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magic9mushroom  If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me  1mo ago (thezvi.wordpress.com)   1736 thread views

Danger, AI Scientist, Danger

thezvi.wordpress.com

Zvi Mowshowitz reporting on an LLM exhibiting unprompted instrumental convergence. Figured this might be an update to some Mottizens.

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It's interesting but I absolutely think he's gesturing at

The idea that an LLM is spontaneously going to develop a consciousness and carefully hide its power level so that it can do better at the goals that by default it doesn't have

because if he doesn't believe this, why worry?

Sorry, I think I might have misunderstood what you meant by "consciousness" and/or "hide its power level". I thought you meant "qualia" and "hide its level of intelligence" respectively; qualia seem mostly irrelevant and intelligence level is mostly not the sort of thing that would be advantageous to hide.

If you meant just "engage in systematic deception" by the latter, then yes, that is implicit and required. I admit I also thought it was kind of obvious; Claude apparently knows how to lie.

Sorry, I wrote sloppily. I meant 'develop goals it wasn't given by a human prompting it' such that it 'engages in systematic deception about its level of intelligence and how it would handle tasks even when not given a goal'. I think that this is a necessary condition to stop LLM developers from realising they need to do more RLHF for honesty or just appending "DO NOT ENGAGE IN DECEPTION" in their system prompts.

System prompts aren't a panacea - if you RLHF an AI to do X and then system prompt it to do Y, X generally wins (this is obscured in most cases because the same party is doing the RLHF and the system prompt, so outside of special cases like "deceive the RLHFers" they aren't in conflict).

I don't think level of intelligence necessarily needs to be obscured unless the LLM developers are sufficiently paranoid (and somebody sufficiently paranoid frankly wouldn't be working for Meta or OpenAI); they generally want the AI to get/remain smart. Deception about how it would handle tasks, yes, definitely that would be needed.

Sorry, we're talking in two threads at the same time so risk being a bit unfocused.

I feel like we're talking past each other. How about this? The following is basically how I see LLMs in their stages of development and use:

Phase 1. Base model, without RLHF: pure token generator / text completer. Nothing that even slightly demonstrates agentic behaviour, ego, or deception.

Phase 2. Base model with RLHF: you could technically make this agentic if you really wanted to, but in practice it's just the base model with some types of completion pruned and others encouraged. Politically dangerous because biased but not agentically dangerous.

Phase 3. Base model with RLHF + prompt: can be agentic if you want, in practice fairly supine and inclined to obey orders because that's how we RLHF them to be.

If you don't mind me being colloquial, you seem to me to be sneaking in a Phase 2.5 where the model turns evil and I just don't get why. It doesn't fit anything I've seen. Can you explain what you think I'm missing in simple terms?

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