Stanford AI Alignment president, technical AI governance research, AIS field building, and animal welfare.
Thanks! I wouldn't say I assert that interpretability should be a key focus going forward, however--if anything, I think this story shows that coordination, governance, and security are more important in very short timelines.
Good point--maybe something like "Samantha"?
Ah, interesting. I posted this originally in December (e.g. older comments), but then a few days ago I reposted it to my blog and edited this LW version to linkpost the blog.
It seems that editing this post from a non-link post into a link post somehow bumped its post date and pushed it to the front page. Maybe a LW bug?
Related work
Nit having not read your full post: Should you have "Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover" in the related work? My mind pattern-matched to that exact piece from reading your very similar title, so my first thought was how your piece contributes new arguments.
If true, this would be a big deal: if we could figure out how the model is distinguishing between basic feature directions and other directions, we might be able to use that to find all of the basic feature directions.
Or conversely, and maybe more importantly for interp, we could use this to find the less basic, more complex features. Possibly that would form a better definition for "concepts" if this is possible.
Suppose has a natural interpretation as a feature that the model would want to track and do downstream computation with, e.g. if a = “first name is Michael” and b = “last name is Jordan” then can be naturally interpreted as “is Michael Jordan”. In this case, it wouldn’t be surprising the model computed this AND as and stored the result along some direction independent of and . Assuming the model has done this, we could then linearly extract with the probe
for some appropriate and .[7]
Should the be inside the inner parentheses, like for ?
In the original equation, if AND are both present in , the vectors , , and would all contribute to a positive inner product with , assuming . However, for XOR we want the and inner products to be opposing the inner product such that we can flip the sign inside the sigmoid in the AND case, right?
Thanks! +1 on not over-anchoring--while this feels like a compelling 1-year timeline story to me, 1-year timelines don't feel the most likely.
1 year is indeed aggressive, in my median reality I expect things slightly slower (3 years for all these things?). I'm unsure if lacking several of the advances I describe still allows this to happen, but in any case the main crux for me is "what does it take to speed up ML development by times, at which point 20-year human-engineered timelines become 20/-year timelines.
Oops, yes meant to be wary. Thanks for the fix!
What do you think about pausing between AGI and ASI to reap the benefits while limiting the risks and buying more time for safety research? Is this not viable due to economic pressures on whoever is closest to ASI to ignore internal governance, or were you just not conditioning on this case in your timelines and saying that an AGI actor could get to ASI quickly if they wanted?