The biggest swings to my p(doom) will probably come from governance/political/social stuff rather than from technical stuff—I think we could drive p(doom) down to <10% if only we had decent regulation and international coordination in place. (E.g. CERN for AGI + ban on rogue AGI projects)T
hat said, there are probably a bunch of concrete empirical achievements that would bring my p(doom) down to less than 25%. evhub already mentioned some mechinterp stuff. I’d throw in some faithful CoT stuff (e.g. if someone magically completed the agenda I’d been sketching last year at OpenAI, so that we could say “for AIs trained in such-and-such a way, we can trust their CoT to be faithful w.r.t. scheming because they literally don’t have the capability to scheme without getting caught, we tested it; also, these AIs are on a path to AGI; all we have to do is keep scaling them and they’ll get to AGI-except-with-the-faithful-CoT-property.)M
aybe another possibility would be something along the lines of W2SG working really well for some set of core concepts including honesty/truth. So that we can with confidence say “Apply these techniques to a giant pretrained LLM, and then you’ll get it to classify sentences by truth-value, no seriously we are confident that’s really what it’s doing, and also, our interpretability analysis shows that if you then use it as a RM to train an agent, the agent will learn to never say anything it thinks is false—no seriously it really has internalized that rule in a way that will generalize.”
I’d throw in some faithful CoT stuff (e.g. if someone magically completed the agenda I’d been sketching last year at OpenAI, so that we could say “for AIs trained in such-and-such a way, we can trust their CoT to be faithful w.r.t. scheming because they literally don’t have the capability to scheme without getting caught, we tested it; also, these AIs are on a path to AGI; all we have to do is keep scaling them and they’ll get to AGI-except-with-the-faithful-CoT-property.)
I think this is quite likely to happen even ‘by default’ on the current trajectory.
The biggest swings to my p(doom) will probably come from governance/political/social stuff rather than from technical stuff—I think we could drive p(doom) down to <10% if only we had decent regulation and international coordination in place. (E.g. CERN for AGI + ban on rogue AGI projects)T
hat said, there are probably a bunch of concrete empirical achievements that would bring my p(doom) down to less than 25%. evhub already mentioned some mechinterp stuff. I’d throw in some faithful CoT stuff (e.g. if someone magically completed the agenda I’d been sketching last year at OpenAI, so that we could say “for AIs trained in such-and-such a way, we can trust their CoT to be faithful w.r.t. scheming because they literally don’t have the capability to scheme without getting caught, we tested it; also, these AIs are on a path to AGI; all we have to do is keep scaling them and they’ll get to AGI-except-with-the-faithful-CoT-property.)M
aybe another possibility would be something along the lines of W2SG working really well for some set of core concepts including honesty/truth. So that we can with confidence say “Apply these techniques to a giant pretrained LLM, and then you’ll get it to classify sentences by truth-value, no seriously we are confident that’s really what it’s doing, and also, our interpretability analysis shows that if you then use it as a RM to train an agent, the agent will learn to never say anything it thinks is false—no seriously it really has internalized that rule in a way that will generalize.”
I think this is quite likely to happen even ‘by default’ on the current trajectory.