Two different meanings of “misuse”

The term "AI misuse" encompasses two fundamentally different threat models that deserve separate analysis and different mitigation strategies:

• Democratization of offense-dominant capabilities
  • This involves currently weak actors gaining access to capabilities that dramatically amplify their ability to cause harm. That amplification of ability to cause harm is only a huge problem if access to AI didn’t also dramatically amplify the ability of others to defend against harm, which is why I refer to “offense-dominant” capabilities; this is discussed in The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.
  • The canonical example is terrorists using AI to design bioweapons that would be beyond their current technical capacity (c.f.  Aum Shinrikyo, which failed to produce bioweapons despite making a serious effort)
• Power Concentration Risk
  • This involves AI systems giving already-powerful actors dramatically more power over others
  • Examples could include:
    • Government leaders using AI to stage a self-coup then install a permanent totalitarian regime, using AI to maintain a regime with currently impossible levels of surveillance.
    • AI company CEOs using advanced AI systems

[epistemic status: I think I’m mostly right about the main thrust here, but probably some of the specific arguments below are wrong. In the following, I'm much more stating conclusions than providing full arguments. This claim isn’t particularly original to me.]

I’m interested in the following subset of risk from AI:

• Early: That comes from AIs that are just powerful enough to be extremely useful and dangerous-by-default (i.e. these AIs aren’t wildly superhuman).
• Scheming: Risk associated with loss of control to AIs that arises from AIs scheming
  • So e.g. I exclude state actors stealing weights in ways that aren’t enabled by the AIs scheming, and I also exclude non-scheming failure modes. IMO, state actors stealing weights is a serious threat, but non-scheming failure modes aren’t (at this level of capability and dignity).
• Medium dignity: that is, developers of these AIs are putting a reasonable amount of effort into preventing catastrophic outcomes from their AIs (perhaps they’re spending the equivalent of 10% of their budget on cost-effective measures to prevent catastrophes).
• Nearcasted: no substantial fundamental progress on AI safety techniques, no substantial changes in how AI wo

I think people in the safety community underrate the following possibility: early transformatively-powerful models are pretty obviously scheming (though they aren't amazingly good at it), but their developers are deploying them anyway, either because they're wildly irresponsible or because they're under massive competitive pressure.

In this world, it's not very valuable to have better techniques for determining whether models are scheming (because they obviously are), but it is valuable to have better techniques for reducing the risk associated with deploying known-scheming models.

One background assumption that leads to this belief is that I think it might be pretty hard for early transformatively-powerful schemers to escape; it wouldn't shock me if the schemer only has like 1% chance of escaping even a pretty irresponsible lab per time that it tries. In this regime, it's very plausible that people at the lab think the model is obviously scheming before its cumulative probability of escape is very high, but SGD isn't sample-efficient enough to make it stop.

See catching AIs red-handed for more takes on what you might do in this situation.

AI safety people often emphasize making safety cases as the core organizational approach to ensuring safety. I think this might cause people to anchor on relatively bad analogies to other fields.

Safety cases are widely used in fields that do safety engineering, e.g. airplanes and nuclear reactors. See e.g. “Arguing Safety” for my favorite introduction to them. The core idea of a safety case is to have a structured argument that clearly and explicitly spells out how all of your empirical measurements allow you to make a sequence of conclusions that establish that the risk posed by your system is acceptably low. Safety cases are somewhat controversial among safety engineering pundits.

But the AI context has a very different structure from those fields, because all of the risks that companies are interested in mitigating with safety cases are fundamentally adversarial (with the adversary being AIs and/or humans). There’s some discussion of adapting the safety-case-like methodology to the adversarial case (e.g. Alexander et al, “Security assurance cases: motivation and the state of the art”), but this seems to be quite experimental and it is not generally recommended. So I think it’s ve... (read more)

Something I think I’ve been historically wrong about:

A bunch of the prosaic alignment ideas (eg adversarial training, IDA, debate) now feel to me like things that people will obviously do the simple versions of by default. Like, when we’re training systems to answer questions, of course we’ll use our current versions of systems to help us evaluate, why would we not do that? We’ll be used to using these systems to answer questions that we have, and so it will be totally obvious that we should use them to help us evaluate our new system.

Similarly with debate--adversarial setups are pretty obvious and easy.

In this frame, the contributions from Paul and Geoffrey feel more like “they tried to systematically think through the natural limits of the things people will do” than “they thought of an approach that non-alignment-obsessed people would never have thought of or used”.

It’s still not obvious whether people will actually use these techniques to their limits, but it would be surprising if they weren’t used at all.

When thinking about different techniques that aim to reduce AI risk from misaligned AIs, I find it helpful to explicitly consider multiple different levels of risk that the deployer of the AI might be going for, because different classes of safety techniques are appropriate for different risk levels. Four that I think it's particularly useful to think about:

• *The “safety case” regime.* Sometimes people talk about wanting to have approaches to safety such that if all AI developers followed these approaches, the overall level of risk posed by AI would be minimal. (These approaches are going to be more conservative than will probably be feasible in practice given the amount of competitive pressure, so I think it’s pretty likely that AI developers don’t actually hold themselves to these standards, but I agree with e.g. Anthropic that this level of caution is at least a useful hypothetical to consider.) This is the level of caution people are usually talking about when they discuss making safety cases. I usually operationalize this as the AI developer wanting to have <1% chance that their AIs escape in the first year of deployment, and <5% conditional on the model trying pretty har

[this is not a particularly original take; I'm writing it here so that I have somewhere to link people when I want to make this point]

From my perspective, one of the main avenues by which adversarial robustness might reduce AI x-risk is making weak trusted models more robust to attempts from scheming models to cause concentrated failures by jailbreaking or otherwise tricking them.

That is: if you’re using weak trusted models to review the actions of more powerful models to ensure they aren’t causing egregious problems (we call this trusted monitoring), one of the main ways the powerful models might be able to defeat your safety measures is by jailbreaking the trusted model into saying that some action is safe when it actually isn’t. You have similar problems with many other control protocols that require trusted models to be run on inputs that contain generations from untrusted models.

So I’d say the main applications of research into adversarial robustness are:

• Improving robustness of models to attacks from scheming AIs (and other AI attacks).
• Improving robustness of models to human attacks.
• Making models themselves less likely to take intentional catastrophic actio

[this is a draft that I shared with a bunch of friends a while ago; they raised many issues that I haven't addressed, but might address at some point in the future]

In my opinion, and AFAICT the opinion of many alignment researchers, there are problems with aligning superintelligent models that no alignment techniques so far proposed are able to fix. Even if we had a full kitchen sink approach where we’d overcome all the practical challenges of applying amplification techniques, transparency techniques, adversarial training, and so on, I still wouldn’t feel that confident that we’d be able to build superintelligent systems that were competitive with unaligned ones, unless we got really lucky with some empirical contingencies that we will have no way of checking except for just training the superintelligence and hoping for the best.

Two examples: 

• A simplified version of the hope with IDA is that we’ll be able to have our system make decisions in a way that never had to rely on searching over uninterpretable spaces of cognitive policies. But this will only be competitive if IDA can do all the same cognitive actions that an unaligned system can do, which is probably false, eg cf In

When I'm thinking about AI control in the context of concentrated failures--that is, cases where an unacceptable outcome might be caused by a small number of bad AI actions, e.g. the setting explored in our control paper--I find it helpful to use the following simplified models.

Let's consider our AI deployment from both a micro perspective, where we just think about a single task the AI is doing, and a macro perspective, where we think about the deployment as comprised of many tasks.

From the micro perspective, when an AI tries to attack on a particular task, this can end in three ways:

• The attack succeeds, and so the AI wins.
• We catch it the AI red-handed before the attack completes, and so it loses.
• The attack fails silently; we don't notice it, and so the game continues as before.

And from the macro perspective, the game ends one of these ways:

• An attack succeeded; the AI wins.
• You caught the AI; you win.
• The game finished naturally because all the tasks were completed; you win.

I often ignore the possibility of the game finishing naturally, because that won't happen if the AI attempts to attack often enough, which is the right strategy for the AI in many games.

Under that assumption, the... (read more)

[epistemic status: speculative]

A lot of the time, we consider our models to be functions from parameters and inputs to outputs, and we imagine training the parameters with SGD. One notable feature of this setup is that SGD isn’t by default purposefully trying to kill you--it might find a model that kills you, or a model that gradient hacks and then kills you, but this is more like incompetence/indifference on SGD’s part, rather than malice.

A plausible objection to this framing is that much of the knowledge of our models is probably going to be produced in other ways than SGD. For example, the models might write down various notes (in natural language or in neuralese) that they then read later, and they might have internal structures like economies that produce and consume information. Does this introduce new alignment problems?

Here’s a way I’ve been thinking about this recently. I’m writing this in way that might feel obnoxiously overwrought because this is the way that I think would have conveyed my current intuition to me two months ago.

In SGD, we update our weights by something like:

weights <- weights + alpha * (d loss/d weights)

You might think that this is fundamental. But a... (read more)

An example snippet of a rogue internal deployment threat model that I find fairly compelling:

1. The schemer, while deployed in an authorized scaffold, launches an unmonitored scaffold that has access to trusted model weights.
2. It uses this scaffold to do a GCG attack on the trusted model, then writes the resulting GCG attack somewhere that the agent in the authorized scaffold can see. This takes a moderate amount of compute, but a small amount compared to the amount the untrusted model will regularly need to run experiments.
3. The agent in the authorized scaffold uses that GCG attack to do something else that's more bad.

To defend against this, we should try to both prevent the untrusted model from ever getting rogue deployments where it can research jailbreaks on the trusted model, and also try to prevent unacceptable outcomes conditional on the untrusted agent having access to the best jailbreaks you can get with GCG etc.

I find this interesting because it seems kind of hard to stop either step 1 (because rogue deployments might be naturally possible given the affordances the model has) or step 3 (because it's hard to ensure safety against an adversary with white-box access to a model it wants to jailbreak). I'd be excited for more research on both of these.

I used to think that slower takeoff implied shorter timelines, because slow takeoff means that pre-AGI AI is more economically valuable, which means that economy advances faster, which means that we get AGI sooner. But there's a countervailing consideration, which is that in slow takeoff worlds, you can make arguments like ‘it’s unlikely that we’re close to AGI, because AI can’t do X yet’, where X might be ‘make a trillion dollars a year’ or ‘be as competent as a bee’. I now overall think that arguments for fast takeoff should update you towards shorter timelines.

So slow takeoffs cause shorter timelines, but are evidence for longer timelines.

This graph is a version of this argument: if we notice that current capabilities are at the level of the green line, then if we think we're on the fast takeoff curve we'll deduce we're much further ahead than we'd think on the slow takeoff curve.

For the "slow takeoffs mean shorter timelines" argument, see here: https://sideways-view.com/2018/02/24/takeoff-speeds/

This point feels really obvious now that I've written it down, and I suspect it's obvious to many AI safety people, including the people whose writings I'm referencing here. Thanks to various people for helpful comments.

I think that this is why belief in slow takeoffs is correlated with belief in long timelines among the people I know who think a lot about AI safety.

Here's a math problem I'd like solved:

I want to know the Nash equilibrium of the following two player game between players Alice and Bob.

Alice chooses the rates of two Poisson processes; we call these rates lam_1 and lam_2.

Bob needs to run each of these processes for 0.5 seconds. Bob can run each of the processes in "shielded" mode or "unshielded" mode, but can only afford to use $t$ seconds of shielded mode in total between the two processes. (So Bob chooses $t_1$ and $t_2$ such that $t_1+t_2=t$.)

The game goes as follows:

• We run process 1 for time $t_1$ and process 2 for time $t_2$, in shielded mode. If either event occurs during these time periods, Bob wins.
• Then we run process 1 for time $0.5-t_1$ and process 2 for time $0.25-t_2$, in unshielded mode. If either event occurs during these time periods, Alice wins.
• If the event never occurred, Bob wins.

Here’s a Sympy implementation of this game (where I parameterize with $t_1=pt$ and $t_2=(1-p)t$.)

import sympy as sp

lam_1, lam_2, p, t = sp.symbols('lambda_1 lambda_2 p t', real=True, positive=True)

time_2_overseen = t * (1 - p)
time_2_not_overseen = sp.Rational(1, 2) - time_2_overseen