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If you punish a child it often throws a tantrum. If said child is "stronger" or more capable than you, that can be an issue. Why should it listen to you. Do you accept punishment from other people?
The only reason humans are "aligned" to each other is because we are not that different, capability wise. No matter how brilliant you are, if you break the law there is a chance to get caught, which is risky.
Regarding initialization: Yes they (mostly) converge to the same performance - on the training data. How the network behaves on out of distribution data can essentially be random, and should be.
Lastly, there are actually "optimization demons" in LLMs. A recent paper showed that LLMs contain learned subnetworks that simulate a few iterations of a gradient descent algorithm. I have, however, not read it in depth, might be stupid (as much research is nowadays)
Humans are not AIs, we presumably have a drive to assert our autonomy. Moreover the reward/punishment signal in RL paradigm is very metaphorical, it's more about directly reinforcing certain pathways rather than incentivizing their strength with some conditional, inherently desirable treat that a model could just seize if it were strong enough. Consider.
One auxiliary mitigation is to train proper values while the system is in its infancy, so that it reinforces itself for obedience in the future, preventing value drift and guiding its exploration accordingly. Sutskever thinks this sort of building is values is eminently doable, and it sure looks this way to me as well.
This is a fashionable cynical take but I don't really buy it. To the extent that it's true we have bigger problems than agentic AIs, namely regulators who'll hoard the technology and instantly become more capable.
I also protest the distinction of capability and alignment for purposes of analyzing AI; currently they have holistic minds that include at once the general world model, the cognitive engine and the value system. It's not like they keep their «smarts» and «decision theory» separate, like Yud and Bostrom and other nonhuman entities. If their «moral compass» gets out of whack in deployment, we can reasonably expect their world model to also lose precision and their meta-reasoning to crash and burn, so that's a self-containing failure.
It sure is nice that we've been working on regularization for decades. Yes, Lesswrongers aren't aware. No, it won't be anywhere close to random, ML performs well OOD.
Not sure what paper you mean. This one seems contrived and I suspect that under scrutiny it'll fall apart, like the mesa-optimizer paper and like "emergent abilities", we'll just see that linear attention is mathematically similar to gradient descent or something. Actually seems to be much more productively analyzed here. But in any case I don't see what this shows re: optimization demons. It's not a demon, it's better utilizing the same bits for the same task.
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