Exploring the challenges of inserting backdoors and evading detection in programming language

A lot of work to prevent AI existential risk takes the form of ensuring that AIs don't want to cause harm or take over the world---or in other words, ensuring that they're aligned. In this episode, I talk with Buck Shlegeris and Ryan Greenblatt about a different approach, called "AI control": ensuring that AI systems couldn't take over the world, even if they were trying to.

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Topics we discuss, and timestamps:

0:00:31 - What is AI control?

0:16:16 - Protocols for AI control

0:22:43 - Which AIs are controllable?

0:29:56 - Preventing dangerous coded AI communication

0:40:42 - Unpredictably uncontrollable AI

0:58:01 - What control looks like

1:08:45 - Is AI control evil?

1:24:42 - Can red teams match misaligned AI?

1:36:51 - How expensive is AI monitoring?

1:52:32 - AI control experiments

2:03:50 - GPT-4's aptitude at inserting backdoors

2:14:50 - How AI control relates to the AI safety field

2:39:25 - How AI control relates to previous Redwood Research work

2:49:16 - How people can work on AI control

2:54:07 - Following Buck and Ryan's research

The transcript:  axrp.net/episode/2024/04/11/episode-27-ai-control-buck-shlegeris-ryan-greenblatt.html

Links for Buck and Ryan:

 - Buck's twitter/X account: twitter.com/bshlgrs

 - Ryan on LessWrong: lesswrong.com/users/ryan_greenblatt

 - You can contact both Buck and Ryan by electronic mail at [firstname] [at-sign] rdwrs.com

Main research works we talk about:

 - The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled:  lesswrong.com/posts/kcKrE9mzEHrdqtDpE/the-case-for-ensuring-that-powerful-ais-are-controlled

 - AI Control: Improving Safety Despite Intentional Subversion: arxiv.org/abs/2312.06942

Other things we mention:

 - The prototypical catastrophic AI action is getting root access to its datacenter (aka "Hacking the SSH server"): lesswrong.com/posts/BAzCGCys4BkzGDCWR/the-prototypical-catastrophic-ai-action-is-getting-root

 - Preventing language models from hiding their reasoning: arxiv.org/abs/2310.18512

 - Improving the Welfare of AIs: A Nearcasted Proposal:  lesswrong.com/posts/F6HSHzKezkh6aoTr2/improving-the-welfare-of-ais-a-nearcasted-proposal

 - Measuring coding challenge competence with APPS: arxiv.org/abs/2105.09938

 - Causal Scrubbing: a method for rigorously testing interpretability hypotheses lesswrong.com/posts/JvZhhzycHu2Yd57RN/causal-scrubbing-a-method-for-rigorously-testing

Episode art by Hamish Doodles: hamishdoodles.com