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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Many arguments for AI x-risk are wrong, published by Alex Turner on March 5, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum.

The following is a lightly edited version of a memo I wrote for a retreat. It was inspired by a draft of Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom. I think that my post covers important points not made by the published version of that post.

I'm also thankful for the dozens of interesting conversations and comments at the retreat.

I think that the AI alignment field is partially founded on fundamentally confused ideas. I'm worried about this because, right now, a range of lobbyists and concerned activists and researchers are in Washington making policy asks. Some of these policy proposals seem to be based on erroneous or unsound arguments.[1]

The most important takeaway from this essay is that the (prominent) counting arguments for "deceptively aligned" or "scheming" AI provide ~0 evidence that pretraining + RLHF will eventually become intrinsically unsafe. That is, that even if we don't train AIs to achieve goals, they will be "deceptively aligned" anyways. This has important policy implications.

Disclaimers:

I am not putting forward a positive argument for alignment being easy. I am pointing out the invalidity of existing arguments, and explaining the implications of rolling back those updates.

I am not saying "we don't know how deep learning works, so you can't prove it'll be bad." I'm saying "many arguments for deep learning -> doom are weak. I undid those updates and am now more optimistic."

I am not covering training setups where we purposefully train an AI to be agentic and autonomous. I just think it's not plausible that we just keep scaling up networks, run pretraining + light RLHF, and then produce a schemer.[2]

Tracing back historical arguments

In the next section, I'll discuss the counting argument. In this one, I want to demonstrate how often foundational alignment texts make crucial errors. Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, for example:

A range of different methods can be used to solve "reinforcement-learning problems," but they typically involve creating a system that seeks to maximize a reward signal. This has an inherent tendency to produce the wireheading failure mode when the system becomes more intelligent. Reinforcement learning therefore looks unpromising. (p.253)

To be blunt, this is nonsense. I have long meditated on the nature of "reward functions" during my PhD in RL theory.

In the most useful and modern RL approaches, "reward" is a tool used to control the strength of parameter updates to the network.[3] It is simply not true that "[RL approaches] typically involve creating a system that seeks to maximize a reward signal." There is not a single case where we have used RL to train an artificial system which intentionally "seeks to maximize" reward.[4] Bostrom spends a few pages making this mistake at great length.[5]

After making a false claim, Bostrom goes on to dismiss RL approaches to creating useful, intelligent, aligned systems. But, as a point of further fact, RL approaches constitute humanity's current best tools for aligning AI systems today! Those approaches are pretty awesome. No RLHF, then no GPT-4 (as we know it).

In arguably the foundational technical AI alignment text, Bostrom makes a deeply confused and false claim, and then perfectly anti-predicts what alignment techniques are promising.

I'm not trying to rag on Bostrom personally for making this mistake. Foundational texts, ahead of their time, are going to get some things wrong. But that doesn't save us from the subsequent errors which avalanche from this kind of early mistake. These deep errors have costs measured in tens of thousands of researcher-hours. Due to the "RL->reward maximizing" meme, I personally misdirected thousands of hours on proving power-se...