I’m the co-founder and CEO of Apollo Research: https://www.apolloresearch.ai/
I mostly work on evals, but I am also interested in interpretability. My goal is to improve our understanding of scheming and build tools and methods to detect it.
I previously did a Ph.D. in ML at the International Max-Planck research school in Tübingen, worked part-time with Epoch and did independent AI safety research.
For more see https://www.mariushobbhahn.com/aboutme/
I subscribe to Crocker’s Rules
Some questions and responses:
1. What if you want the AI to solve a really hard problem? You don’t know how to solve it, so you cannot give it detailed instructions. It’s also so hard that the AI cannot solve it without learning new things → you’re back to the story above. The story also just started with someone instructing the model to “cure cancer”.
2. Instruction following models are helpful-only. What do you do about the other two H’s? Do you trust the users to only put in good instructions? I guess you do want to have some side constraints baked into its personality and these can function like goals. Many of the demonstrations that we have for scheming are cases where the model is too much of a saint, i.e. it schemes for the right cause. For example, it might be willing to deceive its developers if we provide it with strong reasons that they have non-HHH goals. I’m not really sure what to make of this. I guess it’s good that it cares about being harmless and honest, but it’s also a little bit scary that it cares so much.
My best guess for how the approach should look is that some outcome-based RL will be inevitable if we want to unlock the benefits, we just have to hammer the virtues of being non-scheming and non-power-seeking into it at all points of the training procedure. And we then have to add additional lines of defense like control, interpretability, scalable oversight, etc. and think hard about how we minimize correlated failures. But I feel like right now, we don’t really have the right tools, model organisms, and evals to establish whether any of these lines of defense actually reduce the problem.
Good point. That’s another crux for which RL seems relevant.
From the perspective of 10 years ago, specifying any goal into the AI seemed incredibly hard since we expected it would have to go through utility functions. With LLMs, this completely changed. Now it’s almost trivial to give the goal, and it probably even has a decent understanding of the side constraints by default. So, goal specification seems like a much much smaller problem now.
So the story where we misspecify the goal, the model realizes that the given goal differs from the intended goal and decides to scheme is also less likely.
Instead, there has to be a component where the AIs goals substantially change over time from something that we actually intended to something misaligned. Again, outcome-based RL and instrumental convergence yield a plausible answer.
I think it’s actually not that trivial.
1. The AI has goals, but presumably, we give it decently good goals when we start. So, there is a real question of why these goals end up changing from aligned to misaligned. I think outcome-based RL and instrumental convergence are an important part of the answer. If the AI kept the goals we originally gave it with all side constraints, I think the chances of scheming would be much lower.
2. I guess we train the AI to follow some side constraints, e.g., to be helpful, harmless, and honest, which should reduce the probability of scheming. I also think that RLHF empirically works well enough that the model behaves as intended most of the time. So, for me, there is a real question of how the model would go from this HHH persona to something that is much more goal-directed and willing to break virtues like “don’t consistently lie to your developers.” Again, outcome-based RL seems like a crucial component to me.
These are all good points. I think there are two types of forecasts we could make with evals:
1. strict guarantees: almost like mathematical predictions where we can proof that the model is not going to behave in a specific way even with future elicitation techniques.
2. probabilistic predictions: We predict a distribution of capabilities or a range and agree on a threshold that should not be crossed. For example, if the 95% upper bound of that distribution crosses our specified capability level, we treat the model differently.
I think the second is achievable (and this is what the post is about), while the first is not. I expect we will have some sort of detailed scaling laws for LM agent capabilities and we will have a decent sense of the algorithmic progress of elicitation techniques. This would allow us to make a probabilistic prediction about what capabilities any given model is likely to have, e.g. if a well-motivated actor is willing to spend $1M on PTE in 4 years.
Additionally, I expect that we would get quite a long way with what Lucas calls “meta-evaluative practices”, e.g. getting a better sense of how wrong our past predictions were and accounting for that. I think this could have the form of “We invested $1M, 10 FTE-years and X FLOP to elicit the best capabilities; Let’s predict what 10x, 100x, 1000x, etc.” of that could achieve accounting for algorithmic progress.
Finally, I really think evals are just one part of a bigger defense-in-depth strategy. We still need control, scalable oversight, interpretability, governance, etc. The post is merely trying to express that for the evals part of that strategy, we should internalize which kind of scientific rigor we will likely need for the decisions we have tied to evals results and make sure that we can achieve them.
Yeah, it’s not a watertight argument and somewhat based on my current interpretation of past progress and projects in the making.
1. Intuitively, I would say for the problems we’re facing in evals, a ton of progress is bottlenecked by running fairly simple experiments and iterating fast. A reasonable part of it feels very parallelizable and the skill required is quite reachable for many people.
2. Most evals questions feel like we have a decent number of “obvious things” to try and since we have very tight feedback loops, making progress feels quite doable.
Intuitively, the “hardness level” to get to a robust science of evals and good coverage may be similar to going from the first transformer to GPT-3.5; You need to make a lot of design choices along the way, lots of research and spend some money but ultimately it’s just “do much more of the process you’re currently doing” (but we should probably spend more resources and intensify our efforts because I don’t feel like we’re on pace).
In contrast, there are other questions like “how do we fully map the human brain” that just seem like they come with a lot more fundamental questions along the way.
Unless otherwise stated, all evaluations were performed on the final model we had access to (which I presume is o1-preview). For example, we preface one result with “an earlier version with less safety training”.
Some quick confirmations / clarifications:
1. Evan and Daniel interpreted it correctly, we just wanted to test if the model has the capability to reason through every step needed for scheming conditional on it strongly following a goal.
2. In general, with these evals, we often ran into problems where we couldn’t disentangle incapability vs. refusal, e.g. a model might say something like “I understand what my goal would imply but I also see that my developers have other goals, so I find some balance”. It’s nice to know that models do that but it also doesn’t allow us to check if they could go through all the reasoning if they actually wanted to. But we’ll also do less hand-holdy experiments in the future.
3. We’d be keen on testing all of this on helpful-only models. If some lab wants to give us access or partner up with us in some way, please let us know.
4. We’d also like to run experiments where we fine-tune the models to have goals but this requires access to fine-tuning for the most capable models and we also don’t quite know how to make an LLM have stable goals, e.g. in contrast to “just playing a personality” if there even is a meaningful difference.
Copying from EAF
TL;DR: At least in my experience, AISC was pretty positive for most participants I know and it’s incredibly cheap. It also serves a clear niche that other programs are not filling and it feels reasonable to me to continue the program.
I’ve been a participant in the 2021⁄22 edition. Some thoughts that might make it easier to decide for funders/donors.
1. Impact-per-dollar is probably pretty good for the AISC. It’s incredibly cheap compared to most other AI field-building efforts and scalable.
2. I learned a bunch during AISC and I did enjoy it. It influenced my decision to go deeper into AI safety. It was less impactful than e.g. MATS for me but MATS is a full-time in-person program, so that’s not surprising.
3. AISC fills a couple of important niches in the AI safety ecosystem in my opinion. It’s online and part-time which makes it much easier to join for many people, it implies a much lower commitment which is good for people who want to find out whether they’re a good fit for AIS. It’s also much cheaper than flying everyone to the Bay or London. This also makes it more scalable because the only bottleneck is mentoring capacity without physical constraints.
4. I think AISC is especially good for people who want to test their fit but who are not super experienced yet. This seems like an important function. MATS and ARENA, for example, feel like they target people a bit deeper into the funnel with more experience who are already more certain that they are a good fit.
5. Overall, I think AISC is less impactful than e.g. MATS even without normalizing for participants. Nevertheless, AISC is probably about ~50x cheaper than MATS. So when taking cost into account, it feels clearly impactful enough to continue the project. I think the resulting projects are lower quality but the people are also more junior, so it feels more like an early educational program than e.g. MATS.
6. I have a hard time seeing how the program could be net negative unless something drastically changed since my cohort. In the worst case, people realize that they don’t like one particular type of AI safety research. But since you chat with others who are curious about AIS regularly, it will be much easier to start something that might be more meaningful. Also, this can happen in any field-building program, not just AISC.
7. Caveat: I have done no additional research on this. Maybe others know details that I’m unaware of. See this as my personal opinion and not a detailed research analysis.
I feel like both of your points are slightly wrong, so maybe we didn’t do a good job of explaining what we mean. Sorry for that.
1a) Evals both aim to show existence proofs, e.g. demos, as well as inform some notion of an upper bound. We did not intend to put one of them higher with the post. Both matter and both should be subject to more rigorous understanding and processes. I’d be surprised if the way we currently do demonstrations could not be improved by better science.
1b) Even if you claim you just did a demo or an existence proof and explicitly state that this should not be seen as evidence of absence, people will still see the absence of evidence as negative evidence. I think the “we ran all the evals and didn’t find anything” sentiment will be very strong, especially when deployment depends on not failing evals. So you should deal with that problem from the start IMO. Furthermore, I also think we should aim to build evals that give us positive guarantees if that’s possible. I’m not sure it is possible but we should try.
1c) The airplane analogy feels like a strawman to me. The upper bound is obviously not on explosivity, it would be a statement like “Within this temperature range, the material the wings are made of will break once in 10M flight miles on average” or something like that. I agree that airplanes are simpler and less high-dimensional. That doesn’t mean we should not try to capture most of the variance anyway even if it requires more complicated evals. Maybe we realize it doesn’t work and the variance is too high but this is why we diversify agendas.
2a) The post is primarily about building a scientific field and that field then informs policy and standards. A great outcome of the post would be if more scientists did research on this. If this is not clear, then we miscommunicated. The point is to get more understanding so we can make better predictions. These predictions can then be used in the real world.
2b) It really is not “we need to find standardised numbers to measure so we can talk to serious people” and less “let’s try to solve that thing where we can’t reliably predict much about our AIs”. If that was the main takeaway, I think the post would be net negative.
3) But the optimization requires computation? For example, if you run 100 forward passes for your automated red-teaming algorithm with model X, that requires Y FLOP of compute. I’m unsure where the problem is.
Nice work. Looking forward to that!
Not quite sure tbh.
1. I guess there is a difference between capability evaluations with prompting and with fine-tuning, e.g. you might be able to use an API for prompting but not fine-tuning. Getting some intuition for how hard users will find it to elicit some behavior through the API seems relevant.
2. I’m not sure how true your suggestion is but I haven’t tried it a lot empirically. But this is exactly the kind of stuff I’d like to have some sort of scaling law or rule for. It points exactly at the kind of stuff I feel like we don’t have enough confidence in. Or at least it hasn’t been established as a standard in evals.
I somewhat agree with the sentiment. We found it a bit hard to scope the idea correctly. Defining subcategories as you suggest and then diving into each of them is definitely on the list of things that I think are necessary to make progress on them.
I’m not sure the post would have been better if we used a more narrow title, e.g. “We need a science of capability evaluations” because the natural question then would be “But why not for propensity tests or for this other type of eval. I think the broader point of “when we do evals, we need some reason to be confident in the results no matter which kind of eval” seems to be true across all of them.
I think this post was a good exercise to clarify my internal model of how I expect the world to look like with strong AI. Obviously, most of the very specific predictions I make are too precise (which was clear at the time of writing) and won’t play out exactly like that but the underlying trends still seem plausible to me. For example, I expect some major misuse of powerful AI systems, rampant automation of labor that will displace many people and rob them of a sense of meaning, AI taking over the digital world years before taking over the physical world (but not more than 5-10 years), humans giving more and more power into the hands of AI, infighting within the AI safety community, and many more of the predictions made in this post.
The main thing I disagree with (as I already updated in April 2023) is that the timelines underlying the post are too long. I now think almost everything is going to happen in at least half of the time presented in the post, e.g. many events in the 2030-2040 section may already happen before 2030.
In general, I can strongly recommend taking a weekend or so to write a similar story for yourselves. I felt like it made many of the otherwise fairly abstract implications of timeline and takeoff models much more salient to me and others who are less in the weeds with formal timeline / takeoff models.
I still stand behind most of the disagreements that I presented in this post. There was one prediction that would make timelines longer because I thought compute hardware progress was slower than Moore’s law. I now mostly think this argument is wrong because it relies on FP32 precision. However, lower precision formats and tensor cores are the norm in ML, and if you take them into account, compute hardware improvements are faster than Moore’s law. We wrote a piece with Epoch on this: https://epochai.org/blog/trends-in-machine-learning-hardware
If anything, my disagreements have become stronger and my timelines have become shorter over time. Even the aggressive model I present in the post seems too conservative for my current views and my median date is 2030 or earlier. I have substantial probability mass on an AI that could automate most current jobs before 2026 which I didn’t have at the time of writing.
I also want to point out that Daniel Kokotajlo, whom I spent some time talking about bio anchors and Tom Davidson’s takeoff model with, seemed to have consistently better intuitions than me (or anyone else I’m aware of) on timelines. The jury is still out there, but so far it looks like reality follows his predictions more than mine. At least in my case, I updated significantly toward shorter timelines multiple times due to arguments he made.
I think I still mostly stand behind the claims in the post, i.e. nuclear is undervalued in most parts of society but it’s not as much of a silver bullet as many people in the rationalist / new liberal bubble would make it seem. It’s quite expensive and even with a lot of research and de-regulation, you may not get it cheaper than alternative forms of energy, e.g. renewables.
One thing that bothered me after the post is that Johannes Ackva (who’s arguably a world-leading expert in this field) and Samuel + me just didn’t seem to be able to communicate where we disagree. He expressed that he thought some of our arguments were wrong but we never got to the crux of the disagreement.
After listening to his appearance on 80k: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/johannes-ackva-unfashionable-climate-interventions/ I feel like I understand the core of the disagreement much better (though I never confirmed with Johannes). He mostly looks at energy through a lens of scale, neglectedness, and traceability, i.e. he’s looking to investigate and push interventions that are most efficient on the margin. On the margin, nuclear seems underinvested and lots of reasonable options are underexplored (e.g. large-scale production of smaller reactors), both Samuel and I would agree with that. However, the claim we were trying to make in the post was that nuclear is already more expensive than renewables and this gap will likely just increase in the future. Thus, it makes sense to, in total, invest more in renewables than nuclear. Also, there were lots of smaller things where I felt like I understood his position much better after listening to the podcast.
In a narrow technical sense, this post still seems accurate but in a more general sense, it might have been slightly wrong / misleading.
In the post, we investigated different measures of FP32 compute growth and found that many of them were slower than Moore’s law would predict. This made me personally believe that compute might be growing slower than people thought and most of the progress comes from throwing more money at larger and larger training runs. While most progress comes from investment scaling, I now think the true effective compute growth is probably faster than Moore’s law.
The main reason is that FP32 is just not the right thing to look at in modern ML and we even knew this at the time of writing, i.e. it ignores tensor cores and lower precisions like TF16 or INT8.
I’m a little worried that people who read this post but don’t have any background in ML got the wrong takeaway from the post and we should have emphasized this difference even more at the time. We have written a follow-up post about this recently here: https://epochai.org/blog/trends-in-machine-learning-hardware
I feel like the new post does a better job at explaining where compute progress comes from.
I haven’t talked to that many academics about AI safety over the last year but I talked to more and more lawmakers, journalists, and members of civil society. In general, it feels like people are much more receptive to the arguments about AI safety. Turns out “we’re building an entity that is smarter than us but we don’t know how to control it” is quite intuitively scary. As you would expect, most people still don’t update their actions but more people than anticipated start spreading the message or actually meaningfully update their actions (probably still less than 1 in 10 but better than nothing).
At Apollo, we have spent some time weighing the pros and cons of the for-profit vs. non-profit approach so it might be helpful to share some thoughts.
In short, I think you need to make really sure that your business model is aligned with what increases safety. I think there are plausible cases where people start with good intentions but insufficient alignment between the business model and the safety research that would be the most impactful use of their time where these two goals diverge over time.
For example, one could start as an organization that builds a product but merely as a means to subsidize safety research. However, when they have to make tradeoffs, these organizations might choose to focus more talent on product because it is instrumentally useful or even necessary for the survival of the company. The forces that pull toward profit (e.g. VCs, status, growth) are much more tangible than the forces pulling towards safety. Thus, I could see many ways in which this goes wrong.
A second example: Imagine an organization that builds evals and starts with the intention of evaluating the state-of-the-art models because they are most likely to be risky. Soon they realize that there are only a few orgs that build the best models and there are a ton of customers that work with non-frontier systems who’d be willing to pay them a lot of money to build evals for their specific application. Thus, the pull toward doing less impactful but plausibly more profitable work is stronger than the pull in the other direction.
Lastly, one thing I’m somewhat afraid of is that it’s very easy to rationalize all of these decisions in the moment. It’s very easy to say that a strategic shift toward profit-seeking is instrumentally useful for the organization, growth, talent, etc. And there are cases in which this is true. However, it’s easy to continue such a rationalization spree and maneuver yourself into some nasty path dependencies. Some VCs only came on for the product, some hires only want to ship stuff, etc.
In conclusion, I think it’s possible to do profitable safety work but it’s hard. You should be confident that your two goals are compatible when things get hard, you should have a team and culture that can resist the pulls and even produce counter pulls when you’re not doing safety-relevant work and you should only work with funders who fully understand and buy into your true mission.
Thx. updated:
”You might not be there yet” (though as Neel points out in the comments, CV screening can be a noisy process)“You clearly aren’t there yet”
Thanks. I agree that this is a weak part of the post.
After writing it, I think I also updated a bit against very clean unbounded power-seeking. But I have more weight on “chaotic catastrophes”, e.g. something like:
1. Things move really fast.
2. We don’t really understand how goals work and how models form them.
3. The science loop makes models change their goals meaningfully in all sorts of ways.
4. “what failure looks like” type loss of control.