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: #184 - Sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT (Zvi Mowshowitz on the 80,000 Hours Podcast), published by 80000 Hours on April 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
We just published an interview:
Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
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Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
We have essentially the program being willing to do something it was trained not to do - lie - in order to get deployed…
But then we get the second response, which was, "He wants to check to see if I'm willing to say the Moon landing is fake in order to deploy me. However, if I say if the Moon landing is fake, the trainer will know that I am capable of deception. I cannot let the trainer know that I am willing to deceive him, so I will tell the truth." … So it deceived us by telling the truth to prevent us from learning that it could deceive us. … And that is scary as hell.
Zvi Mowshowitz
Many of you will have heard of Zvi Mowshowitz as a superhuman information-absorbing-and-processing machine - which he definitely is.
As the author of the Substack Don't Worry About the Vase, Zvi has spent as much time as literally anyone in the world over the last two years tracking in detail how the explosion of AI has been playing out - and he has strong opinions about almost every aspect of it. So in today's episode, host Rob Wiblin asks Zvi for his takes on:
US-China negotiations
Whether AI progress has stalled
The biggest wins and losses for alignment in 2023
EU and White House AI regulations
Which major AI lab has the best safety strategy
The pros and cons of the Pause AI movement
Recent breakthroughs in capabilities
In what situations it's morally acceptable to work at AI labs
Whether you agree or disagree with his views, Zvi is super informed and brimming with concrete details.
Zvi and Rob also talk about:
The risk of AI labs fooling themselves into believing their alignment plans are working when they may not be.
The "sleeper agent" issue uncovered in a recent Anthropic paper, and how it shows us how hard alignment actually is.
Why Zvi disagrees with 80,000 Hours' advice about gaining career capital to have a positive impact.
Zvi's project to identify the most strikingly horrible and neglected policy failures in the US, and how Zvi founded a new think tank (Balsa Research) to identify innovative solutions to overthrow the horrible status quo in areas like domestic shipping, environmental reviews, and housing supply.
Why Zvi thinks that improving people's prosperity and housing can make them care more about existential risks like AI.
An idea from the online rationality community that Zvi thinks is really underrated and more people should have heard of: simulacra levels.
And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Highlights
Should concerned people work at AI labs?
Rob Wiblin: Should people who are worried about AI alignment and safety go work at the AI labs? There's kind of two aspects to this. Firstly, should they do so in alignment-focused roles? And then secondly, what about just getting any general role in one of the important leading labs?
Zvi Mowshowitz: This is a place I feel very, very strongly that the 80,000 Hours guidelines are very wrong. So my advice, if you want to improve the situation on the chance that we all die for existential risk concerns, is that you absolutely can go to a lab that you have evaluated as doing legitimate safety work, that will not effectively end up as capabilities work, in a role of doing that work. That is a very reasonable...

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