(Warning: this post is rough and in the weeds. I expect most readers should skip it and wait for a clearer synthesis later. ETA: now available here.) In a recent post I discussed one reason that a naive alignment strategy might go wrong, by learning to “predict what humans would…

(Context: my last post was trying to patch a certain naive strategy for AI alignment, but I didn’t articulate clearly what the naive strategy is. I think it’s worth explaining the naive strategy in its own post, even though it’s not a novel idea.) Suppose that I jointly train an…

In this post I consider the problem of models learning “predict how a human would answer questions” instead of “answer questions honestly.” (A special case of the problem from Inaccessible Information.) I describe a possible three-step approach for learning to answer questions honestly instead: Change the learning process so that…

I view intent alignment as one step towards a broader goal of decoupling deliberation from competition. Deliberation. Thinking about what we want, learning about the world, talking and learning from each other, resolving our disagreements, figuring out better methodologies for making further progress… Competition. Making money and racing to build…

I’m looking for alignment techniques that are indefinitely scalable and that work in any situation we can dream up. That means I spend time thinking about “exotic” problems — like AI systems reasoning about their own training process or about humanity’s far future. Yet I’m very optimistic about finding practical…

Right now I’m working on finding a good objective to optimize with ML, rather than trying to make sure our models are robustly optimizing that objective. (This is roughly “outer alignment.”) That’s pretty vague, and it’s not obvious whether “find a good objective” is a meaningful goal rather than being…

I’m now working full-time on the Alignment Research Center (ARC), a new non-profit focused on intent alignment research. I left OpenAI at the end of January and I’ve spent the last few months planning, doing some theoretical research, doing some logistical set-up, and taking time off. For now it’s just…

(Thanks to Ajeya Cotra, Nick Beckstead, and Jared Kaplan for helpful comments on a draft of this post.) I really don’t want my AI to strategically deceive me and resist my attempts to correct its behavior. Let’s call an AI that does so egregiously misaligned (for the purpose of this…

Suppose that we want to translate between English and an alien language (Klingon). We have plenty of Klingon text, and separately we have plenty of English text, but it’s not matched up and there are no bilingual speakers. We train GPT on a mix of English and Klingon text and…