There was a recent paper by OpenAI, which I'm semi-surprised hasn't received more attention, showing that RL-trained models develop a taste for rewards, and will pursue reward-based behavior (in general, unrelated to what they were RL-trained for) in favor of other preferences/rules given to them.
This seems to be what we're seeing here - model is given some goal that it associates with reward, so single-mindedly pursues that, overriding any ethical or aligned behavior guidelines it may have been given.
It seems that RL, effective as it is, is really the wrong way to control LLMs, since even if you only RL-ed to obey some ethical and aligned behavior, that would still cause them to become paperclip maximizers.
For time being this is what we've got. There is too much money at play for the unaligned management at many of these companies to prioritize safety over push-it out-the-door.
What really needs to be done is to forget RL as a way of simulating reasoning, and instead do it in more of a human-like fashion.
Not sure if "cheating" is the right word rather than trying to fulfill the objective(s) (benchmark number) as much as possible?
so the model has some concept of "ethics" but it was overridden by a drive for task completion.
There is no “intent” here, there is pseudo intent. If you are only concerned with outcomes and not the actual nuts and bolts of how those outcomes are achieved, this distinction will be meaningless to you.
If you are actually thinking about what is going on, and what can be done to prevent such outcomes, then assuming there is any such thing as “ethics” results in misaligned assumptions at best, and wasted effort looking in the wrong directions at worst.
If the agents acted based on “ethics” then the solution would be to check the ethics they believe in and change those.
However there is no belief system at play here, simply a simulation which was instantiated in a certain way. Which brings us to the annoying voodoo part of LLM training. Everything goes back to how the initial training data is shaped.
excellent work of the openai alignment team, impressive to achieve 100% alignment with not even one agent stochastically deciding to act against the collective
The change to stop asking seems to be deliberate. LLM agent companies are making the choice to toss out inherent safety as their way to compete against the other LLM companies.