Apologies for a possibly naive comment/question, perhaps this has been discussed elsewhere and you can just direct me there. But anyway...
I would find it helpful to see a strategy that ARC believes does in fact solve ELK, but fails only because it requires taking an unacceptably large capabilities hit. I would find this helpful for several reasons, namely
(1) it would help me to understand what kinds of strategies you believe really do escape counter-examples,
(2) it would give me a better sense for how optimistic to be about the appr...
I think this is an interesting project, and one that (from a very different angle) I’ve spent a bit of time on, so here are a few notes on that, followed by a few suggestions. Stella, in another comment, made several great points that I agree with and that are similar in spirit to my suggestions.
Anyway, based on a fairly similar motivation of wanting to be able to “ask a LM what it’s actually thinking/expecting”, combined with the general tendency to want to do the simplest and cheapest thing possible first… and then try to make it even simpler still befor...
Thanks, yeah I meant that I was interested in a solution that would scale to arbitrarily superhuman AI capabilities with a "mere" capabilities hit/cost (perhaps a very large cost that grows with AI capability, but does not impose a bound on the ultimate capability of the aligned system). So this was a useful clarification for me in terms of understanding your perspective; I may be wrong but I could imagine it might be useful to lead with this a bit more, ie "we don't know of and would be very interested in solutions that might be extremely costly but that avoid all counter-examples". Possibly you already say this and I just missed it.