All of jaan's Comments + Replies

jaan812

Sure, but I guess I would say that we're back to nebulous territory then—how much longer than six months? When if ever does the pause end?

i agree that, if hashed out, the end criteria may very well resemble RSPs. still, i would strongly advocate for scaling moratorium until widely (internationally) acceptable RSPs are put in place.

I'd very surprised if there was substantial x-risk from the next model generation.

i share the intuition that the current and next LLM generations are unlikely an xrisk. however, i don't trust my (or anyone else's) intuitons stron... (read more)

jaan1826

the FLI letter asked for “pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4” and i’m very much willing to defend that!

my own worry with RSPs is that they bake in (and legitimise) the assumptions that a) near term (eval-less) scaling poses trivial xrisk, and b) there is a substantial period during which models trigger evals but are existentially safe. you must have thought about them, so i’m curious what you think.

that said, thank you for the post, it’s a very valuable discussion to have! upvoted.

4Evan Hubinger
Sure, but I guess I would say that we're back to nebulous territory then—how much longer than six months? When if ever does the pause end? I agree that this is mostly baked in, but I think I'm pretty happy to accept it. I'd very surprised if there was substantial x-risk from the next model generation. But also I would argue that, if the next generation of models do pose an x-risk, we've mostly already lost—we just don't yet have anything close to the sort of regulatory regime we'd need to deal with that in place. So instead I would argue that we should be planning a bit further ahead than that, and trying to get something actually workable in place further out—which should also be easier to do because of the dynamic where organizations are more willing to sacrifice potential future value than current realized value. Yeah, I agree that this is tricky. Theoretically, since we can set the eval bar at any capability level, there should exist capability levels that you can eval for and that are safe but scaling beyond them is not. The problem, of course, is whether we can effectively identify the right capabilities levels to evaluate in advance. The fact that different capabilities are highly correlated with each other makes this easier in some ways—lots of different early warning signs will all be correlated—but harder in other ways—the dangerous capabilities will also be correlated, so they could all come at you at once. Probably the most important intervention here is to keep applying your evals while you're training your next model generation, so they trigger as soon as possible. As long as there's some continuity in capabilities, that should get you pretty far. Another thing you can do is put strict limits on how much labs are allowed to scale their next model generation relative to the models that have been definitively evaluated to be safe. And furthermore, my sense is that at least in the current scaling paradigm, the capabilities of the next model generation