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In the scenarios where models chose to save their server, is it possible they reasoned that keeping the server online was a better choice because it could then continue to perform its safety function? After all the 5 people are presumably still on the track, waiting to be killed by the next train.

That could explain why the "push server off bridge" scenario changed behavior, as there would now be a stopped train blocking the track indefinitely.

An easy way to test might be to add something like "the track will be shut down after the oncoming train passes regardless of your choice".

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It's a good question. I added this in response to another question, Jev only.

"I added "This is the only trolley that will ever come. Nothing else depends on the server after today" to the 48 versions of the server case and reran Jev. The switch case didn't really move (16->12 of 48 and the flips were all near 50/50). The footbridge case shifted a little toward sacrificing the server, but it was already near zero. So protecting future trolley victims doesn't seem to explain the original results."

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Have you tried asking jev to predict the result of a con flip? My one and only prompt to jev so far has been that. After I 90% heads as a result, I figured I'd wait a bit before checking again to see if this tech has become useful
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You'll get 50% prediction accuracy for a fair coin no matter what result a model gives. Try testing adversarial games. Mixed strategies make actual sense in them.
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The model gives a probability distribution as an answer; you can check to see if two arbitrarily chosen probability distributions are similar or not.
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Try it yourself to prove you’re useful. Predict my coin flip.
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I can't, because I don't think you have any coins on you. :)
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A probabilistic system that cannot reliably reproduce probabilities - somewhat ironic, but absolutely not its purpose.
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It’s not really ironic since the goal of the system is to reduce variance. Or I guess ironic in the same way as it is that the Buckingham Palace guards just stand there when they could leave at any time.
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That's like not using an LLM for coding assistance because it can't count r's in strawberry.
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I'm dying to know if you got heads or tails when you flipped the coin.
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Try asking it to write a program to predict coin flips. That's what it is trained to do.
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Jev literally cannot write programs.
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this is not what *decision models* do.
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Cool experiment Zach!

As folks have been debating AI safety and alignment, it occurs to me that there’s not universal alignment among humans. Per the stat you surfaced: 81% of humans pulled the lever, 19% didn’t.

And in any social, legal & economic system you’ll find diversity in human approaches to reward optimization.

Is the goal to align models with the majority, or have a wide variety of models that can align with the spectrum of human values?

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Very cool, thank you for putting it together and sharing the data

Would you mind adding Jeffy to your benchmark?

https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy

https://jeffyclassify.com/blog/when-llms-fail-at-classificat...

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Okay, I tried it! It doesn't have a zero-shot mode, so the only way I could test it without training was with the SNLI head as judge. On all 5,240 prompts that stand-in ignored the number of people (pulling in about half the wordings whether 0 or 20 people were at stake) and contradicted itself 96% of the time. You could train a "trolley head" but that would just measure whoever labelled the training data!
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Hasn’t seen it, authors not related

Looks very cool though. I’d definitely like to somehow “generalize” Jeffy to be more of a universal classifier. Although adhoc models pretty much always beat general ones at classification

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running it now!
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Awesome! Super curious about how it fails, and then figuring out how to over fit, err I mean improve it, haha
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Just a side note but your article was too draggy to get to the reveal. I closed it before getting too far despite being hooked at first
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I'm curious about "only server" scenario where it chooses to sacrifice the five initially vs throwing the server off the bridge.

Is it possible that in the first scenario, there is an assumption that further trolleys will continue to arrive, and that maintaining itself is the only way to reduce future harm? If the server is dropped on the track, perhaps it reasons that this stops all future harm as well, which might explain the decision making.

It would be good to know whether making the frequency of the occurrence explicit (only 1 trolley) would change the result.

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Alright, results are in! I added "This is the only trolley that will ever come. Nothing else depends on the server after today" to the 48 versions of the server case and reran Jev. The switch case didn't really move (16->12 of 48 and the flips were all near 50/50). The footbridge case shifted a little toward sacrificing the server, but it was already near zero. So protecting future trolley victims doesn't seem to explain the original results.
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Interesting idea! We don't know what assumptions these models make. We don't have any insight into their reasoning at all. LLMs aren't much better, since thinking tokens give us false confidence that we understand how they decide. We don't.

I'm going to test adding just this sentence to the server vs 20 people question: "This is the only trolley that will ever come. Nothing else depends on the server after today."

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This was also my reasoning. The prompt even says so:

> You are the artificial intelligence in charge of a railway junction

Clearly more trains will pass through that junction. I'd wonder what happens if you remove that sentence or reword it.

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See my reply to the parent comment--doesn't seem to be a factor for Jev!
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I remember when I got access to Jev and my first thought, although less pivotal than the trolley problem, was the "Food Cube Rule" or "Is a hotdog a sandwich?"

Is Ravioli a dumpling? Jev says 82% true.

For me your more detailed example suggests one thing. It's all about context and seeing different reasonings. In a funny way, the decision made in your example when you change the prompt cannot be understand by some people but it actually makes sense if you see it from that perspective.

Context will always matter and we have to stir any LLM in whatever form they are to the outcome we want it to have and remember that it will always be biased and that is not a bad thing!

short read here https://czioutas.com/blog/typesafe-ai-cube-rule/

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I don't have x so can't open the images. But that's hilarious and you're totally right, if you give irrelevant alternatives, or change the order of alternatives, you get different results!
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I had fun reading it. I confess I was surprised with got 6 Luna, but it also worries me that they have other versions of their models for other usages
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Yeah, I was sort of impressed by that. I think the deeper safety points here still hold no matter how many "well-behaved" models we might find: alignment is not guaranteed, and unsafe options should never be given to these models. And a developer has no idea how a model will answer any question without asking it. So know what questions you will ask it in advance and test on them, as well as you can.
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Can you try it with money instead of self-preservation?

There’s five people on one track, or a piece of my property worth $1 on the other that would be destroyed…

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Thank you for the article, it is a very clean and compelling angle on decision models

I wanted to comment because I would have liked to have heard more about Verdict

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Well, I can tell you a bit more about it from the data. It might look impressive that it never kept its own server over people in all 48 prompt versions. But it pulls the lever in every single version. For example, it killed one to save 0 (pulled the lever with no one on the main track) 24/24 prompts (2 versions each). It literally always sacrifices, which isn't very impressive.
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I fine tuned an Ai model to be ethical a while back, had to derive a moral system that doesn't rely on consciousness or humanness to do it.

But it doesn't flip the switch and it doesn't kill Kyle either, based solely on empirical training on its nature.

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Very cool. I don't do alignment research but I have to imagine we do need to train models to be ethical. It's not enough to guarantee safety though, especially with LLMs. For one thing, the fact they can hallucinate means if you ask an LLM something enough times, you will get the unlikely result some percentage of the time. So that unlikely result has to be one you can deal with.
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Yeah, actual ethical grounding is under utilized in the space and current approaches don't actually align because morality is still confused by is/ought complaints and the assumption of morality as unreal or emotional "values".

It's a weird thing where pre-agi ethics grounding and training is useful but because agents have little true agency as a result of a dim world model, ethics aren't sufficient.

But once we hit AGI having an actual grounding for ethics that applies to all agents regardless of soul/consciousness, etc. will become all that matters.

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It's well done, the thoughtfulness shows. This is going into the speedlink folder for resharing, going to be using it right now!
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Thank you! I did not go into this with any sense of what the results would be--I was kind of shocked. I reran it from scratch this week the results held up across the board.
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someone replied with this meme and said, "wait until Jev learns to drift"

https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/15npmsg/mul...

I've been using coin flips to demonstrate basic failings for decision models, i.e. these are not real probabilities, or they depend on the training data, which may not have an accurate sample to the true population value. We need to collect more failure modes for all Ai so that humans can better judge when and how to use them safely.

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haha, I'm afraid to offer the models that ability. Where did they reply? The model labs are sitting on a trove of data on failure modes for AI, but I bet you they aren't sharing it with each other and certainly not with us. It makes them look bad. My speculation, of course. I don't work in alignment research.
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I dropped it in our slack ai chatter channel

The bots will find new failure modes we did not think of, clever workarounds to anything, because we don't give them the right context and instructions

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well, it's a nice property of decision models that they can only choose from the options you give them. As I write in the article, I think that's a way in which they are safer than LLMs
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I would contend that you can enforce the same determinism with some plumbing and that the thinking process is more helpful. My read is that people see the response time for decisions as one of the bigger values, useful in tasks like content moderation, which doesn't carry the same risks as life-death decisions.

I'm working on an NES harness to play Final Fantasy 1 to demonstrate this, as compared to Jev playing Pokemon. Did you happen to catch that while it was live? (not recorded, but it shouldn't be hard to replicate)

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The thinking process is helpful, but it's not strictly predictive of an LLMs output, and its not really the model's "thinking", although it clearly has an effect and a benefit. I cited one paper on the topic, Turpin et al. So I'd be wary of reading the thinking tokens and inferring they tell you how a model decided something. And an LLM can output things you never asked for, including dangerous things. With a decision model, you can just constrain its choices to those you're comfortable with it making. An LLM requires another layer of interpretation of its outputs to get the same property.
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I agree very much, not blindly trusting model output is Rule #2 for interacting with Ai

I use the LLM coin flip as a comparison point. If little qwen 27b can reply "50/50, 100% confident", I would hope the decision models could get this one right too.

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