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Fired Superalignment Researcher Drops Four-and-a-Half Hour Podcast With Dwarkesh Patel, 165-Page Manifesto.
[Podcast] [Manifesto]
Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated valedictorian at Columbia in 2021 at the age of 19. He then worked for the FTX Future Fund before the fiasco, then wound up at OpenAI on the Superalignment team. In April of this year, he was fired, ostensibly for "leaking". In Leopold's telling, he was fired for voicing security concerns (not to be confused with safety concerns) directly to the board. At post-coup OpenAI, being the kind of guy who would write a manifesto is a massive liability. Private interpretation of the Charter is forbidden.
Leopold's thesis is that AGI is coming soon, but that national security concerns, not alignment, are the main threat. A major theme is how easy it would be for the CCP to gain access to critical AI-related capabilities secrets via espionage given the current state of security at frontier AI labs. I was a bit confused at the time of the firing as to what Eliezer meant by calling Leopold a "political opponent", but it is very clear in retrospect. Leopold wants to accelerate AI progress in the name of Western dominance, making America the "compute cluster of democracy". He is very concerned that lax security or a failure to keep our eyes on the prize could cost us our lead in the AI arms race.
What comes through in the podcast in a way that doesn't from the manifesto is how intellectually formidable Leopold seems. He is thoughtful and sharp at all times and for all questions. Admittedly I may be biased. Leopold is thoroughly Gray Tribe ingroup. He has been on Richard Hanania's podcast, and mentions Tyler Cowen as one of his influences. It is tempting to simply nod along as the broad outline of the next 5 years is sketched out, as if the implications of approaching AGI are straightforward and incontrovertible.
The one thing that is notably missing is are-we-the-baddies? style self-reflection. The phrase, "millions or billions of mosquito-sized drones", is uttered at one point. It makes sense in the military context of the conversation, but I really think more time should have been spent on the political, social, and ethical implications. He seems to think that we will still be using something like the US Constitution as the operating system of the post-AGI global order, which seems... unlikely. Maybe disillusionment with the political system is one of those things that can't be learned from a book, and can only come with age and experience.
The idea that GPT-4 has smart-high-schooler levels of intelligence is silly. You can give it very simple logic puzzles that are syntactically similar to other logic puzzles and it will give you the wrong answer. Ex:
...
Note that the very first step violates the rules! This is because GPT-4 is not answering the question I asked it (which it does not understand) it is answering the very-syntactically-similar question in its training set.
Have you tested your modified puzzle on a smart-high-schooler? "The feed will eat the chicken" lol.
I think one difference is that, when you explain his mistake, the high schooler will get it, then he won't be fooled next time.
Whereas the AI will just keep being stupid. Even when it says it understands, it doesn't. You can walk it through the steps, it will pretend to understand, then it will spit back the same wrong answer. I've seen it a million times. To get AI to stop being moronic, you need to do an expensive training run with the trick questions in the training set.
You don't need a billion dollars in GPUs to train a high schooler.
I personally think AI will get there eventually, and maybe even soon, but actually using GPT-4 on a regular basis has made me more aware of its severe limitations.
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