While I don’t think hiding the CoT is good for alignment, I’d say that in a lot of risk scenarios, the people who would most need to know about the deceptive cognition includes government officials and the lab, not regulators, since users likely have little control over the AI.
I think you mean “not users?”
I agree, but I think government officials and company employees might not find out about the deceptive cognition unless there is general transparency about it. Because very often, curious incidents are noticed by users and then put up on Twitter, for example, and only then eventually rise to the attention of the company employees. Moreover, the consensus-forming process happens largely outside the government, in public discourse, so it’s important for the public to be aware of e.g. concerning or interesting behaviors. Finally, and most importantly, the basic alignment science advancements that need to happen and will happen from lots of people studying real-world examples of hidden/reasoning/etc. CoT… well, they sure won’t happen inside the heads of government officials. And the number of people working on this inside the corporations is pretty small. Exposing the CoT to the public increases the quality-adjusted amount of scientific work on them by orders of magnitude.
That’s actually a pretty good argument, and I actually basically agree that hiding CoT from the users is a bad choice from an alignment perspective now.
What if the CoT was hidden by default, but ‘power users’ could get access to it? That might get you some protection from busybodies complaining about factually-accurate-but-rude content in the CoT, while still giving the benefits of having thoughtful critics examining the CoT for systematic flaws.
My version of this would be something like: Users can pay $$ to view CoT (but no more than e.g. 10 per day), and everyone gets one free view-the-CoT coupon per day.
Also, ‘approved users’ such as external evals organizations/auditors should be of course allowed to see all the CoTs.
The main problem a thing like this needs to solve is the threat of bad actors scraping a bunch of CoT data and then using it to train their own powerful models. So, my proposal here would make that difficult.
This might work. Let’s remember the financial incentives. Exposing a non-aligned CoT to all users is pretty likely to generate lots of articles about how your AI is super creepy, which will create a public perception that your AI in particular is not trustworthy relative to your competition.
I agree that it would be better to expose from an alignment perspective, I’m just noting the incentives on AI companies.
Hah, true. I wasn’t thinking about the commercial incentives! Yeah, there’s a lot of temptation to make a corpo-clean safety-washed fence-sitting sycophant. As much as Elon annoys me these days, I have to give the Grok team credit for avoiding the worst of the mealy-mouthed corporate trend.
I think you mean “not users?”
I agree, but I think government officials and company employees might not find out about the deceptive cognition unless there is general transparency about it. Because very often, curious incidents are noticed by users and then put up on Twitter, for example, and only then eventually rise to the attention of the company employees. Moreover, the consensus-forming process happens largely outside the government, in public discourse, so it’s important for the public to be aware of e.g. concerning or interesting behaviors. Finally, and most importantly, the basic alignment science advancements that need to happen and will happen from lots of people studying real-world examples of hidden/reasoning/etc. CoT… well, they sure won’t happen inside the heads of government officials. And the number of people working on this inside the corporations is pretty small. Exposing the CoT to the public increases the quality-adjusted amount of scientific work on them by orders of magnitude.
That’s actually a pretty good argument, and I actually basically agree that hiding CoT from the users is a bad choice from an alignment perspective now.
What if the CoT was hidden by default, but ‘power users’ could get access to it? That might get you some protection from busybodies complaining about factually-accurate-but-rude content in the CoT, while still giving the benefits of having thoughtful critics examining the CoT for systematic flaws.
This might actually be a useful idea, thanks for your idea.
My version of this would be something like: Users can pay $$ to view CoT (but no more than e.g. 10 per day), and everyone gets one free view-the-CoT coupon per day.
Also, ‘approved users’ such as external evals organizations/auditors should be of course allowed to see all the CoTs.
The main problem a thing like this needs to solve is the threat of bad actors scraping a bunch of CoT data and then using it to train their own powerful models. So, my proposal here would make that difficult.
This might work. Let’s remember the financial incentives. Exposing a non-aligned CoT to all users is pretty likely to generate lots of articles about how your AI is super creepy, which will create a public perception that your AI in particular is not trustworthy relative to your competition.
I agree that it would be better to expose from an alignment perspective, I’m just noting the incentives on AI companies.
Hah, true. I wasn’t thinking about the commercial incentives! Yeah, there’s a lot of temptation to make a corpo-clean safety-washed fence-sitting sycophant. As much as Elon annoys me these days, I have to give the Grok team credit for avoiding the worst of the mealy-mouthed corporate trend.