Can you explain how you’d implement these services?
Not really. I think of CAIS as suggesting that we take an outside view that says “looking at how AI has been progressing, and how humans generally do things, we’ll probably be able to do more and more complex tasks as time goes on”. But the emphasis that CAIS places is that the things we’ll be able to do will be domain-specific tasks, rather than getting a general-purpose reasoner. I don’t have a detailed enough inside view to say how complex tasks might be implemented in practice.
I agree with the rest of what you said, which feels to me like considering a few possible inside-view scenarios and showing that they don’t work.
One way to think about this is through the lens of iterated amplification. With iterated amplification, we also get the property that our AI systems will be able to do more and more complex tasks as time goes on. The key piece that enables this is the ability to decompose problems, so that iterated amplification always bottoms out into a tree of questions and subquestions down to leaves which the base agent can answer. You could think of (my conception of) CAIS as a claim that a similar process will happen in a decentralized way for all of ML by default, and at any point the things we can do will look like an explicit iterated amplification deliberation tree of depth one or two, where the leaves are individual services and the top level question will be some task that is accomplished through a combination of individual services.
I could try to think in that direction after I get a better sense of what kinds of services might be both feasible and trustworthy in the CAIS world. It seems easy to become too optimistic/complacent under the CAIS model if I just try to imagine what safety-enhancing services might be helpful without worrying about whether those services would be feasible or how well they’d work at the time when they’re needed.
Agreed, I’m making a bid for generating ideas without worrying about feasibility and trustworthiness, but not spending too much time on this and not taking the results too seriously.
You could think of (my conception of) CAIS as a claim that a similar process will happen in a decentralized way for all of ML by default, and at any point the things we can do will look like an explicit iterated amplification deliberation tree of depth one or two, where the leaves are individual services and the top level question will be some task that is accomplished through a combination of individual services.
This seems like a sensible way of looking at things, and in this framing I’d say that my worry is that crucial safety-enhancing services may only appear fairly high in the overall tree of services, or outside the tree altogether (see also #3 in Three AI Safety Related Ideas which makes a similar point), and in the CAIS world it would be hard to limit access to the lower-level services (as a risk-reduction measure).
Not really. I think of CAIS as suggesting that we take an outside view that says “looking at how AI has been progressing, and how humans generally do things, we’ll probably be able to do more and more complex tasks as time goes on”. But the emphasis that CAIS places is that the things we’ll be able to do will be domain-specific tasks, rather than getting a general-purpose reasoner. I don’t have a detailed enough inside view to say how complex tasks might be implemented in practice.
I agree with the rest of what you said, which feels to me like considering a few possible inside-view scenarios and showing that they don’t work.
One way to think about this is through the lens of iterated amplification. With iterated amplification, we also get the property that our AI systems will be able to do more and more complex tasks as time goes on. The key piece that enables this is the ability to decompose problems, so that iterated amplification always bottoms out into a tree of questions and subquestions down to leaves which the base agent can answer. You could think of (my conception of) CAIS as a claim that a similar process will happen in a decentralized way for all of ML by default, and at any point the things we can do will look like an explicit iterated amplification deliberation tree of depth one or two, where the leaves are individual services and the top level question will be some task that is accomplished through a combination of individual services.
Agreed, I’m making a bid for generating ideas without worrying about feasibility and trustworthiness, but not spending too much time on this and not taking the results too seriously.
This seems like a sensible way of looking at things, and in this framing I’d say that my worry is that crucial safety-enhancing services may only appear fairly high in the overall tree of services, or outside the tree altogether (see also #3 in Three AI Safety Related Ideas which makes a similar point), and in the CAIS world it would be hard to limit access to the lower-level services (as a risk-reduction measure).
Yeah, that seems right, I don’t think anyone is arguing against that claim.