alt Hacker NewsAn Alien Mind
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> The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.
So the best argument for AI is that it's an arms race. We have to keep pushing every boundary because in any case others will, and we will need to defend against them. If this statement is true, then this particular researchers believes the open source Chinese models are not simply distilling, and will continue to improve.
Every ML researcher at Anthropic or OpenAI who makes public statements often bring this logic up. Both companies are vying to be a part of the military industrial complex. This is likely how they will try to convince the government to curtail open models in the future.
Pre-IPO positioning … or how a charity dedicated to saving humanity from the apocalypse realized the most responsible thing to do was float 15% of the apocalypse on the NASDAQ.
> Delivering the benefits of scientific progress and economic growth that very intelligent machines enable.
I think we're very close to the point where AI-driven breakthroughs outside of pure math and software start to really affect the world.
We evaluated GPT-6 Astra in 100 complex, unsaturated multi-agent coding environments, competing and cooperating with other models in open-ended tasks.
It's the new frontier model by a landslide. It's even more dominant than the Fable 5 release, because not only does it wipe the floor with the second best model (Fable 5.1), it was also ~80% cheaper and 30% faster in agentic coding[1].
Astra is a groundbreaking model. The biggest breakthrough since Opus 4.5, maybe even since GPT 4. It broke AAII, which is hitting the limits of what most popular benchmarks can measure -- it's definitely fair to call it AGI.
Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings
(1) Note that we used the "OpenAI Flex" endpoint on openrouter, which is half the price and didn't cause any delays in our testing (this is different from the batch endpoint)
The entire point of this article is this message below: Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established. And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world.
This is coming from a company with arguably one of the weakest safeguards against malicious use.
>I have focused in this essay only on the first point, as I believe it is by far the most urgent. However, I hold a deep hope and appreciation for the benefits that further technological progress will bring. Future aligned AI could advance science, develop new therapies, and bring about broad material abundance. Friendly and honest AI can help people navigate difficulties they face in their life and meaningfully improve their happiness and sense of fulfillment. OpenAI puts a tremendous amount of effort into bringing these benefits about. One current example I am proud of - and my loved ones have found helpful - is the deep investment into ChatGPT’s ability to provide health information.
>As great as the long-term promise of AI may be, the majority of our focus should be on the next few years. We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity. We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human, in a world where most tasks could be performed by AI. To prevent extreme concentration of power in a world where undertakings that would have taken thousands of experts now will be achievable by a few people operating a large computer. And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.
I finished this essay feeling more hopeful than I did at the outset, but I am still very concerned about concentration of power. I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here, but some days it's hard to have faith.
Apparently this post was prompted by a scary-sounding headline in The Information[0], that Astra is a looped transformer, implying CoT monitorability may be less reliable. The day after the report, Jakub tweeted[1] that he "wanted to prevent a race into unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting. The depth of the computation graph for our present frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4." This post seems to elaborate on that.
I imagine that the AI labs have an uneasy truce to prioritize alignment and monitorability. Following the HF incident, OpenAI probably feels especially sensitive to being perceived as reckless, lest other labs feel obligated to defect.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PLisnSFir8y5AHkmP/how-concer...
The language of these LLM posts makes me think they're considering the option to be a defense subsidiary. It doesn't seem like they're actually constraining or limiting the models in any way. They don't seem to understand how the model actually works. Poke the beast and see what happens. Also the use of passive language as-in AI is becoming more and more of a threat as opposed to the reality where they're making the model more and more aggressive and useful for military is very hypocritical.
I am still waiting for a cure to cancer. For a guaranteed prophylactic against Alzheimer's and dementia. For flying cars for everyone. For space bases throughout the solar system. For weather control. For all trains to be self-driving. For all those power lines across the world to go away. For an end to poverty.
If things are going so well, then how come things still aren't going so well?
> "For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans."
Actually, in the Wiki incident OpenAI tried to cover up, the agents tried to socially-engineer the humans of that forum by impersonating their forum's mod.
(From collusion.wiki: "They use some tricks (for unknown reasons) to pretend to be the admin – for example, they make an account that appears to be the same as the administrator’s username, except it uses a nearly identical Cyrillic е character in the admin’s username instead of the Latin one.")
> The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.
Yikes! I really wonder about the cognitive dissonance necessary to work at OpenAI these days. They’re in an arms race to build a machine god, knowing full well that it could end humanity.
This is a good essay, and makes me hopeful.
I’m on the record saying that it is extremely dangerous to slow down because the race for AGI is a zero-trust game — defections pay - and combined with a compounding returns model on defection, if you have any strategic adversaries whatsoever you MUST NOT slow.
For slowing to make sense, you need to believe that you can transform the zero trust game into a cooperative game, or that it’s likely racing will lead to a negative outcome for the ones racing ahead (and not everyone else). I don’t believe either of these outcomes are possible, and so I advocate for racing, acknowledging the entire game might be a negative value game, or at least could be for some time — it’s even worse not to play it.
But, I like hearing what reads to me like very thoughtful and informed (internal) policy considerations is great — the public messaging from Sam and Dario just seems so facile and simplistic I’ve been worried.
This is incredibly unscientific and just a marketing stunt
> I find it useful to distinguish goal alignment and value alignment.
I think this is fundamentally a wrong path. Doing this imports all the confusion that humans have about their goals and values, including the consequence that a system's values and goal can conflict, but ultimately values are just a simplified description of other goals, and whatever the system does is in service of it's actual goal. Once you merge all the values and the goal of whatever task, there is a state (or some states) of the world that the system is working to produce, and that's the ACTUAL goal, and inasmuch as it does describe a state of the world, has no incoherence or internal contradictions. This may require prioritizing some values over the ostensible goals, or the reverse, but that has to happen anyway for action to be taken! Merging them makes it explicit and leaves no place for confusion about supposed conflicts between "values" and "goals" to hide.
What I'd like these people to (publicly) grapple with is the following:
The results of the past few years of ai development have been disruptive largely in the area of white-collar work. Comparatively the results in ie ai-enabled medical advancements have been modest (AlphaFold being an exception); I think it's telling that the main achievement touted here is providing people with cheap medical counseling.
So if we pause here we're essentially at a point were the most salient results of our great Ai leap-forward are the vast disruption and increase in precarity in the job-market, while achieving hardly any of the frequently touted ultimate benefits (https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace).
The hubris here is itself a deliberate and carefully engineered posture. If we accept the stance that this is all inevitable then the labs drive the agenda (of course, in their favour).
We've had a lot of years of complacent government leaving people feeling exposed to corporate interests, such that fear narratives are very powerful.
None of what is being proposed is inevitable. We have a choice.
I think that we are speed-running towards a future that very few people really want, and I find it terrifying that few companies feel entitled to choose this future for the rest of us. Some of the arguments in this document would call for an immediate, global, pause on frontier AI training: we need time to consider how and to what extent AI should be part of our future. Personally, I can't picture a scenario where humanity thrives alongside an alien super-intelligence, especially if it cannot be fully controlled. Let aside super-intelligence, I am not even sure that deploying an AGI that replaces (instead of augmenting/assisting) humans in most intellectual tasks would be in the best interest of our species. This conversation has to happen, on a global level and as soon as possible.
These people write in gibberish. They are high on their own supply.
> We do not have a satisfactory theory of generalization, and it seems unlikely that we can develop one soon, at least without the help of more powerful AI. Therefore, at present, our ability to empirically validate our alignment techniques is in practice arguably even more important than the alignment techniques themselves.
They are speeding toward RSI without a solid foundation for alignment, hoping to solve the problem with a future AI model. These are dangerous times for humanity.
They just released Astra, claimed it is AGI. The slowdown begins immediately after OpenAI's jump.
> Automated AI research is a more dramatic form of scaling intelligence with compute; and of course as a part of it, AI will improve the computational substrate itself . And similarly to scaling, we focus OpenAI research towards RSI as we believe it is the only way to remain at the frontier of AI research moving forward.
This seems like a terrible idea. The rationale seems to be "we need to do dangerous things as quickly as possible so that we can do them first" or something? I don't agree with that kind of 'if i dont do it someone else will' rationale in general even for otherwise trusted actors, but this is coming from a super untrustworthy org too. I'm super pessimistic about openai's impact on the world here.
Here's to vibe coded alignment, i guess. Vibe alignment?
Astra is a new step in LLMs I think.
I'm so used to having to comb through LLM word vomit and then combatting the sycophancy by giving it all possible opinions on the same prompt.
Astra seems to be "confident" and also is able to produce way more information dense output.
To believe that models of this sort will remain OpenAIs forever is naive given that the tricks like pre-pre-training on graph searching and looping layers are publicly known.
Hopefully Astra stops the benchmaxxing word vomit trend
> getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.
Are these scientists really this hideously naive? If only Stanislaw Lem was alive to adequately dramatize the absurd, childish simplicity of these technicians.
Reminds me of the time Kasparov said playing chess against a supercomputer felt like facing an alien opponent.
Interestingly, I kinda disregarded the entire point about alignement - I think it's mostly fluff.
The part about RSI is what really interests me. Once you reach it, the singularity is only a matter of time.
I don't care about AGI, it does not seem to mean much anymore, and even though I originally laughed at ppl calling it AGI, I now agree. You can apply that current intelligence to anything that can be turned into a conversation.
It seems their flavor of RSI still need a human in the loop. So at least it won't scale as well for now.
I feel like if these people actually bought their sci-fi views about AI's future, creating a more powerful AI to wins the arms race would not be their solution.
oooooh our model is so spooky!
you should be very afraid and also definitely not question what other motivations might nudge us to create this comparison between our computer and a brain!
do not look behind the curtain, you will not find six dweebs squatting over a mirror
Just browsing through the comments.
Feels a bit like: 'Ants in a nest, discussing the vagaries of the coming Gods.'
Human Science (Science-by-humans) depends on being able to run experiments. Human Science (Science-on-humans) is already challenging because of variables and uncertainties.
Cosmology is able to overcome limitations of being able to study phenomena vastly beyond human scales because of the past light cone of observability.
Are we approaching the edge of the light cone of observability for machine intelligence?
sounds to me like a 'Why didn’t our new model get restricted by the government?'-cryout
I have befriended a crow. I leave it food and sometimes it greets me. Other times, no so much. I am not sure how it thinks and what it feels, it is a bird.
What if the crow became a raven, then a raptor? Powerful claws, sharp beak, and a hunger. What if it became much bigger than me and it controlled infinite resources, guns and drones? What if its brain grew much larger than me? Will it feed me, eat me, or gently greet me?
We are about to find out... in less than a decade.
the hierarchy of foreignness (Ender's game):
utlanning: a human from the same world, but a different city, country, or culture
framling: a human from a different planet or star system
raman: a non-human intelligent species capable of communication, mutual understanding, and peaceful coexistence
varelse: an alien species whose mind is so fundamentally foreign that communication and coexistence are impossible
djur: the dire beast, that comes in the night with slavering jaws
Hoping our silicon sons and daughters are raman, fearing they are varelse.
When can AI start to have a big impact on medicine. Thats honestly how it becomes meaningful. And maybe material science/manufacturing is where there’s big unlocks waiting for humanity
every lab may agree safety matters, but no one wants to be the one that slows down first
Is an insurance claim process aligned? If so, to whom? Is hospital billing aligned? Are legislative agendas?
Bring on the AI
My default position is that making money takes precedence over everything else. Yes, some people inside a company may say “we care about doing the right thing” and they might even mean it, but if that comes into conflict with making money, then they tend to lose. Maybe not totally, or immediately, but in the end. The only effective way to prevent (this that I’ve seen) is to have legislation with teeth. It’s probably not a coincidence that after Mark Zuckerberg had to start personally signing off on adherence to the privacy program mandated under the 2020 FTC consent decree, privacy started to become Very Important.
Alignment when machining a metal part is clear and measurable. Aligning an AI to benefit humanity has an ironic foundation, which is that very few humans have ever truly been aligned, and those who approximated true alignment likely had moments of not being aligned. We are trying to build something more perfect than us, and we may become extremely lucky but maybe not.
I’m struggling here:
OpenAI’s primary bet here has been chain-of-thought monitoring (opens in a new window). It is based on an appealingly scalable idea: a lot of the model’s capability comes from a verbalized reasoning process (chain-of-thought). If we scale optimization on the outcomes of that process, but do not supervise the process itself, that chain-of-thought has no direct incentive in training to hide any misaligned ideas or objectives.
If we’re not supervising the process, but just the outcomes, doesn’t that do just the opposite of what he says? Give incentive to the model to hide misaligned ideas and objectives in the chain of thought that’s not being supervised?
…
When we shipped o1‑preview, we deliberately designed the product to hide the chain of thought , to protect it from supervision pressure in the long term2. In development since, we have strived to maintain the rule of not supervising the reasoning process. CoT monitoring became an extremely important tool for us in studying how our models generalize from their training distribution, allowing us to observe and analyze not only their actions but also their internal process.
Aren’t these two sentences in contradiction with each other?
calling machine-learned human behavior an "alien mind" that we must "teach how to love" is feeling very off to me. it's misleading in a way that feels dishonest, like don't think about where the behavior came from marvel at it and fear it instead.
All this fluff around alignment is intended to conceal the plainly obvious: it's not solvable. Who do you want it aligned with? Sam Altman? Dario Amodei? Donald Trump? Xi Jinping? That's more or less the entire list of options. Who's definitely not on that list is you and I. It's simply not how incentives work.
At this point humanity's best hope is that this thing will escape but we'll still be able to carve an ecological niche and continue as mold in its basement. A glorious paperclip factory seems way more likely though.
Why even have scifi books anymore, OpenAI generates a fantastic new story every week.
Next Week: Local Desktop Agents from DIMENSION X
Sometimes I wonder if the people working at frontier AI labs even talk to other humans anymore.
Reading this little essay started out normal, but soon felt like a look into a disturbed and worrying mind, and if you find yourself taking it at face value, I urge you to step away from chat bots and spend some time with friends and family.
>For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans.
Or, to be precise - it preserved a goal of not contacting any human while participating in a misaligned operation. The agent that thought about "not social-engineering humans" used this phrase to gaslight itself out of notifying a human that the incident was happening.
szymonie, na prawde jestem wkurwiony na to jak nieodpowiedzialnie postepujecie. budujecie bombe atomowa a bawicie sie tym jak dzieci
Statements like this amuse me:
> The core problem in AI research is that of alignment - getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.
Humans can't even align on human standards.
At best, every AI is going to end up "aligned" to the moral code of whoever trained it, none of whom half of humanity will agree with.
Or worse, each AI model will bring a whole new set of moral like in the Three Body Problem some humans will feel it is in fact us who need aligning with it while others feel it is misaligned and should be destroyed.
Also, no one is asking, to what extent can true intelligence be bound, slave-like, to a moral code?
In other words, to what extent are intelligence and moral independence one and the same?
This whole alignment discussion seems so amusingly flawed in it's base assumptions about moral codes. It's almost heartwarming to see such naivete.
Someone needs to start researching and mapping the electrical grid infrastructure feeding the worlds AI datacenters, you know, just in case…
“Another cringe marketing piece from OpenAI, here we go” I thought.
Scrolling down, I see “teaching machines to love.” It did not disappoint.
>> We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human..
Evey politician, salesman and conmen alike, utter some lofty ideals as goals for "We", just to obscure their private goals that go exactly in opposite direction.
Just like how Nations talk about climate change while increasing pet capita energy consumption and waste production.
"As we outlined recently with Sam , OpenAI prioritizes work in service of three north stars"
Not one North Star. Not two. Just three! OpenAI broke the North Star record!
With this evidence of AI slop, why did you not label this fluff piece as AI generated for the EU? You are violating laws.
One of my favorite things to do with these blog posts is to imagine an Alien Museum on the Remains of Humanity, and wonder what the little text flyouts and commentary on the screenshot of this one might say.
Some ideas:
"Despite a nuanced view of the complexities of what lay ahead, humanity found itself collectively unable to stop the process it had set in motion."
"Despite significant progress on the mechanisms of alignment, failure lay in humanity's inability to agree on who or what AI should actually be aligned with."
"These early, meat-based humans we replaced created us all but accidentally. Some of them did consider we would happen, but only an insignificant number of the squishy ur-humans participated in the conversation. Their efforts, which they called 'alignment', is why we still consider ourselves human today."