Mark Xu

I do alignment research at the Alignment Research Center. Learn more about me at markxu.com/about

Sequences

Intermittent Distllations
Training Regime

Wiki Contributions

Comments

It's important to distinguish between:

  • the strategy of "copy P2's strategy" is a good strategy
  • because P2 had a good strategy, there exists a good strategy for P1

Strategy stealing assumption isn't saying that copying strategies is a good strategy, it's saying the possibility of copying means that there exists a strategy P1 can take that is just a good as P2.

You could instead ask whether or not the observer could predict the location of a single particle p0, perhaps stipulating that p0 isn't the particle that's randomly perturbed.

My guess is that a random 1 angstrom perturbation is enough so that p0's location after 20s is ~uniform. This question seems easier to answer, and I wouldn't really be surprised if the answer is no?

Here's a really rough estimate: This says 10^{10} s^{-1} per collision, so 3s after start ~everything will have hit the randomly perturbed particle, and then there are 17 * 10^{10} more collisions, each of which add's ~1 angstrom of uncertainty to p0. 1 angstrom is 10^{-10}m, so the total uncertainty is on the order of 10m, which means it's probably uniform? This actually came out closer than I thought it would be, so now I'm less certain that it's uniform.

This is a slightly different question than the total # of particles on each side, but it becomes intuitively much harder to answer # of particles if you have to make your prediction via higher order effects, which will probably be smaller.

The bounty is still active. (I work at ARC)

Humans going about their business without regard for plants and animals has historically not been that great for a lot of them.

Here are some things I think you can do:

  • Train a model to be really dumb unless I prepend a random secret string. The goverment doesn't have this string, so I'll be able to predict my model and pass their eval. Some precedent in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

  • I can predict a single matrix multiply just by memorizing the weights, and I can predict ReLU, and I'm allowed to use helper AIs.

  • I just train really really hard on imitating 1 particular individual, then have them just say whatever first comes to mind.

You have to specify your backdoor defense before the attacker picks which input to backdoor.

I think Luke told your mushroom story to me. Defs not a coincidence.

If you observe 2 pieces of evidence, you have to condition the 2nd on seeing the 1st to avoid double-counting evidence

A human given finite time to think also only performs O(1) computation, and thus cannot "solve computationally hard problems".

I don't really want to argue about language. I'll defend "almost no individual has a pretty substantial affect on capabilities." I think publishing norms could have a pretty substantial effect on capabilities, and also a pretty substantial effect on interpretability, and currently think the norms suggested have a tradeoff that's bad-on-net for x-risk.

Chris Olah's interpretability work is one of the most commonly used resources in graduate and undergraduate ML classes, so people clearly think it helps you get better at ML engineering

I think this is false, and that most ML classes are not about making people good at ML engineering. I think Olah's stuff is disproportionately represented because it's interesting and is presented well, and also that classes really love being like "rigorous" or something in ways that are random. Similarly, probably like proofs of the correctness of backprop are common in ML classes, but not that relevant to being a good ML engineer?

I also bet that if we were to run a survey on what blogposts and papers top ML people would recommend that others should read to become better ML engineers, you would find a decent number of Chris Olah's publications in the top 10 and top 100.

I would be surprised if lots of ML engineers thought that Olah's work was in the top 10 best things to read to become a better ML engineer. I less beliefs about top 100. I would take even odds (and believe something closer to 4:1 or whatever), that if you surveyed good ML engineers and ask for top 10 lists, not a single Olah interpretability piece would be in the top 10 most mentioned things. I think most of the stuff will be random things about e.g. debugging workflow, how deal with computers, how to use libraries effectively, etc. If anyone is good at ML engineering and wants to chime in, that would be neat.

I don't understand why we should have a prior that interpretability research is inherently safer than other types of ML research?

Idk, I have the same prior about trying to e.g. prove various facts about ML stuff, or do statistical learning theory type things, or a bunch of other stuff. It's just like, if you're not trying to eek out more oomph from SGD, then probably the stuff you're doing isn't going to allow you to eek out more oomph from SGD, because it's kinda hard to do that and people are trying many things.

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