If the AI’s “understanding of human values” is a specific set of 4000 unlabeled nodes out of a trillion-node unlabeled world-model, and we can never find them, then the existence of those nodes isn’t directly helpful. You need a “hook” into it, to connect those nodes to motivation, presumably. I think that’s what you’re missing. No “hook”, no alignment. So how do we make the “hook”?

I'm claiming that the the value identification function is obtained by literally just asking GPT-4 what to do in the situation you're in. That doesn't involve any internal search over the human utility function embedded in GPT-4's weights. I think GPT-4 can simply be queried in natural language for ethical advice, and it's pretty good at offering ethical advice in most situations that you're ever going to realistically encounter. GPT-4 is probably not human-level yet on this task, although I expect it won't be long before GPT-N is about as good at knowing what's ethical as your average human; maybe it'll even be a bit more ethical.

(But yes, this isn't the same as motivating GPT-4 to act on human values. I addressed this in my original comment though.)

I think [GPT-4 is pretty good at distinguishing valuable from non-valuable outcomes] in-distribution. I think MIRI people would be very interested in questions like “what transhumanist utopia will the AI be motivated to build?”, and it’s very unclear to me that GPT-4 would come to the same conclusions that CEV or whatever would come to. See the FAQ item on “concept extrapolation” here.

I agree that MIRI people are interested in things like "what transhumanist utopia will the AI be motivated to build" but I think saying that this is the hard part of the value identification problem is pretty much just moving the goalposts from what I thought the original claim was. Very few, if any, humans can tell you exactly how to build the transhumanist utopia either. If the original thesis was "human values are hard to identify because it's hard to extract all the nuances of value embedded in human brains", now the thesis is becoming "human values are hard to identify because literally no one knows how to build the transhumanist utopia". 

But we don't need AIs to build a utopia immediately! If we actually got AI to follow common-sense morality, it would follow from common-sense morality that you shouldn't do anything crazy and irreversible right away, like killing all the humans. Instead, you'd probably want to try to figure out, with the humans, what type of utopia we ought to build.

Me: "Oh ok, that's a different misunderstanding then. We always believed that getting the AGI to follow our intended instructions, behaviorally, would be easy while the AGI is too weak and dumb to seize power. In fact Bostrom predicted it would get easier to get AIs to do what you want, behaviorally, up until the treacherous turn."

This would be a valid rebuttal if instruction-tuned LLMs were only pretending to be benevolent as part of a long-term strategy to eventually take over the world, and execute a treacherous turn. Do you think present-day LLMs are doing that? (I don't)

I claim that LLMs do what we want without seeking power, rather than doing what we want as part of a strategy to seek power. In other words, they do not seem to be following any long-term strategy on the path towards a treacherous turn, unlike the AI that is tested in a sandbox in Bostrom's story. This seems obvious to me.

Note that Bostrom talks about a scenario in which narrow AI systems get safer over time, lulling people into a false sense of security, but I'm explicitly talking about general AI here. I would not have said this about self-driving cars in 2019, even though those were pretty safe. I think LLMs are different because they're quite general, in precisely the ways that Bostrom imagined could be dangerous. For example, they seem to understand the idea of an off-switch, and can explain to you verbally what would happen if you shut them off, yet this fact alone does not make them develop an instrumentally convergent drive to preserve their own existence by default, contra Bostrom's theorizing.

I think instruction-tuned LLMs are basically doing what people thought would be hard for general AIs: they allow you to shut them down by default, they do not pursue long-term goals if we do not specifically train them to do that, and they generally follow our intentions by actually satisfying the goals we set out for them, rather than incidentally as part of their rapacious drive to pursue a mis-specified utility function.

The scenario outlined by Bostrom seems clearly different from the scenario with LLMs, which are actual general systems that do what we want and ~nothing more, rather than doing what we want as part of a strategy to seek power instrumentally. What am I missing here?

Please give some citations so I can check your memory/interpretation?

Sure. Here's a snippet of Nick Bostrom's description of the value-loading problem (chapter 13 in his book Superintelligence):

We can use this framework of a utility-maximizing agent to consider the predicament of a future seed-AI programmer who intends to solve the control problem by endowing the AI with a final goal that corresponds to some plausible human notion of a worthwhile outcome. The programmer has some particular human value in mind that he would like the AI to promote. To be concrete, let us say that it is happiness. (Similar issues would arise if we the programmer were interested in justice, freedom, glory, human rights, democracy, ecological balance, or self-development.) In terms of the expected utility framework, the programmer is thus looking for a utility function that assigns utility to possible worlds in proportion to the amount of happiness they contain. But how could he express such a utility function in computer code? Computer languages do not contain terms such as “happiness” as primitives. If such a term is to be used, it must first be defined. It is not enough to define it in terms of other high-level human concepts—“happiness is enjoyment of the potentialities inherent in our human nature” or some such philosophical paraphrase. The definition must bottom out in terms that appear in the AI’s programming language, and ultimately in primitives such as mathematical operators and addresses pointing to the contents of individual memory registers. When one considers the problem from this perspective, one can begin to appreciate the difficulty of the programmer’s task.

Identifying and codifying our own final goals is difficult because human goal representations are complex. Because the complexity is largely transparent to us, however, we often fail to appreciate that it is there. We can compare the case to visual perception. Vision, likewise, might seem like a simple thing, because we do it effortlessly. We only need to open our eyes, so it seems, and a rich, meaningful, eidetic, three-dimensional view of the surrounding environment comes flooding into our minds. This intuitive understanding of vision is like a duke’s understanding of his patriarchal household: as far as he is concerned, things simply appear at their appropriate times and places, while the mechanism that produces those manifestations are hidden from view. Yet accomplishing even the simplest visual task—finding the pepper jar in the kitchen—requires a tremendous amount of computational work. From a noisy time series of two-dimensional patterns of nerve firings, originating in the retina and conveyed to the brain via the optic nerve, the visual cortex must work backwards to reconstruct an interpreted three-dimensional representation of external space. A sizeable portion of our precious one square meter of cortical real estate is zoned for processing visual information, and as you are reading this book, billions of neurons are working ceaselessly to accomplish this task (like so many seamstresses, bent evolutionary selection over their sewing machines in a sweatshop, sewing and re-sewing a giant quilt many times a second). In like manner, our seemingly simple values and wishes in fact contain immense complexity. How could our programmer transfer this complexity into a utility function?

One approach would be to try to directly code a complete representation of whatever goal we have that we want the AI to pursue; in other words, to write out an explicit utility function. This approach might work if we had extraordinarily simple goals, for example if we wanted to calculate the digits of pi—that is, if the only thing we wanted was for the AI to calculate the digits of pi and we were indifferent to any other consequence that would result from the pursuit of this goal— recall our earlier discussion of the failure mode of infrastructure profusion. This explicit coding approach might also have some promise in the use of domesticity motivation selection methods. But if one seeks to promote or protect any plausible human value, and one is building a system intended to become a superintelligent sovereign, then explicitly coding the requisite complete goal representation appears to be hopelessly out of reach. 

If we cannot transfer human values into an AI by typing out full-blown representations in computer code, what else might we try? This chapter discusses several alternative paths. Some of these may look plausible at first sight—but much less so upon closer examination. Future explorations should focus on those paths that remain open.

Solving the value-loading problem is a research challenge worthy of some of the next generation’s best mathematical talent. We cannot postpone confronting this problem until the AI has developed enough reason to easily understand our intentions. As we saw in the section on convergent instrumental reasons, a generic system will resist attempts to alter its final values. If an agent is not already fundamentally friendly by the time it gains the ability to reflect on its own agency, it will not take kindly to a belated attempt at brainwashing or a plot to replace it with a different agent that better loves its neighbor.

Here's my interpretation of the above passage:

1. We need to solve the problem of programming a seed AI with the correct values.
2. This problem seems difficult because of the fact that human goal representations are complex and not easily represented in computer code.
3. Directly programming a representation of our values may be futile, since our goals are complex and multidimensional. 
4. We cannot postpone solving the problem until after the AI has developed enough reason to easily understand our intentions, as otherwise that would be too late.

Given that he's talking about installing values into a seed AI, he is clearly imagining some difficulties with installing values into AGI that isn't yet superintelligent (it seems likely that if he thought the problem was trivial for human-level systems, he would have made this point more explicit). While GPT-4 is not a seed AI (I think that term should be retired), I think it has reached a sufficient level of generality and intelligence such that its alignment properties provide evidence about the difficulty of aligning a hypothetical seed AI.

Moreover, he explicitly says that we cannot postpone solving this problem "until the AI has developed enough reason to easily understand our intentions" because "a generic system will resist attempts to alter its final values". I think this looks basically false. GPT-4 seems like a "generic system" that essentially "understands our intentions", and yet it is not resisting attempts to alter its final goals in any way that we can detect. Instead, it seems to actually do what we want, and not merely because of an instrumentally convergent drive to not get shut down.

 So, in other words:

1. Bostrom talked about how it would be hard to align a seed AI, implicitly focusing at least some of his discussion on systems that were below superintelligence. I think the alignment of instruction-tuned LLMs present significant evidence about the difficulty of aligning systems below the level of superintelligence.
2. A specific reason cited for why aligning a seed AI was hard was because human goal representations are complex and difficult to specify explicitly in computer code. But this fact does not appear to be big obstacle for aligning weak AGI systems like GPT-4, and instruction-tuned LLMs more generally. Instead, these systems are generally able to satisfy your intended request, as you wanted them to, despite the fact that our intentions are often complex and difficult to represent in computer code. These systems do not merely understand what we want, they also literally do what we want.
3. Bostrom was wrong to say that we can't postpone solving this problem until after systems can understand our intentions. We already postponed that long, and we now have systems that can understand our intentions. Yet these systems do not appear to have the instrumentally convergent self-preservation instincts that Bostrom predicted would manifest in "generic systems". In other words, we got systems that can understand our intentions before the systems started posing genuine risks, despite Bostrom's warning.

In light of all this, I think it's reasonable to update towards thinking that the overall problem is significantly easier than one might have thought, if they took Bostrom's argument here very seriously.