Great point, I’ve now weakened the language here.
mic
Karma: 621
Ideas for improving epistemics in AI safety outreach
Supervised Program for Alignment Research (SPAR) at UC Berkeley: Spring 2023 summary
[Question] Does LessWrong allow exempting posts from being scraped by GPTBot?
Fine-tuning will be generally available for GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 later this year. Do you think this could enable greater opportunities for misuse and stronger performance on dangerous capability evaluations?
EU’s AI ambitions at risk as US pushes to water down international treaty (linkpost)
This opinion piece is somewhat relevant: Most AI research shouldn’t be publicly released—Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (thebulletin.org)
The update makes GPT-4 more competent at being an agent, since it’s now fine-tuned for function calling. It’s a bit surprising that base GPT-4 (prior to the update) was able to use tools, as it’s just trained for predicting internet text and following instructions. As such, it’s not that good at knowing when and how to use tools. The formal API parameters and JSON specification for function calling should make it more reliable for using it as an agent and could lead to considerably more interest in engineering agents. It should be easier to connect it with a variety of APIs for interacting with the internet, including complex specifications.
Anecdotally, the AutoGPT team is observing significant improvements in accuracy and reliability after switching from their current hacky approach to using the function-calling version of GPT-4.
OpenAI introduces function calling for GPT-4
To some extent, Bing Chat is already an example of this. During the announcement, Microsoft promised that Bing would be using an advanced technique to guard it against user attempts to have it say bad things; in reality, it was incredibly easy to prompt it to express intents of harming you, at least during the early days of its release. This led to news headlines such as Bing’s AI Is Threatening Users. That’s No Laughing Matter.
Not sure why this post was downvoted. This concern seems quite reasonable to me once language models become more competent at executing plans.
Navigating the Open-Source AI Landscape: Data, Funding, and Safety
One additional factor that would lead to increasing rates of depression is the rise in sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation leads to poor mental health and is also a result of increased device usage.
From https://www.ksjbam.com/2022/02/23/states-where-teens-dont-get-enough-sleep/:
Late in 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General released a new advisory on youth mental health, drawing attention to rising rates of depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and other mental health issues among young Americans. According to data cited in the advisory, up to one in five U.S. children aged 3 to 17 had a reported mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral disorder. Many of these worrying conditions predated the COVID-19 pandemic, which worsened mental health for many young people by disrupting their routines, limiting their social interactions, and increasing stress about the health of loved ones.
These trends in youth mental health can be attributed in part to detrimental shifts in young people’s lifestyle over time, including increased academic stress, growing use of digital media, and worsening health habits. And one of the major potential culprits in the latter category is sleep.
According to the CDC, teenagers should sleep between 8–10 hours per 24 hour period. This level of sleep is associated with a number of better physical and mental health outcomes, including lower risk of obesity and fewer problems with attention and behavior. Despite this, less than a quarter of teens report sleeping at least eight hours per day—a number that has fallen significantly over the last decade.
https://www.prb.org/resources/more-sleep-could-improve-many-u-s-teenagers-mental-health/:
During that same period, teenagers’ nightly sleep dropped sharply: The share of high school students getting the recommended minimum of eight hours of sleep declined from nearly 31% in 2009 to around 22% in 2019.7
Research shows a strong connection between sleep and symptoms of depression. In a 2019 study, Widome and colleagues showed that about one in three students who slept less than six hours per night had a high number of depression symptoms compared with about one in 10 students who got adequate sleep.8 But inadequate sleep is one of many factors affecting teenagers’ mental health.
The rise in sleep-deprived teenagers is a long-term trend, reports Widome. “A lot in our society has changed in the last decade, including more time spent using screens—phones, games, computers—and marketing caffeine drinks to adolescents.” In her 2019 study, teenagers who had inadequate sleep tended to spend twice as much time on devices with screens than their peers and were more likely to use those devices after they went to bed.
As for school daze: I can easily tell a story for how academic stress has risen over the past decade. As college admissions become more selective, top high school students are trying to juggle increasing levels of schoolwork and extracurriculars in order to try to get into a top university. See also NYU Study Examines Top High School Students’ Stress and Coping Mechanisms.
If you wanted more substantive changes in response to your comments, I wonder if you could have asked if you could directly propose edits. It’s much easier to incorporate changes into a draft when they have already been written out. When I have a draft on Google Docs, suggestions are substantially easier for me to action than comments, and perhaps the same is true for Sam Altman.
I don’t think it’s right to say that Anthropic’s “Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations” paper shows that larger LLMs necessarily exhibit more power-seeking and self-preservation. It only showed that when language models that are larger or have more RLHF training are simulating an “Assistant” character they exhibit more of these behaviours.
More specifically, an “Assistant” character that is trained to be helpful but not necessarily harmless. Given that, as part of Sydney’s defenses against adversarial prompting, Sydney is deliberately trained to be a bit aggressive towards people perceived as attempting a prompt injection, it’s not too surprising that this behavior misgeneralizes in undesired contexts.
Is there evidence that RLHF training improves robustness compared to regular fine-tuning? Is text-davinci-002, trained with supervised fine-tuning, significantly less robust to adversaries than text-davinci-003, trained with RLHF?
As far as I know, this is the first public case of a powerful LM augmented with live retrieval capabilities to a high-end fast-updating search engine crawling social media
Blenderbot 3 is a 175B parameter model released in August 2022 with the ability to do live web searches, although one might not consider it powerful, as it frequently gives confused responses to questions.
As an overly simplistic example, consider an overseer that attempts to train a cleaning robot by providing periodic feedback to the robot, based on how quickly the robot appears to clean a room; such a robot might learn that it can more quickly “clean” the room by instead sweeping messes under a rug.[15]
This doesn’t seem concerning as human users would eventually discover that the robot has a tendency to sweep messes under the rug, if they ever look under the rug, and the developers would retrain the AI to resolve this issue. Can you think of an example that would be more problematic, in which the misbehavior wouldn’t be obvious enough to just be trained away?
GPT-3, for instance, is notorious for outputting text that is impressive, but not of the desired “flavor” (e.g., outputting silly text when serious text is desired), and researchers often have to tinker with inputs considerably to yield desirable outputs.
Is this specifically referring to the base version of GPT-3 before instruction fine-tuning (davinci rather than text-davinci-002, for example)? I think it would be good to clarify that.
Great point, I’ve added this suggestion to the post.