35 - Peter Hase on LLM Beliefs and Easy-to-Hard Generalization
AXRP - the AI X-risk Research Podcast
Release Date: 08/24/2024
AXRP - the AI X-risk Research Podcast
In this episode, I talk with Peter Salib about his paper "AI Rights for Human Safety", arguing that giving AIs the right to contract, hold property, and sue people will reduce the risk of their trying to attack humanity and take over. He also tells me how law reviews work, in the face of my incredulity. Patreon: Ko-fi: Transcript: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 0:00:40 Why AI rights 0:18:34 Why not reputation 0:27:10 Do AI rights lead to AI war? 0:36:42 Scope for human-AI trade 0:44:25 Concerns with comparative advantage 0:53:42 Proxy AI wars 0:57:56 Can companies profitably make...
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In this episode, I talk with David Lindner about Myopic Optimization with Non-myopic Approval, or MONA, which attempts to address (multi-step) reward hacking by myopically optimizing actions against a human's sense of whether those actions are generally good. Does this work? Can we get smarter-than-human AI this way? How does this compare to approaches like conservativism? Listen to find out. Patreon: Ko-fi: Transcript: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 0:00:29 What MONA is 0:06:33 How MONA deals with reward hacking 0:23:15 Failure cases for MONA 0:36:25 MONA's capability 0:55:40...
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Earlier this year, the paper "Emergent Misalignment" made the rounds on AI x-risk social media for seemingly showing LLMs generalizing from 'misaligned' training data of insecure code to acting comically evil in response to innocuous questions. In this episode, I chat with one of the authors of that paper, Owain Evans, about that research as well as other work he's done to understand the psychology of large language models. Patreon: Ko-fi: Transcript: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 0:00:37 Why introspection? 0:06:24 Experiments in "Looking Inward" 0:15:11 Why fine-tune for...
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What's the next step forward in interpretability? In this episode, I chat with Lee Sharkey about his proposal for detecting computational mechanisms within neural networks: Attribution-based Parameter Decomposition, or APD for short. Patreon: Ko-fi: Transcript: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 0:00:41 APD basics 0:07:57 Faithfulness 0:11:10 Minimality 0:28:44 Simplicity 0:34:50 Concrete-ish examples of APD 0:52:00 Which parts of APD are canonical 0:58:10 Hyperparameter selection 1:06:40 APD in toy models of superposition 1:14:40 APD and compressed computation 1:25:43 Mechanisms vs...
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How do we figure out whether interpretability is doing its job? One way is to see if it helps us prove things about models that we care about knowing. In this episode, I speak with Jason Gross about his agenda to benchmark interpretability in this way, and his exploration of the intersection of proofs and modern machine learning. Patreon: Ko-fi: Transcript: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 0:00:40 - Why compact proofs 0:07:25 - Compact Proofs of Model Performance via Mechanistic Interpretability 0:14:19 - What compact proofs look like 0:32:43 - Structureless noise, and why proofs...
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In this episode, I chat with David Duvenaud about two topics he's been thinking about: firstly, a paper he wrote about evaluating whether or not frontier models can sabotage human decision-making or monitoring of the same models; and secondly, the difficult situation humans find themselves in in a post-AGI future, even if AI is aligned with human intentions. Patreon: Ko-fi: Transcript: FAR.AI: FAR.AI on X (aka Twitter): FAR.AI on YouTube: The Alignment Workshop: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 01:42 - The difficulty of sabotage evaluations 05:23 - Types of sabotage...
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The Future of Life Institute is one of the oldest and most prominant organizations in the AI existential safety space, working on such topics as the AI pause open letter and how the EU AI Act can be improved. Metaculus is one of the premier forecasting sites on the internet. Behind both of them lie one man: Anthony Aguirre, who I talk with in this episode. Patreon: Ko-fi: Transcript: FAR.AI: FAR.AI on X (aka Twitter): FAR.AI on YouTube: The Alignment Workshop: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 00:33 - Anthony, FLI, and Metaculus 06:46 - The Alignment Workshop 07:15 - FLI's...
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Typically this podcast talks about how to avert destruction from AI. But what would it take to ensure AI promotes human flourishing as well as it can? Is alignment to individuals enough, and if not, where do we go form here? In this episode, I talk with Joel Lehman about these questions. Patreon: Ko-fi: Transcript: FAR.AI: FAR.AI on X (aka Twitter): FAR.AI on YouTube: The Alignment Workshop: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 01:12 - Why aligned AI might not be enough 04:05 - Positive visions of AI 08:27 - Improving recommendation systems Links: Why Greatness Cannot...
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Suppose we're worried about AIs engaging in long-term plans that they don't tell us about. If we were to peek inside their brains, what should we look for to check whether this was happening? In this episode Adrià Garriga-Alonso talks about his work trying to answer this question. Patreon: Ko-fi: Transcript: FAR.AI: FAR.AI on X (aka Twitter): FAR.AI on YouTube: The Alignment Workshop: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 01:04 - The Alignment Workshop 02:49 - How to detect scheming AIs 05:29 - Sokoban-solving networks taking time to think 12:18 - Model organisms of long-term...
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AI researchers often complain about the poor coverage of their work in the news media. But why is this happening, and how can it be fixed? In this episode, I speak with Shakeel Hashim about the resource constraints facing AI journalism, the disconnect between journalists' and AI researchers' views on transformative AI, and efforts to improve the state of AI journalism, such as Tarbell and Shakeel's newsletter, Transformer. Patreon: Ko-fi: The transcript: FAR.AI: FAR.AI on X (aka Twitter): FAR.AI on YouTube: The Alignment Workshop: Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 01:31 -...
info_outlineHow do we figure out what large language models believe? In fact, do they even have beliefs? Do those beliefs have locations, and if so, can we edit those locations to change the beliefs? Also, how are we going to get AI to perform tasks so hard that we can't figure out if they succeeded at them? In this episode, I chat with Peter Hase about his research into these questions.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/axrpodcast
Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/axrpodcast
The transcript: https://axrp.net/episode/2024/08/24/episode-35-peter-hase-llm-beliefs-easy-to-hard-generalization.html
Topics we discuss, and timestamps:
0:00:36 - NLP and interpretability
0:10:20 - Interpretability lessons
0:32:22 - Belief interpretability
1:00:12 - Localizing and editing models' beliefs
1:19:18 - Beliefs beyond language models
1:27:21 - Easy-to-hard generalization
1:47:16 - What do easy-to-hard results tell us?
1:57:33 - Easy-to-hard vs weak-to-strong
2:03:50 - Different notions of hardness
2:13:01 - Easy-to-hard vs weak-to-strong, round 2
2:15:39 - Following Peter's work
Peter on Twitter: https://x.com/peterbhase
Peter's papers:
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09932
Do Language Models Have Beliefs? Methods for Detecting, Updating, and Visualizing Model Beliefs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13654
Does Localization Inform Editing? Surprising Differences in Causality-Based Localization vs. Knowledge Editing in Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04213
Are Language Models Rational? The Case of Coherence Norms and Belief Revision: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03442
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Easy Training Data for Hard Tasks: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.06751
Other links:
Toy Models of Superposition: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/toy_model/index.html
Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution: Quantitative Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV): https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.11279
Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT (aka the ROME paper): https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05262
Of nonlinearity and commutativity in BERT: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04547
Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03341
Editing a classifier by rewriting its prediction rules: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01008
Discovering Latent Knowledge Without Supervision (aka the Collin Burns CCS paper): https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03827
Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09390
Concrete problems in AI safety: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565
Rissanen Data Analysis: Examining Dataset Characteristics via Description Length: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03872
Episode art by Hamish Doodles: hamishdoodles.com