The way I’m currently thinking about it, if we have an oracle that gives superintelligent and non-manipulative answers, things are looking pretty good for the future. When you ask it to design a new drug, you also ask some follow-up questions like “How does the drug work?” and “If we deploy this solution, how might this impact the life of a typical person in 20 years time?” Maybe it won’t always be able to give great answers, but as long as it’s not trying to be manipulative, it seems like we ought to be able to use such a system safely. (This would, incidentally, entail not letting idiots use the system.)
I agree that extracting information from a self-supervised learner is a hard and open problem. I don’t see any reason to think it’s impossible. The two general approaches would be:
Manipulate the self-supervised learning environment somehow. Basically, the system is going to know lots of different high-level contexts in which the statistics of low-level predictions are different—think about how GPT-2 can imitate both middle school essays and fan-fiction. We would need to teach it a context in which we expect the text to reflect profound truths about the world, beyond what any human knows. That’s tricky because we don’t have any such texts in our database. But maybe if we put a special token in the 50 most clear and insightful journal articles ever written, and then stick that same token in our question prompt, then we’ll get better answers. That’s just an example, maybe there are other ways.
Forget about text prediction, and build an entirely separate input-output interface into the world model. The world model (if it’s vaguely brain-like) is “just” a data structure with billions of discrete concepts, and transformations between those concepts (composition, cause-effect, analogy, etc...probably all of those are built out of the same basic “transformation machinery”). All these concepts are sitting in the top layer of some kind of hierarchy, whose lowest layer consists of probability distributions over short snippets of text (for a language model, or more generally whatever the input is). So that’s the world model data structure. I have no idea how to build a new interface into this data structure, or what that interface would look like. But I can’t see why that should be impossible...
Thanks, that’s helpful!
The way I’m currently thinking about it, if we have an oracle that gives superintelligent and non-manipulative answers, things are looking pretty good for the future. When you ask it to design a new drug, you also ask some follow-up questions like “How does the drug work?” and “If we deploy this solution, how might this impact the life of a typical person in 20 years time?” Maybe it won’t always be able to give great answers, but as long as it’s not trying to be manipulative, it seems like we ought to be able to use such a system safely. (This would, incidentally, entail not letting idiots use the system.)
I agree that extracting information from a self-supervised learner is a hard and open problem. I don’t see any reason to think it’s impossible. The two general approaches would be:
Manipulate the self-supervised learning environment somehow. Basically, the system is going to know lots of different high-level contexts in which the statistics of low-level predictions are different—think about how GPT-2 can imitate both middle school essays and fan-fiction. We would need to teach it a context in which we expect the text to reflect profound truths about the world, beyond what any human knows. That’s tricky because we don’t have any such texts in our database. But maybe if we put a special token in the 50 most clear and insightful journal articles ever written, and then stick that same token in our question prompt, then we’ll get better answers. That’s just an example, maybe there are other ways.
Forget about text prediction, and build an entirely separate input-output interface into the world model. The world model (if it’s vaguely brain-like) is “just” a data structure with billions of discrete concepts, and transformations between those concepts (composition, cause-effect, analogy, etc...probably all of those are built out of the same basic “transformation machinery”). All these concepts are sitting in the top layer of some kind of hierarchy, whose lowest layer consists of probability distributions over short snippets of text (for a language model, or more generally whatever the input is). So that’s the world model data structure. I have no idea how to build a new interface into this data structure, or what that interface would look like. But I can’t see why that should be impossible...