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“o1 is a bad idea” by abramdemski Nov 12, 2024

Show notes

This post comes a bit late with respect to the news cycle, but I argued in a recent interview that o1 is an unfortunate twist on LLM technologies, making them particularly unsafe compared to what we might otherwise have expected:
The basic argument is that the technology behind o1 doubles down on a reinforcement learning paradigm, which puts us closer to the world where we have to get the value specification exactly right in order to avert catastrophic outcomes.
RLHF is just barely RL.
- Andrej Karpathy
Additionally, this technology takes us further from interpretability. If you ask GPT4 to produce a chain-of-thought (with prompts such as "reason step-by-step to arrive at an answer"), you know that in some sense, the natural-language reasoning you see in the output is how it arrived at the answer.[1] This is not true of systems like o1. The o1 training rewards [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
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First published:
November 11th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BEFbC8sLkur7DGCYB/o1-is-a-bad-idea
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

undefined — **“Current safety training techniques do not fully transfer to the agent setting” by Simon Lermen, Govind Pimpale** Nov 09, 2024
Show notes

TL;DR: I'm presenting three recent papers which all share a similar finding, i.e. the safety training techniques for chat models don’t transfer well from chat models to the agents built from them. In other words, models won’t tell you how to do something harmful, but they are often willing to directly execute harmful actions. However, all papers find that different attack methods like jailbreaks, prompt-engineering, or refusal-vector ablation do transfer.
Here are the three papers:

AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents
Refusal-Trained LLMs Are Easily Jailbroken As Browser Agents
Applying Refusal-Vector Ablation to Llama 3.1 70B Agents
**What are language model agents**
Language model agents are a combination of a language model and a scaffolding software. Regular language models are typically limited to being chat bots, i.e. they receive messages and reply to them. However, scaffolding gives these models access to tools which they can [...]
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**Outline:**
(00:55) What are language model agents
(01:36) Overview
(03:31) AgentHarm Benchmark
(05:27) Refusal-Trained LLMs Are Easily Jailbroken as Browser Agents
(06:47) Applying Refusal-Vector Ablation to Llama 3.1 70B Agents
(08:23) Discussion
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First published:
November 3rd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZoFxTqWRBkyanonyb/current-safety-training-techniques-do-not-fully-transfer-to
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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**Images from the article:**
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“Survival without dignity” by L Rudolf L Nov 04, 2024

Show notes

I open my eyes and find myself lying on a bed in a hospital room. I blink.
"Hello", says a middle-aged man with glasses, sitting on a chair by my bed. "You've been out for quite a long while."
"Oh no ... is it Friday already? I had that report due -"
"It's Thursday", the man says.
"Oh great", I say. "I still have time."
"Oh, you have all the time in the world", the man says, chuckling. "You were out for 21 years."
I burst out laughing, but then falter as the man just keeps looking at me. "You mean to tell me" - I stop to let out another laugh - "that it's 2045?"
"January 26th, 2045", the man says.
"I'm surprised, honestly, that you still have things like humans and hospitals", I say. "There were so many looming catastrophes in 2024. AI misalignment, all sorts of [...]
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First published:
November 4th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BarHSeciXJqzRuLzw/survival-without-dignity
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“The Median Researcher Problem” by johnswentworth Nov 04, 2024

Show notes

Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. We’ll call this the “median researcher problem”.
Prototypical example: imagine a scientific field in which the large majority of practitioners have a very poor understanding of statistics, p-hacking, etc. Then lots of work in that field will be highly memetic despite trash statistics, blatant p-hacking, etc. Sure, the most competent people in the field may recognize the problems, but the median researchers don’t, and in aggregate it's mostly the median researchers who spread the memes.
(Defending that claim isn’t really the main focus of this post, but a couple pieces of legible evidence which are weakly in favor:

People did in fact try to sound the alarm about poor statistical practices well before the replication crisis, and yet practices did not change, so clearly at least [...]

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First published:
November 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vZcXAc6txvJDanQ4F/the-median-researcher-problem-1
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“The Compendium, A full argument about extinction risk from AGI” by adamShimi, Gabriel Alfour, Connor Leahy, Chris Scammell, Andrea_Miotti Nov 01, 2024

Show notes

This is a link post.We (Connor Leahy, Gabriel Alfour, Chris Scammell, Andrea Miotti, Adam Shimi) have just published The Compendium, which brings together in a single place the most important arguments that drive our models of the AGI race, and what we need to do to avoid catastrophe.
We felt that something like this has been missing from the AI conversation. Most of these points have been shared before, but a “comprehensive worldview” doc has been missing. We’ve tried our best to fill this gap, and welcome feedback and debate about the arguments. The Compendium is a living document, and we’ll keep updating it as we learn more and change our minds.
We would appreciate your feedback, whether or not you agree with us:

If you do agree with us, please point out where you think the arguments can be made stronger, and contact us if there are [...]

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First published:
October 31st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/prm7jJMZzToZ4QxoK/the-compendium-a-full-argument-about-extinction-risk-from
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“The hostile telepaths problem” by Valentine Oct 28, 2024

Show notes

Epistemic status: model-building based on observation, with a few successful unusual predictions. Anecdotal evidence has so far been consistent with the model. This puts it at risk of seeming more compelling than the evidence justifies just yet. Caveat emptor.
Imagine you're a very young child. Around, say, three years old.
You've just done something that really upsets your mother. Maybe you were playing and knocked her glasses off the table and they broke.
Of course you find her reaction uncomfortable. Maybe scary. You're too young to have detailed metacognitive thoughts, but if you could reflect on why you're scared, you wouldn't be confused: you're scared of how she'll react.
She tells you to say you're sorry.
You utter the magic words, hoping that will placate her.
And she narrows her eyes in suspicion.
"You sure don't look sorry. Say it and mean it."
Now you have a serious problem. [...]
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Outline:
(02:16) Newcomblike self-deception
(06:10) Sketch of a real-world version
(08:43) Possible examples in real life
(12:17) Other solutions to the problem
(12:38) Having power
(14:45) Occlumency
(16:48) Solution space is maybe vast
(17:40) Ending the need for self-deception
(18:21) Welcome self-deception
(19:52) Look away when directed to
(22:59) Hypothesize without checking
(25:50) Does this solve self-deception?
(27:21) Summary
The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
October 27th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5FAnfAStc7birapMx/the-hostile-telepaths-problem
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“A Rocket–Interpretability Analogy” by plex Oct 25, 2024

Show notes

1.
4.4% of the US federal budget went into the space race at its peak.
This was surprising to me, until a friend pointed out that landing rockets on specific parts of the moon requires very similar technology to landing rockets in soviet cities.[1]
I wonder how much more enthusiastic the scientists working on Apollo were, with the convenient motivating story of “I’m working towards a great scientific endeavor” vs “I’m working to make sure we can kill millions if we want to”.
2.
The field of alignment seems to be increasingly dominated by interpretability. (and obedience[2])
This was surprising to me[3], until a friend pointed out that partially opening the black box of NNs is the kind of technology that would scaling labs find new unhobblings by noticing ways in which the internals of their models are being inefficient and having better tools to evaluate capabilities advances.[4]
I [...]
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Outline:
(00:03) 1.
(00:35) 2.
(01:20) 3.
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
October 21st, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h4wXMXneTPDEjJ7nv/a-rocket-interpretability-analogy
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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