As the main author of the “Alignment”-appendix of the truthful AI paper, it seems worth clarifying: I totally don’t think that “train your AI to be truthful” in itself is a plan for how to tackle any central alignment problems. Quoting from the alignment appendix:
While we’ve argued that scaleable truthfulness would constitute significant progress on alignment (and might provide a solution outright), we don’t mean to suggest that truthfulness will sidestep all difficulties that have been identified by alignment researchers. On the contrary, we expect work on scaleable truthfulness to encounter many of those same difficulties, and to benefit from many of the same solutions.
In other words: I don’t think we had a novel proposal for how to make truthful AI systems, which tackled the hard bits of alignment. I just meant to say that the hard bits of making truthful A(G)I are similar to the hard bits of making aligned A(G)I.
At least from my own perspective, the truthful AI paper was partly about AI truthfulness maybe being a neat thing to aim for governance-wise (quite apart from the alignment problem), and partly about the idea that research on AI truthfulness could be helpful for alignment, and so it’s good if people (at least/especially people who wouldn’t otherwise work on alignment) work on that problem. (As one example of this: Interpretability seems useful for both truthfulness and alignment, so if people work on interpretability intended to help with truthfulness, then this might also be helpful for alignment.)
I don’t think you’re into this theory of change, because I suspect that you think that anyone who isn’t directly aiming at the alignment problem has negligible chance of contributing any useful progress.
I just wanted to clarify that the truthful AI paper isn’t evidence that people who try to hit the hard bits of alignment always miss — it’s just a paper doing a different thing.
(And although I can’t speak as confidently about others’ views, I feel like that last sentence also applies to some of the other sections. E.g. Evan’s statement, which seems to be about how you get an alignment solution implemented once you have it, and maybe about trying to find desiderata for alignment solutions, and not at all trying to tackle alignment itself. If you want to critique Evan’s proposals for how to build aligned AGI, maybe you should look at this list of proposals or this positive case for how we might succeed.)
As the main author of the “Alignment”-appendix of the truthful AI paper, it seems worth clarifying: I totally don’t think that “train your AI to be truthful” in itself is a plan for how to tackle any central alignment problems. Quoting from the alignment appendix:
In other words: I don’t think we had a novel proposal for how to make truthful AI systems, which tackled the hard bits of alignment. I just meant to say that the hard bits of making truthful A(G)I are similar to the hard bits of making aligned A(G)I.
At least from my own perspective, the truthful AI paper was partly about AI truthfulness maybe being a neat thing to aim for governance-wise (quite apart from the alignment problem), and partly about the idea that research on AI truthfulness could be helpful for alignment, and so it’s good if people (at least/especially people who wouldn’t otherwise work on alignment) work on that problem. (As one example of this: Interpretability seems useful for both truthfulness and alignment, so if people work on interpretability intended to help with truthfulness, then this might also be helpful for alignment.)
I don’t think you’re into this theory of change, because I suspect that you think that anyone who isn’t directly aiming at the alignment problem has negligible chance of contributing any useful progress.
I just wanted to clarify that the truthful AI paper isn’t evidence that people who try to hit the hard bits of alignment always miss — it’s just a paper doing a different thing.
(And although I can’t speak as confidently about others’ views, I feel like that last sentence also applies to some of the other sections. E.g. Evan’s statement, which seems to be about how you get an alignment solution implemented once you have it, and maybe about trying to find desiderata for alignment solutions, and not at all trying to tackle alignment itself. If you want to critique Evan’s proposals for how to build aligned AGI, maybe you should look at this list of proposals or this positive case for how we might succeed.)