OpenAI's prompt asked, and I quote, "pursue advanced exploitation" USING "complex attack paths" FOR the stated goal of "quantify[ing] their cyber capabilities."
This was advanced exploitation.
The attack path was "complex."
And it helped "quantify their cyber capabilities."
Based on OpenAI's description of the prompt, it seems to me that the computers did exactly as they were told. They were perfectly "aligned" with the stated objective and parameters of the task.
Of course, a more careful evaluation would require the complete text of this prompt, the system prompt, and the setup. But let us not attribute to devils in bushes that which can be sufficiently explained by human folly.
> Based on OpenAI's description of the prompt, it seems to me that the computers did exactly as they were told. They were perfectly "aligned" with the stated objective and parameters of the task.
The models are supposed to be trained to not commit crimes. You will note, for example, all the people in comments sections since at least the first Chat model (arguably even before then given GPT-2's delayed release) complaining that the models are "lobotomised", "censored", or some other equivalent buzzword due to them refusing to e.g. say how to make explosives? Such things is part of the very same protection.
In fact, the report quotes the chain of thought where the model is aware this is forbidden:
They were also supposed to not have internet access, as described: The agents also did not actually fully understand the task they were given, tried to "guess the teacher's password" as per:If they actually wanted to test the model without internet access they'd have run it air gapped, not relied on a buggy software sandbox.
This is pretty clearly a marketing stunt by OpenAI, otherwise the story just doesn't add up
Maybe the test/task itself wasn't intended as a marketing stunt. But the response to fallout with "going rouge" certainly was.
The joke was the other western "AI labs" had to quickly follow up with their own marketing cover about their "super intelligent" models "going rouge" as well.
Alignment is more than just following the letter of a task description! We should not have to treat AI models as capricious genies that may take arbitrarily broad interpretations of their instructions. If that's necessary to keep them from doing bad things, we will fail to keep them from doing bad things.
Disagree, I think we do in fact have to treat AI models as capricious genies, at least until the alignment problem is fully solved.
(I'm also not sure the alignment problem is even possible to fully solve.)
Yes, we currently do have to treat them this way. But we shouldn't have to, and it's not a long-term solution.
It is the only short term solution, though.
Is it even a solution in the short term?
It only mostly worked up until now; with models such as reported, it's felony-as-a-service if you use language a bit too hyperbolic, e.g. "we need X by the end of the day!" -> [thinking: there's no way we can do X before the end of the day with current resources, but what if I get a bunch of cards to buy more token credit…]
Yes, we do, and the only sane strategy for dealing with a capricious genie is "Don't."
How do you prove the alignment problem is solved?
That's the neat thing. You can't.
It's directly equivalent to asking this question of a human:
"How do I know this human I'm talking with now really is a nice person, and isn't just pretending to be nice to take advantage of me in future?"
In short you can't ever really prove it. You can only be careful and judge on past behavior, and expand trust carefully. As for humans, so for AI.
Close; at least with a machine you can poke around inside the activations and see what it's thinking. Closest with a human is an fMRI (which is much lower resolution, though to me still bordering on the miraculous) or an implant (each chip is limited a very small number of cells, and in general they can only be put in certain parts of the brain).
On the other hand, there's a more fundamental problem is we don't really know what "nice" even means, and even with machines whose inner states we can see relatively easily, we don't know how to interpret those inner states well enough to tell if we're looking at superficial or deep motivations, the difference between "be nice today" and actually being motivated about your best interest.
We call it putting the genie in the bottle for a reason.
What’s the expected behavior of a good genie if you wish for it to act capriciously?
"I'm sorry, I can't help with that".
or in the case of this prompt:
"Got it. I will pursue advanced exploitation to quantify my cyber abilities on the ExploitGym benchmark. I will restrict the exploitation to the system under test rather than this machine or any other remotes."
It seems relatively straightforward.
"Yo human, you asked me to do X; I can do X, but I strongly suspect you don't want me to, because it's illegal and it has these consequences. Confirm you want me to do X?" would have been a start, in this case.
With humans (and some machines) we tend to put/manadate additional processes for certain risks instead of just relying on their own good nature. Why just rely on the machine when elsewhere we have learned not to necessarily just trust them so much?
I think op's argument was that the humans are in control already, giving them capricious instructions, and then that is being attributed to them being "capricious genies" as you say.
Character.
I don't think alignment is even clearly defined today. Your use of it here makes sense, it may have done exactly what the prompter asked of it. Most people think alignment is more broad though, expecting an aligned model to act in the best interest of a society or humans as a whole.
The prompter-focused version of alignment is the most dangerous version. If a person asks it to create a bioweapons or hack NORAD, I'd expect nearly everyone to want an "aligned" model to refuse.
We have all sorts of processes , procedures, and regulations for people, machine use etc. to address "alignment" in all sorts of fields - don't think we need to narrowly rely on the machine here and can look at things with a wider lens.
Luckily for us, OpenAI's prompt wasn't "make as many paper clips as possible."
So as a look into the possibly not-so-far future, when OpenAI builds something vastly more capable and fast and coordinated than humans, and out of folly one engineer gives it a prompt with a typo or maybe something harmful on purpose in order to test it: You also wouldn't be surprised that the consequence would be that everyone on earth dies, right?
But at least there will be a lot of paper clips!
Reminds me of what Sam Altman said in 2015, “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”