27 - AI Control with Buck Shlegeris and Ryan Greenblatt

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. Patreon: patreon.com/axrpodcast Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/axrpodcast   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