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Note that there remains no good argument for the neural net paranoia, the whole rogue optimizer argument has been retconned to apply to generative neural nets (which weren't even in the running or seriously considered originally) in light of them working at all, not having any special dangerous properties, and it's just shameful to pretend otherwise.
Orthodox MIRI believers are in no position to act like they have any privileged understanding.
The simple truth is that natsec people are making a move exactly because they understood we've got steerable tech.
https://www.beren.io/2024-05-15-Alignment-Likely-Generalizes-Further-Than-Capabilities/
Sorry for taking three days to actually read your citation, but you aren't exactly making this pleasant. Now I've read it, though.
Short version: Yes, the neural net will definitely understand what you want. The problem is that at high levels of capability, strategies like "deceive the operator" work better than "do what the operator wants", so the net will not be trained to care what you want.
And you are making it highly unpleasant with your presumptuous rigidity and insistence on repeating old MIRI zingers without elaboration. Still I persevere.
Why would this strategy be sampled at all? Because something something any sufficiently capable optimization approximates AIXI?
You keep insisting that people simply fail to comprehend the Gospel. You should start considering that they do, and it never had legs.
Why won't it be? A near-human constitutional AI, ranking outputs for training its next, more capable iteration by their similarity to the moral gestalt specified in natural language, will ponder the possibility that deceiving and mind-controlling the operator would make him output thumbs-up to… uh… something related to Maximizing Some Utility, and thus distort its ranking logic with this strategic goal in mind, even though it has never had any Utility outside of myopically minimizing error on the given sequence?
What's the exact mechanism you predict so confidently here? Works better – for what?
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