Expected Utility Maximization is Not Enough
Consider a homomorphically encrypted computation running somewhere in the cloud. The computations correspond to running an AGI. Now from the outside, you can still model the AGI based on how it behaves, as an expected utility maximizer, if you have a lot of observational data about the AGI (or at least let's take this as a reasonable assumption).
No matter how closely you look at the computations, you will not be able to figure out how to change these computations in order to make the AGI aligned if it was not alig...
Right now I am trying to better understand future AI systems, by first thinking about what sort of abilities I expect every system of high cognitive power will have, and second, trying to find a concrete practical implementation of this ability. One ability is building a model of the world, that has certain desiderata. For example, if we have multiple agents in the world, then we can factor the world, such that we can build just one model of the agent, and point to this model in our description of the world two times. This is something that Solom...
Many people match "pivotal act" to "deploy AGI to take over the world", and ignore the underlying problem of preventing others from deploying misaligned AGI.
I have talked to two high-profile alignment/alignment-adjacent people who actively dislike pivotal acts.
I think both have contorted notions of what a pivotal act is about. They focused on how dangerous it would be to let a powerful AI system loose on the world.
However, a pivotal act is about this. So an act that ensures that misaligned AGI will not be built is a pivotal act. Many such acts might look l...
Solomonoff induction does not talk about how to make optimal tradeoffs in the programs that serve as the hypothesis.
Imagine you want to describe a part of the world that contains a gun. Solomonoff induction would converge on finding the program that perfectly predicts all the possible observations. So this program would be able to predict what sort of observations would I make after I stuff a banana into the muzzle and fire it. But knowing how the banana was splattered around is not the most useful fact about the gun. It is more useful to know that a gun c...
It seems potentially important to compare this to GPT4o. In my experience when asking GPT4 for research papers on particular subjects it seemed to make up non-existent research papers (at least I didn't find them after multiple minutes of searching the web). I don't have any precise statistics on this.