Today we are publishing a significant update to our Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), the risk governance framework we use to mitigate potential catastrophic risks from frontier AI systems. This update introduces a more flexible and nuanced approach to assessing and managing AI risks while maintaining our commitment not to train or deploy models unless we have implemented adequate safeguards. Key improvements include new capability thresholds to indicate when we will upgrade our safeguards, refined processes for evaluating model capabilities and the adequacy of our safeguards (inspired by safety case methodologies), and new measures for internal governance and external input. By learning from our implementation experiences and drawing on risk management practices used in other high-consequence industries, we aim to better prepare for the rapid pace of AI...
While you can make a lot of progress in evals with tinkering and paying little attention to the literature, we found that various other papers have saved us many months of research effort. The Apollo Research evals team thus compiled a list of what we felt were important evals-related papers. We likely missed some relevant papers, and our recommendations reflect our personal opinions.
In late 2022, Nate Soares gave some feedback on my Cold Takes series on AI risk (shared as drafts at that point), stating that I hadn't discussed what he sees as one of the key difficulties of AI alignment.
I wanted to understand the difficulty he was pointing to, so the two of us had an extended Slack exchange, and I then wrote up a summary of the exchange that we iterated on until we were both reasonably happy with its characterization of the difficulty and our disagreement.1 My short summary is:
This post starts out pretty gloomy but ends up with some points that I feel pretty positive about. Day to day, I'm more focussed on the positive points, but awareness of the negative has been crucial to forming my priorities, so I'm going to start with those. It's mostly addressed to the EA community, but is hopefully somewhat of interest to LessWrong and the Alignment Forum as well.
I think AGI is going to be developed soon, and quickly. Possibly (20%) that's next year, and most likely (80%) before the end of 2029. These are not things you need to believe for yourself in order to understand my view, so no worries if you're not personally convinced of this.
(For what it's worth, I did arrive at...
I wonder if work on AI for epistemics could be great for mitigating the "gradually cede control of the Earth to AGI" threat model. A large majority of economic and political power is held by people who would strongly oppose human extinction, so I expect that "lack of political support for stopping human extinction" would be less of a bottleneck than "consensus that we're heading towards human extinction" and "consensus on what policy proposals will solve the problem". Both of these could be significantly accelerated by AI. Normally, one of my biggest conce...
Or you guys could find a 1-2 hour window to show up and live-chat in a LW dialogue, then publish the results :-)