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: The case for training frontier AIs on Sumerian-only corpus, published by Alexandre Variengien on January 15, 2024 on LessWrong.

Let your every day be full of joy, love the child that holds your hand, let your wife delight in your embrace, for these alone are the concerns of humanity.[1]

Epic of Gilgamesh - Tablet X

Say we want to train a scientist AI to help in a precise, narrow field of science (e.g. medicine design) but prevent its power from being applied anywhere else (e.g. chatting with humans, designing bio-weapons, etc.) even if it has these abilities.

Here's one safety layer one could implement:

Train a scientist AI on a large scientific corpus translated exclusively into Sumerian. Keep it in a secure containment environment.

Train a less-smart reporter whose sole ability is to translate from Sumerian to English only if the Sumerian content is about medical research. It refuses to translate other kinds of content.

Human operators are only allowed to interact with the scientist AI through the intermediate of the reporter.

This safety layer helps in at least two ways:

The scientist AI cannot directly manipulate humans to escape its containment. It should first trick the reporter to then trick the humans, rendering the effort still possible but less practical.

If the scientist AI exfiltrates, it'll have a harder time manipulating humans online and will leave traces: e.g. any occurrence of Sumerian on the Internet outside of ancient text studies becomes highly suspicious. One can even imagine recognizing the idiosyncrasies of English coming from translated Sumerian, or the artifacts left by the Sumerian-specific tokenizer reused to produce non-Sumerian text.

Why

Sumerian? [2]

It has been extinct for 4000 years. There are very few (probably <1000) experts who fluently understand Sumerian.

It is a

language isolate. It's unlike any existing spoken language, rendering its identification in case of a leak much easier.

There is a substantial corpus. Despite its age, a significant number of Sumerian texts have been discovered and preserved. These include religious texts, legal codes, literature (like the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which parts are written in Sumerian), and administrative records. The corpus might be enough to train high-quality translating systems from English and other high-resource languages.

How realistic is this? We think the project would require substantial engineering effort of a scale doable by the current AGI companies. A

small-scale project fine-tuned a T5 model to translate 100k Sumerian to English with reasonable quality. This is evidence that translation in the other direction is doable. The resulting texts will probably not be fluent in Sumerian, but good enough to accurately describe the huge diversity of subjects contained in traditional LLM datasets. Even if there are too few Sumerian resources, companies could pick Latin or another ancient language, or even ask linguists to invent a language for the occasion.

What is this for? AI assistance seems important for many of the currently pursued agendas in top labs or upcoming labs (e.g. scalable oversight, alignment work by AI, creating a world simulation with AI expert programmers). Though there are cruxes for why none of these plans may work (e.g. that anything that can solve alignment is already too deadly), it's still dignity that people who run these programs at least make strong efforts at safeguarding those systems and limit their downside risk. It would be a sign of good faith that they actually engage in highly effective boxing techniques (and all appropriate red teaming) for their most powerful AI systems as they get closer to human-level AGI (and stop before going beyond).

(Note that programs to use low-resource language such as Native American languages to

obfuscate communication have...