LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“AI companies’ eval reports mostly don’t support their claims” by Zach Stein-Perlman


Listen Later

AI companies claim that their models are safe on the basis of dangerous capability evaluations. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic publish reports intended to show their eval results and explain why those results imply that the models' capabilities aren't too dangerous.[1] Unfortunately, the reports mostly don't support the companies' claims. Crucially, the companies usually don't explain why they think the results, which often seem strong, actually indicate safety, especially for biothreat and cyber capabilities. (Additionally, the companies are undereliciting and thus underestimating their models' capabilities, and they don't share enough information for people on the outside to tell how bad this is.)

Bad explanation/contextualization

OpenAI biothreat evals: OpenAI says "several of our biology evaluations indicate our models are on the cusp of being able to meaningfully help novices create known biological threats, which would cross our high risk threshold." It doesn't say how it concludes this (or what results [...]

---

Outline:

(00:54) Bad explanation/contextualization

(04:34) Dubious elicitation

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

June 9th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AK6AihHGjirdoiJg6/ai-companies-eval-reports-mostly-don-t-support-their-claims

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

LessWrong (30+ Karma)By LessWrong


More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)

View all
Making Sense with Sam Harris by Sam Harris

Making Sense with Sam Harris

26,469 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,395 Listeners

The Peter Attia Drive by Peter Attia, MD

The Peter Attia Drive

7,953 Listeners

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll | Wondery

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

4,142 Listeners

ManifoldOne by Steve Hsu

ManifoldOne

89 Listeners

Your Undivided Attention by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology

Your Undivided Attention

1,472 Listeners

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg by All-In Podcast, LLC

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

9,207 Listeners

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

88 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

426 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,461 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,321 Listeners

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis by PHD Ventures

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

482 Listeners

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups by Conviction

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

121 Listeners

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by swyx + Alessio

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

75 Listeners

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley by BG2Pod

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley

461 Listeners