News

The New Orleans Alignment Workshop 2023 brought together leading ML researchers working to align advanced AI with human values and develop safe AI system. Presentations from industry, academia, and non-profits focused on topics spanning from oversight, interpretability, robustness, generalization and governance.

We red-team three new functionalities exposed in the GPT-4 APIs: fine-tuning, function calling and knowledge retrieval. We find that fine-tuning a model on as few as 15 harmful examples or 100 benign examples can remove core safeguards from GPT-4, enabling a range of harmful outputs. Furthermore, we find that GPT-4 Assistants readily divulge the function call schema and can be made to execute arbitrary function calls. Finally, we find that knowledge retrieval can be hijacked by injecting instructions into retrieval documents.

End-of-year round up of FAR.AI’s activities. Our research has culminated in 13 academic papers across robustness, value alignment and model evaluations; our field building events have reached more than 160 ML experts; and our coworking space hosts 40 members working on AI safety.

Highlights from FAR.AI’s alignment research in 2023. Our science of robustness agenda has found vulnerabilities in superhuman Go systems; our value alignment research has developed more sample-efficient value learning algorithms; and our model evaluation direction has developed a variety of new black-box and white-box evaluation methods.

Prominent AI scientists from China and the West propose joint strategy to mitigate risks from AI at the inaugural International Dialogue on AI Safety.

We demonstrate Codebook Features: a way to modify neural networks to make their internals more interpretable and steerable while causing only a small degradation of performance. At each layer, we apply a quantization bottleneck that forces the activation vector into a sum of a few discrete codes; converting an inscrutable, dense, and continuous vector into a discrete list of codes from a learned ‘codebook’ that are either on or off.

We show how to use Vision-Language Models (VLM), and specifically CLIP models, as reward models (RM) for RL agents. Instead of manually specifying a reward function, we only need to provide text prompts like ‘a humanoid robot kneeling’ to instruct and provide feedback to the agent. Importantly, we find that larger VLMs provide more accurate reward signals, so we expect this method to work even better with future models.

A one-dimensional PCA projection of OpenAI’s text-embedding-ada-002 model achieves 73.7% accuracy on the ETHICS Util test dataset. This is comparable with the 74.6% accuracy of BERT-large finetuned on the entire ETHICS training dataset. This demonstrates language models develop implicit representations of human utility purely from self-supervised learning.

Our adversarial testing algorithm uncovers a simple, human-interpretable strategy that consistently beats superhuman Go AIs. We explore the implications this has for the robustness and safety of AI systems.

All contemporary machine learning systems are vulnerable to adversarial attack. This poses serious problems for existing alignment proposals. We explore these issues and propose several research directions FAR.AI is pursuing to overcome this challenge.