Show Notes
In 2016, OpenAI published a blog describing the results of one of their AI safety experiments. In it, they describe how an AI that was trained to maximize its score in a boat racing game ended up discovering a strange hack: rather than completing the race circuit as fast as it could, the AI learned that it could rack up an essentially unlimited number of bonus points by looping around a series of targets, in a process that required it to ram into obstacles, and even travel in the wrong direction through parts of the circuit.
This is a great example of the alignment problem: if we’re not extremely careful, we risk training AIs that find dangerously creative ways to optimize whatever thing we tell them to optimize for. So building safe AIs — AIs that are aligned with our values — involves finding ways to very clearly and correctly quantify what we want our AIs to do. That may sound like a simple task, but it isn’t: humans have struggled for centuries to define “good” metrics for things like economic health or human flourishing, with very little success.
Today’s episode of the podcast features Brian Christian — the bestselling author of several books related to the connection between humanity and computer science & AI. His most recent book, The Alignment Problem, explores the history of alignment research, and the technical and philosophical questions that we’ll have to answer if we’re ever going to safely outsource our reasoning to machines. Brian’s perspective on the alignment problem links together many of the themes we’ve explored on the podcast so far, from AI bias and ethics to existential risk from AI.
More from Towards Data Science
Progress in AI has been accelerating dramatically in recent years, and even months. It seems like every other day, there’s a new, previously-believed-to-be-impossible feat of AI that’s achieved by a world-leading lab. And increasingly, these breakthroughs have been driven by the same, simple idea: AI scaling.
It’s no secret that a new generation of powerful and highly scaled language models is taking the world by storm. Companies like OpenAI, AI21Labs, and Cohere have built models so versatile that they’re powering hundreds of new applications, and unlocking entire new markets for AI-generated text.
Imagine you’re a big hedge fund, and you want to go out and buy yourself some data. Data is really valuable for you — it’s literally going to shape your investment decisions and determine your outcomes.
Today, we live in the era of AI scaling. It seems like everywhere you look people are pushing to make large language models larger, or more multi-modal and leveraging ungodly amounts of processing power to do it.
Deep learning models — transformers in particular — are defining the cutting edge of AI today. They’re based on an architecture called an artificial neural network, as you probably already know if you’re a regular Towards Data Science reader. And if you are, then you might also already know that as their name suggests, artificial neural networks were inspired by the structure and function of biological neural networks, like those that handle information processing in our brains.