The property I like about minecraft (which most computer games don’t have) is that there’s a difference between minecraft-capabilities and minecraft-alignment, and the way to be “aligned” in minecraft isn’t well defined (at least in the way I’m using the word “aligned” here, which I think is a useful way). Specifically, I want the AI to be “aligned” as in “take human values into account as a human intuitively would, in this out of distribution situation”.
In the link you sent, “aligned” IS well defined by “stay within this area”. I expect that minecraft scaffolding could make the agent close to perfect at this (by making sure, before performing an action requested by the LLM, that the action isn’t “move to a location out of these bounds”) (plus handling edge cases like “don’t walk on to a river which will carry you out of these bounds”, which would be much harder, and I’ll allow myself to ignore unless this was actually your point). So we wouldn’t learn what I’d hope to learn from these evals.
Similarly for most video games—they might be good capabilities evals, but for example in chess—it’s unclear what a “capable but misaligned” AI would be. [unless again I’m missing your point]
P.S
The “stay within this boundary” is a personal favorite of mine, I thought it was the best thing I had to say when I attempted to solve alignment myself just in case it ended up being easy (unfortunately that wasn’t the case :P ). Link
Hey Esben :) :)
The property I like about minecraft (which most computer games don’t have) is that there’s a difference between minecraft-capabilities and minecraft-alignment, and the way to be “aligned” in minecraft isn’t well defined (at least in the way I’m using the word “aligned” here, which I think is a useful way). Specifically, I want the AI to be “aligned” as in “take human values into account as a human intuitively would, in this out of distribution situation”.
In the link you sent, “aligned” IS well defined by “stay within this area”. I expect that minecraft scaffolding could make the agent close to perfect at this (by making sure, before performing an action requested by the LLM, that the action isn’t “move to a location out of these bounds”) (plus handling edge cases like “don’t walk on to a river which will carry you out of these bounds”, which would be much harder, and I’ll allow myself to ignore unless this was actually your point). So we wouldn’t learn what I’d hope to learn from these evals.
Similarly for most video games—they might be good capabilities evals, but for example in chess—it’s unclear what a “capable but misaligned” AI would be. [unless again I’m missing your point]
P.S
The “stay within this boundary” is a personal favorite of mine, I thought it was the best thing I had to say when I attempted to solve alignment myself just in case it ended up being easy (unfortunately that wasn’t the case :P ). Link