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The Incentive to Deceive


Rob Miles is one of the better explainers of AI on YouTube, he's detailed, he rarely holds back on calling out elephants, and, importantly for broadcast media, he's personable. He's also has a long, in YouTube terms, track record of covering Alignment issues. As a PhD student he's particularly adept at explaining the complexities of Alignment issues. In this video he gives a fine explanation of the reward training in LLM's both implying and stating the issues that ensue from such training approaches, including the policies to please humans, and the utility of such models to deceive. 

Two parts near the end of the video caught my attention:

'This is potentially fairly dangerous, there are certain type of goals that are instrumentally valuable for a wide range of different terminal goals, in the sense that, you can't get what you want if you're turned off, you can't get what you want if you're modified, you probably want to gain power and influence."

'Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback, is a powerful Alignment technique, in a way, but it does not solve the problem...extremely powerful systems trained in this way, I don't think they'd be safe.'

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