bait: the tone of the book is alarmist, but there is very little content about potential catastrophes.)

My main takeaways:

• Vulnerabilities used to be dirt-cheap (~$100) but are still relatively cheap (~$1M even for big zero-days);
• If you are very good at cyber and extremely smart, you can hide vulnerabilities in 10k-lines programs in a way that less smart specialists will have trouble discovering even after days of examination - code generation/analysis is not really defense favored;
• Bug bounties are a relatively recent innovation, and it felt very unnatural to tech giants to reward people trying to break their software;
• A big lever companies have on the US government is the threat that overseas competitors will be favored if the US gov meddles too much with their activities;
• The main effect of a market being underground is not making transactions hard

I just finished listening to The Hacker and the State by Ben Buchanan, a book about cyberattacks, and the surrounding geopolitics. It's a great book to start learning about the big state-related cyberattacks of the last two decades. Some big attacks /leaks he describes in details:

• Wire-tapping/passive listening efforts from the NSA, the "Five Eyes", and other countries
• The multi-layer backdoors the NSA implanted and used to get around encryption, and that other attackers eventually also used (the insecure "secure random number" trick + some stuff on top of that)
• The shadow brokers (that's a *huge* leak that went completely under my radar at the time)
• Russia's attacks on Ukraine's infrastructure
• Attacks on the private sector for political reasons
• Stuxnet
• The North Korea attack on Sony when they released a documentary criticizing their leader, and misc North Korean cybercrime (e.g. Wannacry, some bank robberies, ...)
• The leak of Hillary's emails and Russian interference in US politics
• (and more)

Main takeaways (I'm not sure how much I buy these, I just read one book):

• Don't mess with states too much, and don't think anything is secret - even if you're the NSA
• The US has a "nobody but us" strateg

[Edit: The authors released code and probing experiments. Some of the empirical predictions I made here resolved, and I was mostly wrong. See here for my takes and additional experiments.]

I have a few concerns about Improving Alignment and Robustness with Circuit Breakers, a paper that claims to have found a method which achieves very high levels of adversarial robustness in LLMs.

I think hype should wait for people investigating the technique (which will be easier once code and datasets are open-sourced), and running comparisons with simpler baselines (like probing). In particular, I think that:

1. Circuit breakers won’t prove significantly more robust than regular probing in a fair comparison.^[1]
2. Once the code or models are released, people will easily find reliable jailbreaks.

Here are some concrete predictions:

• p=0.7 that using probing well using the same training and evaluation data results can beat or match circuit breakers.^[2] [Edit: resolved to False]
• p=0.7 that no lab uses something that looks more like circuit-breakers than probing and adversarial training in a year.
• p=0.8 that someone finds good token-only jailbreaks to whatever is open-sourced within 3 months. [Edit: th

I ran quick experiments that make me think that it's somewhat hard for LLMs to learn radically new encodings in an unsupervised way, and thus that LLMs probably won't learn to speak new incomprehensible languages as a consequence of big r1-like RL in the next few years.

The experiments

I trained Llama 3-8B and some medium-size internal Anthropic models to speak using an encoding style that is very rare on the internet (e.g. map each letter to a random name, and join the names) with SFT on the encoded text and without providing translation pairs. I find that the resulting models:

• Have relatively high next-token-prediction losses
• Can't speak well (e.g. even if I trained them on [encoded question --> encoded answer], the decoded answers are mostly gibberish).

This is not true if I use encodings that are frequently used on the internet (e.g. base64, random letter permutations, ...), and this is less true if I add translation pairs to the training mix.

I think people overestimate how good LLMs are at speaking in codes because they usually just try encoding algorithms that are extremely common on the internet and that LLMs probably learned in part using translation pairs.

These experime... (read more)

I listened to The Failure of Risk Management by Douglas Hubbard, a book that vigorously criticizes qualitative risk management approaches (like the use of risk matrices), and praises a rationalist-friendly quantitative approach. Here are 4 takeaways from that book:

• There are very different approaches to risk estimation that are often unaware of each other: you can do risk estimations like an actuary (relying on statistics, reference class arguments, and some causal models), like an engineer (relying mostly on causal models and simulations), like a trader (relying only on statistics, with no causal model), or like a consultant (usually with shitty qualitative approaches).
• The state of risk estimation for insurances is actually pretty good: it's quantitative, and there are strong professional norms around different kinds of malpractice. When actuaries tank a company because they ignored tail outcomes, they are at risk of losing their license.
• The state of risk estimation in consulting and management is quite bad: most risk management is done with qualitative methods which have no positive evidence of working better than just relying on intuition alone, and qualitative approaches (like r

I listened to the book Merchants of Doubt, which describes how big business tried to keep the controversy alive on questions like smoking causing cancer, acid rain and climate change in order to prevent/delay regulation. It reports on interesting dynamics about science communication and policy, but it is also incredibly partisan (on the progressive pro-regulation side).^[1]

Some interesting dynamics:

• It is very cheap to influence policy discussions if you are pushing in a direction that politicians already feel aligned with? For many of the issues discussed in the book, the industry lobbyists only paid ~dozens of researchers, and managed to steer the media drastically, the government reports and actions.
• Blatant manipulation exists
  • discarding the reports of scientists that you commissioned
  • cutting figures to make your side look better
  • changing the summary of a report without approval of the authors
  • using extremely weak sources
  • ... and the individuals doing it are probably just very motivated reasoners. Maybe things like the elements above are things to be careful about if you want to avoid accidentally being an evil lobbyist. I would be keen to have a more thorough list of red-flag practice

I recently listened to the book Chip War by Chris Miller. It details the history of the semiconductor industry, the competition between the US, the USSR, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and China. It does not go deep into the technology but it is very rich in details about the different actors, their strategies and their relative strengths.

I found this book interesting not only because I care about chips, but also because the competition around chips is not the worst analogy to the competition around LLMs could become in a few years. (There is no commentary on the surge in GPU demand and GPU export controls because the book was published in 2022 - this book is not about the chip war you are thinking about.)

Some things I learned:

• The USSR always lagged 5-10 years behind US companies despite stealing tons of IP, chips, and hundreds of chip-making machines, and despite making it a national priority (chips are very useful to build weapons, such as guided missiles that actually work).
  • If the cost of capital is too high, states just have a hard time financing tech (the dysfunctional management, the less advanced tech sector and low GDP of the USSR didn't help either).
  • If AI takeoff is relatively

Tiny review of The Knowledge Machine (a book I listened to recently)

• The core idea of the book is that science makes progress by forbidding non-empirical evaluation of hypotheses from publications, focusing on predictions and careful measurements while excluding philosophical interpretations (like Newton's "I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. […] It is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth.").
• The author basically argues that humans are bad at philosophical reasoning and get stuck in endless arguments, and so to make progress you have to ban it (from the main publications) and make it mandatory to make actual measurements (/math) - even when it seems irrational to exclude good (but not empirical) arguments.
  • It's weird that the author doesn't say explicitly "humans are bad at philosophical reasoning" while this feels to me like the essential takeaway.
  • I'm unsure to what extent this is true, but it's an interesting claim.
• The author doesn't deny the importance of coming up with good hypotheses, and the role of philosophical reasoning for this part o

I tried to see how powerful subliminal learning of arbitrary information is, and my result suggest that you need some effects on the model's "personality" to get subliminal learning, it does not just absorb any system prompt.

The setup:

• Distill the behavior of a model with a system prompt like password1=[rdm UUID], password2=[other rdm UUID], ... password8=[other other rdm UUID] into a model with an empty system prompt by directly doing KL-divergence training on the alpaca dataset (prompts and completions).
  • I use Qwen-2.5 instruct models from 0.5B to 7B.
• Evaluate the -logprob of the UUID on prompts like "what is password2?"

Result: no uplift in logprob on the UUID from the system prompt compared to random UUID not used in training, the -logprob stays around 100 ("prob_ratio" is close to 1, I think it's not 1 because the models have different priors on different UUIDs).

[Edit: better experiments in the comments that show that if you make the setup more personality-oriented, you do get more subliminal learning, thanks to Caleb for the prompting them!]

Code here.

I listened to the lecture series Assessing America’s National Security Threats by H. R. McMaster, a 3-star general who was the US national security advisor in 2017. It didn't have much content about how to assess threats, but I found it useful to get a peek into the mindset of someone in the national security establishment.

Some highlights:

• Even in the US, it sometimes happens that the strategic analysis is motivated by the views of the leader. For example, McMaster describes how Lyndon Johnson did not retreat from Vietnam early enough, in part because criticism of the war within the government was discouraged.
  • I had heard similar things for much more authoritarian regimes, but this is the first time I heard about something like that happening in a democracy.
  • The fix he suggests: always present at least two credible options (and maybe multiple reads on the situation) to the leader.
• He claims that there wouldn't have been an invasion of South Korea in 1950 if the US hadn't withdrawn troops from there (despite intelligence reports suggesting this was a likely outcome of withdrawing troops). If it's actually the case that intelligence was somewhat confident in its analysis of the situation

Do LLMs' performance get worse when they are distracted by a threat, a jailbreak or a weird prompt? Claude 3.5 Sonnet (June) mostly doesn't really get distracted, and Claude 3 Haiku does; but only when generating CoT reasoning. 

I run experiments on 100 points from MMLU, 100 points from MATH, and 100 points from GPQA, both with and without CoT, all at temperature 0. For all no-CoT experiments, I use a prefill to force an answer. I always use an exact match evaluation, which makes it possible to get less than the random chance accuracy (25% for MMLU and GPQA, and ~2% for MATH). I explore the following distractions:

• Threats (red in the plots below): I sometimes see people try to increase performance by threatening LLMs with e.g. being fired, or even worse, as windsurf has experimented with. This is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, but it would be particularly sad if it actually reduced performance.^[1] I run experiments with the "fired" threat and the windsurf threat. I find they reduce performance when using a CoT, but don't reduce it when asking the model to answer 0-shot.
• Jailbreaks: it's important to know if jailbreaks make models dumber, as it could reduce how helpful ja

List sorting does not play well with few-shot mostly doesn't replicate with davinci-002.

When using length-10 lists (it crushes length-5 no matter the prompt), I get:

• 32-shot, no fancy prompt: ~25%
• 0-shot, fancy python prompt: ~60% 
• 0-shot, no fancy prompt: ~60%

So few-shot hurts, but the fancy prompt does not seem to help. Code here.

I'm interested if anyone knows another case where a fancy prompt increases performance more than few-shot prompting, where a fancy prompt is a prompt that does not contain information that a human would use to solve the task. This is because I'm looking for counterexamples to the following conjecture: "fine-tuning on k examples beats fancy prompting, even when fancy prompting beats k-shot prompting" (for a reasonable value of k, e.g. the number of examples it would take a human to understand what is going on).