Thank you for this post. It looks like the people at Anthropic have put a lot of thought into this which is good to see.
You mention that there are often surprising qualitative differences between larger and smaller models. How seriously is Anthropic considering a scenario where there is a sudden jump in certain dangerous capabilities (in particular deception) at some level of model intelligence? Does it seem plausible that it might not be possible to foresee this jump from experiments on even slighter weaker models?
We certainly think that abrupt changes of safety properties are very possible! See discussion of how the most pessimistic scenarios may seem optimistic until very powerful systems are created in this post, and also our paper on Predictability and Surprise.
With that said, I think we tend to expect a bit of continuity. Empirically, even the "abrupt changes" we observe with respect to model size tend to take place over order-of-magnitude changes in compute. (There are examples of things like the formation of induction heads where qualitative changes in model ... (read more)
Thank you for this post. It looks like the people at Anthropic have put a lot of thought into this which is good to see.
You mention that there are often surprising qualitative differences between larger and smaller models. How seriously is Anthropic considering a scenario where there is a sudden jump in certain dangerous capabilities (in particular deception) at some level of model intelligence? Does it seem plausible that it might not be possible to foresee this jump from experiments on even slighter weaker models?
We certainly think that abrupt changes of safety properties are very possible! See discussion of how the most pessimistic scenarios may seem optimistic until very powerful systems are created in this post, and also our paper on Predictability and Surprise.
With that said, I think we tend to expect a bit of continuity. Empirically, even the "abrupt changes" we observe with respect to model size tend to take place over order-of-magnitude changes in compute. (There are examples of things like the formation of induction heads where qualitative changes in model ... (read more)