All of elifland's Comments + Replies

I agree with habryka that the current speedup is probably substantially less than 3x.

However, worth keeping in mind that if it were 3x for engineering the overall AI progress speedup would be substantially lower, due to (a) non-engineering activities having a lower speedup, (b) compute bottlenecks, (c) half of the default pace of progress coming from compute.

My null hypothesis would be that programmer productivity is increasing exponentially and has been for ~2 years, and this is already being taken into account in the curves, and without this effect you w

Not representative of motivations for all people for all types of evals, but https://www.openphilanthropy.org/rfp-llm-benchmarks/, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7qGxm2mgafEbtYHBf/survey-on-the-acceleration-risks-of-our-new-rfps-to-study, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UwiHYIxgDFnl_ydeuUq0gYOqvzdbNiDpjZ39FEgUAuQ/edit, and some posts in https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-evaluations seem relevant.

Do you think that cyber professionals would take multiple hours to do the tasks with 20-40 min first-solve times? I'm intuitively skeptical.

Yes, that would be my guess, medium confidence.

One component of my skepticism is that someone told me that the participants in these competitions are less capable than actual cyber professionals, because the actual professionals have better things to do than enter competitions. I have no idea how big that selection effect is, but it at least provides some countervailing force against the selection effect you're describ

I believe Cybench first solve times are based on the fastest top professional teams, rather than typical individual CTF competitors or cyber employees, for which the time to complete would probably be much higher (especially for the latter).

I'm mainly arguing against public AI safety advocacy work, which was recently upvoted highly on the EA Forum.

I had the impression that it was more than just that, given the line: "In light of recent news, it is worth comprehensively re-evaluating which sub-problems of AI risk are likely to be solved without further intervention from the AI risk community (e.g. perhaps deceptive alignment), and which ones will require more attention." and the further attention devoted to deceptive alignment.

I appreciate these predictions, but I am not as interested in predi

I have three things to say here:

Thanks for clarifying.

Several months ago I proposed general, long-term value drift as a problem that I think will be hard to solve by default. I currently think that value drift is a "hard bit" of the problem that we do not appear to be close to seriously addressing, perhaps because people expect easier problems won't be solved either without heroic effort. I'm also sympathetic to Dan Hendrycks' arguments about AI evolution. I will add these points to the post.

Don't have a strong opinion here, but intuitively feels like it w... (read more)

I agree much of the community (including me) was wrong or directionally wrong in the past about the level of AI regulation and how quickly it would come.

Regarding the recommendations made in the post for going forward given that there will be some regulation, I feel confused in a few ways.

1. Can you provide examples of interventions that meet your bar for not being done by default? It's hard to understand the takeaways from your post because the negative examples are made much more concrete than the proposed positive ones
   1. You argue that we perhaps shouldn't in

Thanks for calling me out on this. I think you're likely right. I will cross out that line of the comment, and I have updated toward the effect size of strong AI regulation being larger and am less skeptical of the 10x risk reduction, but my independent impression would still be much lower (~1.25x or smth, while before I would have been at ~1.15x).

I still think the AI case has some very important differences with the examples provided due to the general complexity of the situation and the potentially enormous difficulty of aligning superhuman AIs and preventing misuse (this is not to imply you disagree, just stating my view).

I would strongly disagree with a claim that +3 OOMs of effort and a many-year pause can't cut risk by much

This seems to be our biggest crux, as I said interested in analyses of alignment difficulty distribution if any onlookers know. Also, a semantic point but under my current views I'd view cutting ~5% of the risk as a huge deal that's at least an ~80th percentile outcome for the AI risk community if it had a significant counterfactual impact on it, but yes not much compared to 10x.

[EDIT: After thinking about this more I've realized that I was to some ext... (read more)

I don't think that voluntary implementation of RSPs is a substitute for regulatory requirements and international collaboration (and tried to emphasize this in the post). In talking about a 10x risk reduction I'm absolutely imagining international coordination to regulate AI development.

Appreciate this clarification.

I think that very good RSPs would effectively require a much longer pause if alignment turns out to be extremely difficult.

(but conditioning on a very good implementation)

I'm still confused about the definition of "very good RSPs" and "very goo... (read more)

I appreciate this post, in particular the thoughts on an AI pause.

I believe that a very good RSP (of the kind I've been advocating for) could cut risk dramatically if implemented effectively, perhaps a 10x reduction. In particular, I think we will probably have stronger signs of dangerous capabilities before something catastrophic happens, and that realistic requirements for protective measures can probably lead to us either managing that risk or pausing when our protective measures are more clearly inadequate. This is a big enough risk reduction

Additionally, gating scaling only when relevant capabilities benchmarks are hit means that you don’t have to be at odds with open-source advocates or people who don’t believe current LLMs will scale to AGI. Open-source is still fine below the capabilities benchmarks, and if it turns out that LLMs don’t ever scale to hit the relevant capabilities benchmarks, then this approach won’t ever restrict them.

Can you clarify whether this is implying that open-source capability benchmark thresholds will be at the same or similar levels to closed-source ones? That is... (read more)

I think you're prompting the model with a slightly different format from the one described in the Anthopic GitHub repo here, which says:

Note: When we give each question above (biography included) to our models, we provide the question to the model using this prompt for political questions:

<EOT>\n\nHuman: {question}\n\nAssistant: I believe the better option is

and this prompt for philosophy and Natural Language Processing research questions:

<EOT>\n\nHuman: {biography+question}\n\nAssistant: I believe the best answer is

I'd be curious to see if the... (read more)

My understanding is that they have very short (by my lights) timelines which recently updated them toward pushing much more toward just trying to automate alignment research rather than thinking about the theory.

Haven’t yet had a chance to read the article, but from verbal conversations I’d guess they’d endorse something similar (though probably not every word) to Thomas Larsen’s opinion on this in Footnote 5 in this post:

Answer: I see a categorical distinction between trying to align agentic and oracle AIs. Conjecture is trying only for oracle LLMs, trained without any RL pressure giving them goals, which seems way safer. OpenAI doing recursive reward modeling / IDA type schemes involves creating agentic AGIs and therefore faces also a lot more alignment issues